LED tape is a great, cost-effective way to create a new and beautiful aesthetic.
In the past few years, LED tape has started to become a phenomenal tool for church lighting. It is a relatively cheap and easy way to create a striking visual. LED tape has changed the way we design sets and has become another wonderful tool in our set design process!
As with most LED products, LED tape is also extremely energy efficient.
Let's explore some great characteristics of LED tape, some challenges, and the basics of how to make it work.
LED tape by nature, emits light. This light-emitting property is a huge departure from most church stage design elements. Most church stage design materials are lit externally and the reflection is what the congregation sees. This simple change creates a dynamic that is much more striking and can stand on its own. It also gives a much more modern look that can lend well to the creative church model.
Since LED tape is a light, it affords you the ability to put light in places you would typically be challenged to do so. You can easily position this type of lighting behind the choir, drummer, or even other scenic elements, without the worry of shadows.
As with most LED products, it is also extremely energy efficient. It can create thousands of colors easily, which is extremely important in broadening the visual design of a stage.
LED tape can be bent, installed, and shaped to create truly stunning works of stage art. This flexibility and the small size for each respective LED light allows the tape to blend and disappear into a set, if desired. In large part due to its small size, it is also extremely easy to store when it is not in use.
LED tape comes in lots of shapes, sizes, voltages, control arrangements, and colors.
This type of lighting can be broken into two categories, standard LED tape and pixel tape. Although they are technically both LED tape, pixel tape affords you a lot more control of what is displayed on the tape. Pixel tape is typically much more expensive because of this control.
Both types of tape, though, share some common aspects. Most LED tape is comprised of the following components: LED tape, a DMX decoder, and a power supply. Each component must be compatible with the other to make a fully functional system. Power supplies, tape, and DMX decoders must all operate on the same voltage. Power supplies change the standard 120 volts of AC power to a DC voltage.
Common DC voltages are 5 volts, 12 volts, and 24 volts. In most cases, 12 volt tapes work the best. They typically offer the best cost for their capability. DMX decoders transfer the control information from your DMX console to a voltage (or data signal with pixel tape) that your tape can understand.
Standard LED tape is most common. It is cheap, effective, and can be found easily through many online retailers.
Like any other RGB LED, LED tape creates colors by varying shades of Red, Green, and Blue. From those three colors, a mix of any of them can be combined to create any color, as perceived by our eyes. For example, 100 percent Red and 100 percent Blue will create the appearance of a magenta color.
DMX data fed into an LED tape decoder is typically transferred into four wires that feed the tape. Typically these wires are Red, Green, Blue, and White (or Black). Each color wire corresponds to the colored LEDs it controls. Over each of these cables, the voltage is varied in order to change the perceived color of the tape. The white (or black) wire acts as the neutral to complete each circuit.
Pixel LED tape works a bit differently. In fact, there is much less of a standard in wiring and control, when it comes to pixel tape. Some tapes use four wires, while others use three.
There are multiple chip level types of tape, the most common being WS2812b. There are a few things that are a constant in all of these tapes, though. Most pixel tapes have a voltage positive, voltage negative, data positive, and data negative that they are fed from their pixel decoder. Recently many pixel tape manufacturers have transitioned to using a shared negative for both voltage and data, making the total wire count three.
The largest difference between standard LED tape and pixel tape is the data to control it. While you only need three DMX channels for standard led tape, many pixel tapes will take up an entire 512 DMX channels with 20 feet of tape. Some take even larger amounts of data. This huge increase of data, however, creates the great flexibility to be able to control each pixel individually. When used in tandem with multiple pieces of tape, this individual control can make it possible to create low resolution video-type displays, at a fraction of the cost of traditional LED displays.
As you can imagine, the data infrastructure for a pixel tape system starts to grow very quickly, to be able to control this many channels. Many times art net systems running over Cat 5 work best for this type of control system. External controllers are typically a must as well. Those can range from programs like Madrix, which enables content creation or media servers, allowing one to manage pre-built content mapped to each LED pixel.
With any good thing, there are also so challenges to overcome.
Lower voltage tapes can sometimes suffer from voltage drop. This creates an uneven color between the top and bottom of the tape. The bottom typically fades into more of an orange, while the top looks the correct white color it should. This can be fixed by injecting power into the tape (adding an additional DC voltage connection mid-way through the tape) or by using higher voltage tape that suffers less from voltage drop.
Another concern when using LED tape is its sturdiness. LED tape can be slightly fragile, so some care should be taken to ensure not to crimp the tape when installing it. Our team learned this lesson the hard way. We have found it best to attach LED tape to a solid structure that will minimize the likelihood of the tape being damaged. We found that 2x2 lumber and Unistrut works best to create a reusable structure for LED tape.
LED tape is a great tool to experiment with. We have found it to be of huge benefit to our team and congregation. As always, please feel free to reach out to me with any questions.
Here is a short video of LED strip tape in action, and how it shows how various lights can be shown to move.