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Lighting Grids for high-school Broadcast production studio.
Hi,We’re moving into a new studio and would like to have a a light grid, but we’re at complete loss at where to find one and what works best for studios , we only need 3 lights with room to expand for now. Anything you help us with will be great! Thanks, email me for more info.
Manny
Ma********@**ve.com -
3 Replies
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DO NOT USE PVC PIPE, that is rule #1.
Electrical conduit is also not strong enough or wide enough.
Anything over 15-20 feet across is going to need to be anchored to the ceiling at the center, using a firm mechanical connection to a rafter or beam. You can anchor the sides to walls using braces screwed to the wall studs and carrying the load down to the floor, think of a sort of crutch.
For smaller rooms, what I swear by are Bogen Auto-poles, by Manfrotto. These are portable, expandable, moveable and re-moveable. An overhead grid you can put anywhere, and they work vertically as well as they do horizontally. For semi-permanent use, you’d want to attach some kind of crutch or pocket to the actual walls with screws, so the pole end can’t slide down the wall. This can be a simple piece of quarter-inch board with a v or half-circle cut into one edge, like a bracket for the pipe to nest into.
Don’t forget that every hanging light gets a safety strap on it or a short cable, so it can’t fall and hit someone in the head. Nylon tie wraps are not what you use for this, they can get brittle or melt, typically it is aircraft cable with little carabiner type clips. You can make these up from supplies at the hardware store.
Plan for the electrical, figure out if your panel can handle the amperage before you start to buy and build. Have a nonconductive ladder. Always have leather and cotton gloves handy.
Don’t forget heat: if these are halogen lights: see where the fire sprinklers are and keep well clear.
If using hot type lights, put grids or screens on all of them to trap the molten and shattered quartz if a bulb fails, so nobody gets burned. This is experience talking.
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Thanks, that helps, do you know a place where we could get all of this? we dont really want to build it ourselves… but we do have contractors onsite that can…its a pretty tall space in terms of hight so a autopole might or might not work. thanks for all the help again though.
Manny
Manny.2012@live.com -
B&H sells autopoles and accessories online. You could also check out Markertek and Fullcompass and Musician’s Friend’s online catalogs for lighting grid parts and supplies. Perhaps you can find suitable pipe locally; autopoles are great because they are so portable, but if the rig you want to build is never going anywhere else, you can certainly econimize by not spending on real autopoles and instead, just cutting apropriate size and type metal pipe of a fixed dimension to a pretty close tolerance, then making a screw-on end cap that creates the final width adjustment.
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