INTRO

I primarly thought this as a comment on the podcast itself but since it includes so much stuff and it
might get burried I decided to put things here as an article. Some of the stuff described here I will
try for myself if I find the time and budget, for the rest I'll let others explore my train of thought.
Again its actually a braindump

Word of warning, behind every sentence there should be actually be a question mark instead of a period

First paralell lights in small environments is a thing, there is a youtube tutorial on this:

Since LED stage lights become smaller and smaller this might be feasible to standard lights
The simulation of the sky color would be part of the led stage system.
(Although I'm not sure on this)


Second, about having additional lights to support LED lighting even on an artistic level seems very important
Gaffer and Gear has an interesting video about it (no need to watch to follow this article):



Well this was one of the reasons an old idea, use an hdri to control real lights, resurfaced. (Having initial thoughts about an hdri controlling lights during the sIBLedit times),

CONCEPT SKETCH

What is needed is a relative simple program on a laptop, wich reads the hdri values of a pano and sends the information via dmx to control real rgbwa led stage lights. So you get the brightness and correct spectrum value of the light.

Add to this a cheap smartphone with a motion sensor strapped to the back of the light, so you can correlate the position of the actual light with the one displayed in the program. Use the actual or a slightly different position on the map to control the light color and intensity.
...ok the smartphone needs to be reseted to the center of the stage and even an orientation point might be needed, although the later could also be done by the app itself.

In the past in pure cg land we used around 16 spotlights to simulate environment lighting without radiosity. (median cut)
And if you consider how cheap rgb lights have become you might get pretty decent lighting without a led stage at all, allthough multishaddowing could be a problem, and you won't get reflections from such a system.

Thinking further you might also correlate the light color with a light gel database so you could use non-colored lights also in such an environment.


Since I don't have the budget and time to test this method by myself, I publish my thoughts on this for others with more
ressources.  (Although I propably will code one day the app for it, and try it on a smaller scale)

EDIT: Started to code on the project, but it will defintive be on a smaller scale, since my ressources (money, tools, access, energy and time is low)

WHAT IS NEEDED WHAT YOU GET

Considering how cheap the needed equipment is:
You can get rgbwa (a is amber btw) stage lights for a very low price,the usb2dmx controllers cost less than 50 bucks, and a smartphone with motion sensor is also in the sub 100 bucks range, this might be an option for smaller studios, or even just in photo studios. (product photography: the typical shampoo bottle in front of moving grass / field)

Programming wise the biggest problem is the adaption to various dmx controllers (doesn't seem to be standarised), and make an HSV to RGBWA converter. And in the later stages a way to send portions of the hdri to standard LED panels for reflections and background purposes.
All the rest is pretty easy and is just a matter to interface it as approcheable as possible. 

Again just a small braindump on this..might be wrong on so many levels...light calibration to the dmx commands comes into mind...since I didn't made any real experiments on how well this works take it all with a very small grain of salt.... I might update this article during the next two years to post my findings.

EDIT: started to post some progress reports in the discussion thread. (Wich I invite everyone to join)
Updates on the project can be found in the forum

I know this article sounds very Dunning Kruger, but I think its a good thing when you start a project especially if its experimental / no one else depends on it: You should not have doubts at the beginning of a project, they come during execution anyway, and as long as there is a honest post mortem, everythings fine.