Creative Technology (CT) has turned to Elation Professional KL Panel LED soft lights for its US-based LED studios, adding a several of the full-colour-spectrum fixtures to its growing rental inventory.
In the United States, CT operates virtual event LED studios in Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York and Nashville. Each is equipped with xR and camera tracking technology that works with powerful graphics engines to create dynamic scenes that put a presenter or product virtually into any environment. The results are truly spectacular. In late spring of 2020, Creative Technology contacted Elation about a high-quality LED soft light for the studios and eventually purchased 75 of the units with snap grids and snap bags.
CT has used the KL Panels on many of their studio projects, including in their Las Vegas and Los Angeles locations. In their newest virtual event studio in Las Vegas, KL Panels and other lighting work with a large, curved LED wall, LED floor and LED ceiling to create an ideal virtual event suite for television, film, corporate and automotive work.
“A lot of what we’re hanging these days tends to be a KL Panel and that is because of its flexibility,” stated CT Vice President of Digital Production, Reed Erickson. As lead on CT’s studio systems, he has been hands on with the KL Panels since their acquisition. “The fact that the fixtures are smaller and lighter [than comparable units] gives us a lot more flexibility to put them where we need them and to use more of the fixture. When we put other fixtures in these spaces, we’re using them at a lower capacity but with the Kl Panels we’ve found that they are really easy-to-use in these TV studio environments.” That flexibility, he says, has allowed them to incorporate the units in a multitude of areas, sometimes without a console and just using the encoders on the back of the fixture.
Another key characteristic of the KL Panels, according to Erickson, is the fact that they are full colour-mixing fixtures. “They’ve been great for these LED volume environments where we want to create a seamless integration between foreground actors and virtual backgrounds. We create scenes that we have to fill in with appropriate light for the environment being reflected on the LED wall. The fact that the KL Panels are full colour means we can tune the whole scene to match using lighting instruments instead of having to stretch it out on video canvasses.”
The KL Panel houses a 295W RGBWLC (Red, Green, Blue, White, Lime, Cyan) LED array and is colour temperature-adjustable from 2,000 to 10,000K. CRI is 95 and, importantly for the camera, the KL Panel has a high TLCI value. The units can match the white balance for the camera through a green shift adjustment or virtual gel library with no flickering when used with high-speed cameras.
Working in the CT studio rigs together with LED moving head wash lights, the KL Panels provide all of the front light, backlight and stage space lighting. “In certain cases, we’re able to match the KL Panels to the walls so that the entire environment has a matching colour temperature,” said Erickson. He adds that they work well with the cinema cameras but also with their 4K or 1080 broadcast cameras. “The walls tend to start coloured out rather blue so we can match that with the fixtures. We can use them at a low light output to frontlight people at an appropriate temperature for the actual scene behind them.”
The virtual events that Creative Technology can create using its suite of virtual event solutions, from branded and interactive meetings and conferences to large-scale productions, are truly remarkable, and high-quality, adjustable light from Elation KL Panels is an important part of the package.