American Cinematographer - December 2006 - 130

Gilbertson's innovations and desire to

simplify lighting control for cinematogra¬
phers have taken the system well beyond
simple dimming capabilities.
Several years ago, Gilbertson saw
a vacuum in the motion-picture industry
when it came to dimmer control. "Every¬
one was taking light boards designed for
rock 'n' roll or theater applications and
forcing them to work in the film world,
and it seemed a bit of a compromise," he
says. "For a lot of people, working with
dimmers meant a confusing, complicated
system that often caused more

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headaches than it solved. I wanted to
create a

the film

system designed specifically for
industry that would solve those

issues."
As with most modern
the heart of

technology,
Light by Numbers is a stan¬

dard PC. Gilbertson started with Cast's

WYSIWYG

lighting-design software,
integrated into the ETC Insight
board through a software package called
Emphasis. For lighting-design profession¬
als in the theatrical and live-performance
industries, WYSIWYG ("What You See Is
What You Get") has long been a toolset
staple. Although it comes packaged with
fixtures and photometric data for the liveperformance industry, Gilbertson and his
team worked with Cast to incorporate
common motion-picture fixtures and data
which

was

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into the extensive database. "We worked

closely with Cast and ETC to get into the
guts of their systems and really tailor
them to our needs," explains Gilbertson.
"Basically, Emphasis is a lighting
controller that is completely softwarebased; it's like having a DMX lighting desk
on any PC computer, but it is coded and
set up to run solely with the ETC console."
Like most high-end lighting desks,
Light by Numbers features 5,000 chan¬
nels that can control up to 64,000 individ¬
ual DMX dimmers. It can also link up with
other desks, allowing for essentially limit¬
less capacity. "My goal was to take the
complexity out of the technology and
reduce it to its simplest element," says
Gilbertson. "When you're a director of
photography, you want to light the shot
and shoot, and you don't want hassles or
delays, no matter how big or complicated
your lighting rig is. That's what we set out

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121
American Cinematographer - December 2006

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 2006
