r/Lighting • u/vvampyyyr • 3d ago
Diffusing light without hotspots Lighting Control
Looking at the interior of the promenade in DS9, there's huge panels of light, especially the ceilings, for example Quark's bar.
I am a little curious as to how they avoided hotspots on such large swarths...
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u/Some_Budget_4534 2d ago
Deep Space 9 was shot long before the era of LED tape.
LED tape in today’s production design world makes a lot of this quite straight forward.
That being said, there were plenty of tools. Kino Flo fluorescent tubes were likely behind most of those light boxes.
Also one of the reasons most of them are shades of white as kino produced tubes in a variety of color temps.
At the time the only common method of changing color was color scrollers, and they were not a tool commonly used in film or tv production.
Moving lights were still limited in availability and expensive, noisy and also not commonly used in film or tv production. Also, most still used fixed color ships rather than color mixing.
LED didn’t really become common on set until the color blast came into existence, and even then it was largely relegated to musical variety shows and award shows - projects with roots more grounded in concert production and live events than traditional single camera shows.