Lighting Instruments

There is a large variety of lighting equipment manufactured by many, many different companies. But in general, stage lights fall into a handful of specific categories.

Ellipsoidal Reflector Spotlight

Also called the "Leko," "ERS," and "Ellipsoidal."

These are the "workhorse" stage lighting fixtures and the core lighting instrument in most lighting systems. It is bright, effecient, and multi-purposed. The ellipsoidal outputs a round light beam that is capable of being either hard- or soft-edged and feature a series of interchangeable lens tubes that adjust the size of the light beam from 5 degrees to 90 degrees.

Ellipsoidals also have four shutters that are built into the body of the light that allow the light beam to be shaped from a circle to something like a square or other four-sided polygonal shapes. These shutters allow the designer and the technicians to keep the light from illuminating things you don't want it to light.

PAR

Short for "Parabolic Reflector."

These lights have an extremely bright, oval-shaped, soft-edged light beam. It excels at covering a stage in a way where each light beam blends seamlessly with the next, forming an even "wash" of light.

They feature a series of interchangeable lenses that are inserted into the end of the body of the light that adjust their size.

Unlike ellipsoidals, PARs do not have a shutter system and must rely on some accessories in order to shape the beam.

Fresnel

Pronounced as "fruh-nel."

These lights have a circular, soft-edged beam and, like the PAR, excel at washing a stage in an even coverage of light.

Fresnels are also very versatile because of their unique circular ridged lens and a lamp that can slide closer or farther away from the lens. This makes the fresnel's beam adjustable in size without needing to swap lenses or lens tubes. It can be adjusted during focus from a spot (smaller) to a flood (bigger) beam of light, making it extremely useful in smaller theatres or TV/film work.

Flood Lights

These light produce very wide and very bright, super soft-edged beams of light that create very large smooth washes of light.

These lights come in two different forms: the cell (pictured above) and the striplight (long, metal enclosures of lights with a row of multiple lamps imbedded in them).

They excel at lighting painted drops, cycloramas, and large set pieces with a wash of light and/or color, and is one of the primary ways designers can create the illusion of a sky. Their light beams are more point-able than focusable and cannot be changed in size or shaped by accessories.

Moving Lights

Also called "movers" or "automated fixtures."

Originally created for rock-and-roll concerts, these lights are exclusively programmable from the lighting console and can change their intensity, pan, tilt, color, beam size, beam sharpness or softness, and more constantly throughout the show without needing a technician to physically go to the light or change anything on it. This makes these lights extremely flexible and useful since they can do many different jobs throughout the show and allow fewer lights to need to be hung.

There are different categories of moving lights with different features, but in general these lights have a large variety of features that the designer can use at a moment's notice as they create their lighting cues.

LEDs

Short for "Light Emitting Diodes" these lights can be programmable from the lighting console to remotely change their color. There are LED versions of every type of light: ellipsoidals, PARs, fresnels, flood/cyc, and moving lights and will have features equivalent to the incandescent versions of those lights.

Their biggest benefit is power usage. Instead of an ellipsoidal using 750W, a comparable LED might use only 100W and be just as bright. What would normally be a 2000W moving light might only use 300W.