Case Study: Litepanels at Superbowl XLV
Fox Sports Network was able to show off their Super Bowl on-air announcers in the best light Sunday, and do it in an energy efficient and environmentally friendly way.
Fox Sports took advantage of groundbreaking LED lighting fixtures from Litepanels, Inc. for television and motion picture. The LED fixtures are renowned for their HDTV friendliness, especially on skin tones, and for their miserly use of energy, requiring 90% less of power that was consumed by traditional lighting fixtures.
The Super Bowl XLV telecast saw the first sports announce booth use of a new Litepanels fixture, the daylight Sola 6™ Fresnel fixture. Fresnel fixtures lit with bulbs have been a mainstay of theater, motion pictures and television lighting for over a hundred years. A Fresnel can project light over long distances, can be precisely focused and is controllable by a number of professional accessories.
But using light emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate a Fresnel fixture was not possible until the challenge of combining many LED bulbs into a single point-source of light was met. Litepanels conquered that point-source challenge through breakthrough engineering in optical design that allows the high illumination of multiple LEDs to create that point-source of daylight. This enabled a Fresnel fixture that is fully dimmable no noticeable color shift (not possible with traditional fixtures, uses a small fraction of the power a traditional fixture would use, and generates no heat.
Though Fox Sports Network has used Litepanels fixtures in its NFL broadcast announce booths throughout the 2010 season, they deployed the Sola Fresnels at the latest Super Bowl because the needed the longer throw of the lights for their opening shot with announcers Joe Buck and Troy Aikman in front of the field and Cowboy Stadium, with seats in the background. “We can get a greater intensity of daylight from the Solas, a little more volume of light toward the daylight background,” said Ben Altopp, who is in charge of FOX’s announce booth and an audio technician during the telecast.
In addition to the Sola 6™ Fresnels, Fox Sports used a pair of Litepanels 1x1 Low-Profile daylight LED fixtures to provide light to fill in the faces on the announcers. The Low-Profile fixtures extend only 3” down from the ceiling, which kept them out of the shot and eliminated the need to duck under them while walking in the booth.
Altopp said that lighting for that opening shot, which will only be used once during the telecast, is critical. “You want your first shot to be a good one, and when it’s what you’re coming on the air with, you want it to be the thing that looks good. That shot sets the tone for the rest of the show.”
Though the Super Bowl kicked off at around 5:30pm Dallas time, where little natural daylight was coming into the stadium, Altopp said FOX is looking forward to employing Sola 6™ Fresnels for games in open stadiums that kick off at 1:30pm local time. “From what we have seen, the increase of light we have seen looking at the on-camera rehearsal, they’re very impressive. I feel that we will be able to take a big step toward improving our lighting for the regular season of the NFL next year.”
FOX has already told Bexel Broadcast Services, which supplies lights for FOX’s NFL broadcasts, that they should add Sola 6™ Fresnel fixtures to its order list for next year.
For the in-show announcer shots used throughout the Super Bowl broadcast, Altopp and his crew utilized Litepanels 1x1 Bi-Focus Spot/SuperSpot fixtures, which allow remote focusing from 30 to 15 degrees, while maintaining the characteristically soft, high-definition friendly light the Litepanels 1’ by 1’ LED arrays are famous for. FOX unveiled a new wraparound LED background for the in-show announcer shots, which required a lighting adjustment. “We’ve upped our back light a bit. We have a 1 by 2 Bi-Focus panel between the talent and video wall, as well as another Sola 6™ Fresnel behind them, to separate the guys from the background a little more,” he said.
Both sets of lights were controllable from a lighting console in the announce booth, via DMX. The entire Litepanels light package in the booth drew less than half the capacity of a single 20A circuit, and generated no heat.
The announce booth wasn’t the only part of the Super Bowl that saw Litepanels fixtures in use. They were also largely prevalent at Media Day, the Wednesday before the game.
Independent cameraman Troy Dick, SOC, was on assignment shooting a Gatorade promotion that had him and his crew scrambling from one NFL player to another in a scrum of news media. “It was the type of situation where there are thousands of media people there trying to get interviews with one person, and there’s no way you can bring in anything large and power it with an AC cable. I was looking for something that had a punch, which the Litepanels 1x1 fixtures do, and a light that I could run all day off a single Anton/Bauer Dionic 90 battery.” The Litepanels fixture filled the bill.
Not only was power a concern when Dick put together his equipment package for the Media Day shoot, but he knew the ambient light would be unpredictable. “I didn’t know if I was going to be in a locker room with tungsten, or under fluorescent, or even with daylight coming in.” So he chose the Litepanels 1x1 Bi-Color fixture, which can not only be dimmed from 100 percent to zero with no noticeable color shift, but the color output is infinitely variable from daylight (5600°K) to tungsten (3200°K).
Dick uses the color viewfinder on his camera to judge the match between ambient light and the Bi-Color’s output. “I can talk to my assistant holding the light and tell him, ‘a little more tungsten,’ or ‘a little more daylight,’ and in about 15 seconds I can talk him in and it the Bi-Color matches beautifully to whatever situation I’m in.”
He also uses the Bi-Color fixture to optimize skin tones. “When you have a darker skin person, a lot of times you have to dial in a little bit of tungsten to achieve a normal tone because their skin is absorbing light. And on a lighter skin person, I have to back that off a little bit.”
Troy Dick operates Stick Figure Films in Carrollton, TX. He shoots feature films, television programs and commercials.
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Check out the Ringlite Cinema in Best Buy's Superbowl Commercial - It's out with the old and in with the new in this hilarious new extended version featuring Ozzy Osbourne and Justin Bieber. Not only was the Litepanels Ringlite Cinema used for the commercial but it also makes an appearance in the shot.Visit the Ringlite Cinema Product Page
