Why LED Furniture Flickers on Camera, and What to Rent Instead

Why Does LED Lighting Flicker on Camera?

Because most LEDs do not actually dim. They switch on and off very fast, and your eye averages the pulses into what looks like a steady, dimmer glow. The technique is called pulse width modulation and it is everywhere, because it is cheap and it works beautifully for human vision.

A camera does not average. It samples the world in slices, and depending on frame rate and shutter angle it catches some pulses and misses others. What lands on the sensor is banding, pulsing, or a shadow that rolls slowly up the frame. Raise the frame rate for slow motion and it gets worse, which is exactly when a director wants to shoot a glowing floor.

Your eye averages the flicker into steady light. A camera samples in slices, so it records the gaps.

The frustrating part is that it usually looks fine on the day. Nobody standing in the room sees a problem. It surfaces in dailies, and by then the floor has gone back on the truck.

What Is Flicker Free Production Lighting?

Lighting that never introduces the gap in the first place, so there is no pulse for a camera to land between.

We carry a separate production lighting system for exactly this. It is not the standard party lighting turned up, it is different equipment, and the second thing it does matters nearly as much as the first. It is built for high ambient environments, so it still reads against the lighting a set already has. Ordinary LED furniture that looks striking in a dark room can vanish once a crew brings up their own units. Production lighting holds its own.

We built it for trade shows first. Convention halls run house lighting bright enough that normal LED furniture simply disappears into it, and solving that problem produced a system that turned out to be flicker free as well. The film and television work followed from there.

If you are speccing a shoot, this is the question to ask a rental company directly and early. Not whether their product is bright, but whether it is flicker free on camera. It is a yes or no, and most of the market has to say no.

Can It Run on Battery?

No, and this one is worth planning around rather than discovering on location.

Production lighting is always plugged in. There is no battery version. The battery packs in our range power the disco style lighting that goes inside cocktail tables and bars, which is a different system built for parties and is not flicker free. So the rule is simple. If it has to look right on camera, it has to have power run to it.

How Much Power Does It Need?

A standard floor runs on one or two ordinary household outlets. Large builds need real planning.

The working figure is roughly 25 watts per square foot. A 28 by 40 floor, which is what we installed at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford, comes to about 7,000 watts, and the venue has to be told where to place outlets before the crew arrives. A trade show booth we built at the Javits Center needed 4,500 watts spread across three to four outlets. Neither of those is a problem if it is in the plan and both are a problem at 6am on shoot day.

What Should a Production Ask Before Renting?

Beyond flicker, the questions that actually decide whether a day runs smoothly are logistical.

Ask whether an on-site technician comes with it. On a music video shoot in Brooklyn, the floor was reconfigured mid-shoot from an 8 by 8 dance floor into separate lit cubes with puck lights, which only works if someone is there all day who knows the kit. We bill a tech at $75 an hour, and it is included free on events over $10,000.

Ask about access before quoting. For the two-day build at the Park Hyatt, everything moved through the 58th Street loading dock and up a freight elevator, with strike finished by 10am on the Saturday. Access constraints change crew size and they change price.

Ask what happens if the location cannot take the build. On a feature shoot at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, the existing floor was too poor to build on, so we sent the production photos of the unit bases and their crew framed a subfloor in plywood and 2x4s to suit. That is a solvable problem with a week of notice and an unsolvable one on the morning.

And ask whether the kit can be zoned. We can run a floor through a DMX adapter for zone control on special request, which is worth raising if the lighting desk wants to own it.

What Have We Lit?

Television, film and music video, all of it in the tri-state area.

For Bull we built a 6 by 30 runway at the Angel Orensanz Foundation in Manhattan. The production also asked for twenty extra LED lights beyond the runway itself, purely as working light for the stage hands, which tells you something about how a set uses a rental differently from a party.

For Gotham we put an 18 by 20 floor into the Onyx Ballroom at the Park Hyatt on a two-day rental.

For Daniel Isn't Real we supplied 96 units with strip lights across three days at Fort Wadsworth, with an attendant on site.

For a Meek Mill music video in Brooklyn we built an 8 by 8 floor from sixteen cubes with high output lighting, then broke it apart mid-shoot into individual lit cubes, alongside four decor towers specified to be the tallest available and all exactly level with each other. Nothing could be released until the video aired.

And the runway for the Envy by Melissa Gorga show in New Jersey turned out to be a broadcast job too, which our crew only worked out on site when they noticed the size of the media team.