"Univision's old set had an outdated conservative office look with dark wood veneers everywhere. For their new look, they really wanted to push the envelope and be completely different by having a lot of brightness and color," said Frank Burton of Event Ignition (San Antonio), which designed and installed the lighting in Univision 41's news sets, using LED products from American DJ and its sister company Elation Professional.
The station's management wanted lighting that would be able to produce different colors to change the look of the sets for different types of news stories and broadcasts. "For example, they wanted to be able to use lighting to give the morning news a brighter look than, say, an evening newscast, or convey a sense of urgency for a breaking news story by switching to certain colors like red tones," said Burton.
Management also wanted lighting that could accent the studios' stylish new furnishings, and of course, they required that it be energy efficient - all of which pointed toward using LED fixtures, noted Burton. To achieve these goals, the designer used American DJ's Flat Par TRI7, a low profile par can powered by 7 x 3-watt tri-color RGB LEDs, and Micro Wash RGBW, a mini par can with 7 x 1-watt LEDs (2 Red, 2 Green, 2 Blue & 1 White) that measures just 6.9" x 4" x 2.6".
Twelve Flat Par TRI7 units and 12 Micro Wash RGBW units were installed in the main Univision News Set. "We hung some of the Flat Pars on a pipe grid to light the front facing façade of the news set, and we put others along the back so we could highlight the wall behind the set," detailed Burton. "That way we could change colors on both the back and front walls. The Flat Pars have a 40° beam angle so they gave us a large coverage area, which worked out great."
(Jim Evans)
