Light and the control that runs it

Lighting is the department where a small technical decision is most visible from the seats. A colour that renders skin badly, a fixture that flickers on camera, a dimmer curve that makes a slow fade arrive in steps: none of these are failures of taste, and all of them have mechanisms that can be described.

This section covers the control protocol that ties a rig together, the difference between dimming a filament and dimming a diode, how colour rendering is actually measured, why fixtures beat against camera shutters, what a lighting plot is for, and the electrical arithmetic that has to happen before anything is plugged in.

Two things stay out of these articles deliberately. We do not publish procedures for work on mains distribution or for rigging overhead, both of which are qualified trades with legal duties attached; we describe what the work is and who is competent to do it. And we do not compare named fixtures against each other, because that is a review, and reviews are how publications in this field end up funded by the people they cover.

Figures come from standards bodies, published measurement methods and regulators wherever they exist. Where a number originates with a manufacturer, we say so and treat it accordingly.