Cities switching from sodium streetlights to LED

[Michael Collier]

I was reading the paper friday and saw and article about our mayors office testing LED lights. From the looks of it it seems as though they are considering 5500k (roughly, prob with a low CRI) and similar if not more bright than the sodiums.

 

My question is how would this change the astetic of night city scenes. I can only assume things will change, but what are the upside/downside of doing this as it relates to cinematography? if the city is going to this length to change all lights, what could be implimented to help us out with minimal cost to the city (ie, a special bracket that would hold a filter tray that a production company can pay to use, simplifying adding minus-green or CTO/CTB to suit) Any thoughts?

 

 

heres the full article:

http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/350577.html

[John Sprung]

White LED's don't have strong spectral spikes like sodium or mercury. So, they'll be better for us. CRI will be much better. The big impact will be if sodium and mercury get phased out, we'll have to simulate them to do period pictures about the 1990's - 2000's.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Michael Nash]

if the city is going to this length to change all lights, what could be implimented to help us out with minimal cost to the city (ie, a special bracket that would hold a filter tray that a production company can pay to use, simplifying adding minus-green or CTO/CTB to suit) Any thoughts?

 

Huh, yeah, right... :P

 

As for aesthetics, I think it will just be one more color of light for DP's to choose from for night exteriors. Seems to me it took an amazingly L-O-N-G time for movies to replace the established "blue night" look, long after most cities had gone to sodium. Seemed like a good decade or more before we started seeing that sodium color used more realistically in movies. But now that we're used to mixing up colors for night exteriors, new light sources will probably be incorporated into the "look" sooner.

[Michael Nash]

The big impact will be if sodium and mercury get phased out, we'll have to simulate them to do period pictures about the 1990's - 2000's.

 

And is anyone else bothered by the presence of sodium lights out-of-period in movies? Zodiac had a bunch of 'em, although I guess they were becoming a little more common in the 70's. But I've seen them in movies set earlier in the 20th century as well...