The secret sauce in your event promotion recipe
Event professionals are trying to strike a balance these days. On the one hand, there is a desire to create spectacular, one-of-a-kind visual experiences. On the other is a renewed commitment to sustainability. In many ways, these two are in direct competition. Larger, more complicated experiences demand more equipment, higher power requirements and heat generation. Turning raw energy into powerful visual and audio experiences, it would seem, takes a lot of gear.
Fortunately, lighting and projection technology have come a long way over the past decade, with LED and laser technologies increasingly displacing their incandescent predecessors across the industry. What started as a shift toward energy-efficient lighting in our homes has made its way into meeting and event production. But are these technologies helping us move toward sustainability? We’re going to have to get a little geeky to find out.
Achieving Illumination
The core difference between LED (Light Emitting Diode) technology and traditional incandescent lighting comes down to how they generate light. Traditional incandescent bulbs operate by heating a metal filament until it glows, which is incredibly inefficient. Only about 10% of the electrical energy actually becomes light, which leaves a whopping 90% wasted as heat. “More efficient” and brighter incandescent bulbs were created by advancements in what combination of gases were contained in the bulb, and what type of metal was heated up, but basically, they all worked the same way.
LEDs, by contrast, produce light through a process called “electroluminescence,” a process where electrons release energy in the form of photons when they pass through a semiconductor material. In other words, they make light directly when hooked up to electricity, instead of just heating something up until it glows.
Read More: How Technology Can Help Us Build a Greener Events Industry
L.A.S.E.R. technology (I bet you didn’t know it was an acronym) also generates light through electricity rather than heat, but through a different and much more complicated process. It’s way more than what we want to get into here, but once again, we’re creating light by feeding electricity into special materials (in this case, a gas) and generating light at the atomic level and focusing it into a beam. You know, a “laser beam”? Cue Dr. Evil.
This fundamental difference in how light is generated causes the dramatic energy efficiency gains. LEDs have become brighter and less expensive over the last couple of decades, and laser tech has been miniaturized and significantly less expensive—to the point of being a cat toy. These advances have allowed these technologies to start replacing the incandescent bulbs that enjoyed an almost monopolistic dominance over the last half century in anything that generates light. For events, that falls into two main categories: lighting and projection.
A Little Light on the Subject
The efficiency differences in theatrical and event lighting have become dramatic over the last few years. Traditional stage lighting (think lekos or PARs) relied on fixtures with 500–600-watt lamps (which in turn replaced equivalently bright lamps of 1,000–2,000 watts of the 1980s and ‘90s!) that generated a tremendous amount of heat. The heat of the spotlight was literal, and could cause significant discomfort to performers and presenters alike.
Modern LED stage instruments change this equation dramatically. A 250-watt LED engine can output the same 10,000 lumens as a 500-watt traditional fixture. Beyond this basic efficiency, modern LED stage lighting offers remarkable creative flexibility, including the ability to generate almost any color you can imagine without putting a physical “gel” in front of the fixture to change the color. Previously, it wasn’t uncommon to have batches of PARs with red, green and blue colored gel, and you’d generate new colors by adjusting their levels. This means that not only were the lighting instruments twice as inefficient, but you also needed three times as many!
Read More: Event Lighting: Illuminating Success
For event planners, the reduced power requirements of LED lighting translate directly into budget savings and fewer limitations. You can now produce sophisticated lighting designs with fewer instruments at lower wattages, making them a greener and budget-friendly solution. Win-win. The reduced heat generation means more comfortable experiences for attendees and performers. It’s funny how the mind works, though—I still hear presenters talking about how “hot” it is under the lights!
You’re Projecting
Projection technology has seen a similar revolution. LED lamps saw a brief rise in use, but weren’t getting to the brightness necessary for much beyond home and office boardroom use. While a stage lighting fixture might be capable of generating 10,000 lumens of brightness, movie theaters and high-end concert and event projection clock in at 40,000–60,000 lumens, with older IMAX projectors supposedly supporting up to 600,000 lumens, and requiring additional equipment (more energy) for cooling! As a result, the winner in this battle has been laser technology.
According to manufacturer specs, a relatively modern 20k lumen projector from 2021 runs at about 2,000 watts. A similarly sized 25k lumen laser projector runs at approximately 1,300 watts—not a tremendous energy efficiency gain, but there’s more to being green than just energy efficiency. The real game-changer is the longevity of the laser unit. While incandescent bulbs need to be replaced every 1,000–2,000 hours of use, laser engines can last for 20,000–24,000 hours before needing replacement, and require significantly less cooling both onboard the unit as well as at the venue.
Wall-to-Wall Options
One of the most significant technological shifts in events has been the rise of LED video walls as alternatives to projection systems. LED walls utilize modular panels of compact LED clusters to create seamless, ultra-bright displays. Their biggest advantage is their almost obscene level of brightness. LED walls can be clearly seen even in direct sunlight, making them ideal for outdoor events or venues with significant ambient light.
From an energy efficiency standpoint, it’s not even close—especially for large-format panoramic screens. A 100 ft. x 30 ft. panoramic screen could require as many as ten 35,000 laser projectors to properly cover at a decent brightness, resulting in a whopping 20,000+ watts of power required. In contrast, the same-sized LED wall would require about 3,000 watts.
That brightness and efficiency do come at a cost: display resolution. The distance between those clusters is called “pitch.” If you’re too close to an LED wall, you can see every single pixel or dot in the image, which is why LED walls have become so popular as billboards or outdoor advertisements—they look better the further away you go. Projection systems tend to have much higher resolutions. As a result, LED walls have been better suited to scenic or artistic displays, and not so much at showing highly detailed PowerPoint presentations.
Like all tech, the pitch in LED walls is getting smaller and smaller by the year, but these newer panels tend to be more expensive. It’s a good reminder that not all LED walls are equal. So, if you’re ordering one up for your event, make sure you know the details of what resolution they are and their optimal viewing distances. They also tend to be more expensive than their projection counterparts, but that might outweigh the additional power and cooling requirements depending on your needs.
The Bottom Line
So, are the newer technologies “greener”? For the most part, yes—but for event planners, the most immediate impact of these technology changes comes in the form of power budgeting and venue selection. We’ve seen this in our own setups—ones that required multiple 200–400A service drops now only need one, and with some venues charging $5,000–$10,000 per drop, that already makes quite a difference. Lower power requirements open up the possibilities of more unique venues that might not have “big power” drops available, with LED and projectors being more readily able to run on traditional 20A circuits.
With LED technology, a big visual impact can be achieved with a fraction of the power requirement, but the real environmental benefits might not be as easily quantified. The reduced heat generation from both LED lighting and laser projection means less need for aggressive air conditioning, as well as less actual power draw, which the venue might feel in their power bill, but you wouldn’t necessarily notice as the organizer.
The evolution from hot, power-hungry incandescent bulbs to cool, efficient LED and laser alternatives represents one of the most significant technological shifts in the events industry of the last few decades. As these technologies continue to improve efficiency and decrease cost, they’re enabling event professionals to create more impactful experiences with fewer resources. That’s not just good for your budget and the environment—it’s good for expanding what’s creatively possible within the practical constraints of event production. And that’s something we can all feel bright about!
(And, for those who won’t rest until they know, L.A.S.E.R. stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.)
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Smart Meetings Event Technology Correspondent Brandt Krueger is a senior production manager for an audiovisual company, an industry speaker and educator.
