To augment lighting at Miami Dolphin Stadium for the NFL Super Bowl XLI, JustLighting was asked to design a system that would temporarily assimilate with the stadium's existing sports lighting system to bring the experience and HD broadcast of Super Bowl XLI to a new level of quality in performance and color reproduction. This has become a necessity with today's mega live events in reaction to the quality of definition the viewers can now see in today's live HD broadcasts.
I chose 16 50,000W Luminys SoftSun units provided through the Los Angeles-based Luminys headquarters and rigged by AG Light & Sound Inc. of New York. The SoftSun uses Enhanced Spectrum Long-Arc (ESL) technology, a proprietary Luminys hybrid of Xenon. In laymen's terms, imagine a 6'-long fluorescent tube, except in ESL form. The unit is capable of dimming the lamp source from 3 to 100% via DMX control and comes in 50,000W and 100,000W configurations. Luminys Corp. was formerly Lightning Strikes.
The design doubled the existing legacy light levels on the field of play and provided an additional 800,000W of light. The extra lighting produced brilliant color reproduction and a soft wash of even light over the entire stadium. This allowed the HD cameras to reproduce the game with all of the great detail that today's very long camera lenses now offer. They were able to capture the true emotion of the game and see the eyes inside the helmets.
The temporary lighting also brought new capabilities to the stadium. The game lighting now had independent redundancy to the stadium system and offered dimmable capabilities to the ceremonial and halftime show lighting, all of this contributing to the live spectators' experience and that for the viewers at home.