Neon & LED

For the longest time, colorists have had to deal with the garish digital color processing of neon and LED lights, particularly those of the emergency vehicles, police cars and taillights seen in so many crime shows. Also, at the dawn of digital cinema, LED lights were seldom seen on sets, whereas today, they are commonplace. This was just one of the challenges Arri, RED and Blackmagic Design were compelled to address when developing their latest generation of color processing. Some fun history: while neon, discovered in the late nineteenth century, was relatively quickly commercialized in the 1920s for advertising purposes, changing cityscapes in the USA and elsewhere, LED lights took much longer to catch on. The phenomenon of electroluminescence was discovered by a British experimenter in 1907 and the first LED was created by a Russian inventor in 1927, but it wasn’t until four decades later that LEDs were mass produced. It is only in the last decade that they’ve found acceptance on movie productions – and now, nearly a century since its invention, we’ve got LED volume studios that are changing forever how movies are made.