For 27 years, the Foxtel Group’s Main Event pay-per-view destination has broadcast all the unmissable fights bringing World Champions to the fore as well as new and emerging talent. So when Paul Nardella of On Track Lighting was recently contracted to light No Limit Boxing’s latest bouts for Foxtel, he knew he had to get it right.
Paul has around 35 different boxing promoters in Melbourne and Sydney and says it was time to ensure the broadcast crew was given the industry standard in lighting.
“Foxtel’s requirements were for 4400K and the Fresnels that we were using were 3600K so we had to look elsewhere,” explained Paul. “So we decided to hire sixteen Prolights EclPanel TWCs from Resolution X and as soon as we used them, I knew we had to purchase sixteen of our own!”
Paul comments that before deciding upon the Prolights gear, he thoroughly researched the market in particular, colour temperature and which units actually deliver the correct colour temperature.
“I found many units say they’ll deliver 2600K to 5600K, or whatever, but they don’t,” he said. “We tested these with broadcast cameras to check the Kelvin and make sure that it was doing what it’s meant to do. Some brands, when you get to a certain range, they flicker or the cameras don’t like it. The Prolights EclPanel TWC was the only light that we checked with broadcast quality cameras that delivered perfect colour saturation.”
Paul discovered that the Prolights EclPanel TWC’s superb colours were ideal for room washing too as well as highlighting the ‘blue corner’ or the ‘red corner’ in the ring, thus cutting down on the fixture count.
Paul did not realise the punch that sixteen Prolights EclPanel TWCs could deliver and running them at 60% was plenty!
“They are crazy, absolutely crazy … so powerful,” he added. “When you look at one as a single unit in a demo, you’re like, it’s kind of bright but you put sixteen together and it’s like absolute daylight. There’s more power than you’d need, which is good because you don’t need to push the unit to extremes. “It’s like anything, you want a hazer that’s going to haze at 30% or 40%, not 100%. It’s good to have more power up your sleeves than what you need … and that light definitely has it.”
Paul reports that the broadcast team and the client loved the Prolights EclPanel TWCs and the event photographers commented that they had never seen such an amazing spread of light that was so soft without any hard edges anywhere.
