How to evaluate a followspot for your venue
Choosing a followspot starts with the light source and the kind of look you want on stage. Shawn Harmon explains how incandescent, MSR, xenon, and LED options can each fit different environments, from rooms with existing incandescent light to facilities looking toward LED.
The next step is to think about where the followspot will live. A booth, catwalk, or audience position can affect the power available, whether 120, 208, or three-phase is needed, and how important noise will be in that location.
From there, measure the distance to center stage and decide how much brighter the performer should be than the surrounding stage wash. Shawn recommends using your existing stage look as a starting point, then comparing photometric data and allowing a little extra margin for real-world conditions.
Once those basics are clear, it becomes easier to review cut sheets and narrow the choices to a followspot that fits the facility, operating setup, and desired stage intensity.
Video transcript
Hello everyone! Shawn Harmon with Canto USA here again to talk about questions and answers. One of the questions that we get is, "What kind of followspot should I get for my situation?" For me this all starts with lamp type and quality of light. Do I want incandescent? Because I'm in a room it's full of incandescent I don't want to worry about the color shift. MSR? I have a lot of moving lights and I'd like for my followspots to kind of blend in with the uh… with the moving lights. Do I have a big venue? Maybe xenon is the right choice for me. Or, maybe I'm looking for LED because I'm going into the future. I'm looking into the future and I'm trying to make the right choice. Especially now that LED is kind of filling in where a lot of these products have been for a very long time. So, that gives us our first place to look, and once we kind of figure out which lamp type we want to start with that's going to knock a lot of the other things out of the picture. So, we've kind of subtracted down to whatever we need for our light source. Second question. Where is the follow spot going to go? Is it going to go into a booth, catwalk, into the audience? Where is it going to live? And then that's also going to have a big factor on power. What kind of power do I have in that situation? Does this follow spot have to be 120? Can it be 208? Does it need to be three-phase? Do you have three-phase available in that spot? Figuring out your power is very important and a lot of consultants will also talk about noise. Because they don't want a very loud followspot in an audience whereas in a booth they may be a little less concerned about it. Once you figure that out, power, location, noise. Now we've subtracted out a whole lot of followspots and now we're starting to get down into the core of what we're going to evaluate for our situation. So, once we figured out where that followspot is going to go we need to figure out the distance from that followspot to center stage. Because obviously light over distance gets less bright. It's very bright at the fixture. It gets dimmer the further away you get. I know that was obvious for some of you. Once we have that now we can look at how bright does it need to be at that point on stage. And my favorite way to do that is to say think about your last season. How bright was it at you're at that point on stage center stage. I'm not talking about go into your theater and turn all the lights from house on to full. That is not the look you're looking for. You're looking for an actual look a wash that you created on the stage and how bright was that. Then if you have a performer that's performing in that spot and you want the followspot on them, how much brighter do you want them to be than everything else around them? Half again as bright? Twice as bright? Three times as bright? I don't know. That's completely a subjective question for you but you've got to figure out how much brighter you want them to be so that we can figure out what this follow spot needs to be. Personally I like to start at a two to one. So, if I have a hundred-foot candle wash on the stage and I have a person standing in 100-foot candles and I want them to be twice as bright. My followspot has to be a little bit brighter than 100-foot candles at that distance. So, let's say 100-foot candles at 100 feet. Kind of makes sense right? Got 100-foot candles you hit them with another 100 now they're 200-foot candles. That's a two to one. I think that's a great place to start. Now I would also caution you and say that all the photometric testing that we do is with no gel and no diffusion. So, I like to add a little bit of safety factor in there. So, I would say if I want 100-foot candles at 100 feet on that stage I want to be 110 to 125-foot candles. Depending on if I have glass in there and how much I like to use like minus or minus green or some diffusion. So, I think that's a great way and now you can go and look at cut sheets. You can look at that 100-foot distance. You can figure out what works best for you. Because we figured out what source we want what distance we're at and now we're just looking at intensity. That's really all you need. So, that should help you narrow it down and then you can talk about price and price point with your local dealer. If you have any questions or comments. Maybe you completely disagree with me on two to one. I'd love to hear the comments. I love the discourse that happens in this community. Feel free to you know leave comments or give us a call here at Canto USA. cantousa.com Thanks everybody!