Strobe lighting, American DJ Flash shot DMX

0:01 What is a strobe light?

Alright folks, now this particular video contains strobe lighting so if you're easily affected by strobe lighting I suggest you turn off now. Right, what is a strobe light? Well quite a few nightclubs mobile DJs will have a light that all of a sudden starts to flash like so. Sometimes it could flash just maybe once a second. Or in beat with the music, alternatively, it could flash so fast that it makes the entire room seem to just glow for split seconds. But what does happen quite often with strobe light, if let's say it's flashing very fast, it's almost as though if you watch your hand, your hand is moving, it's editing. Now if you imagine, let's say we look at an old piece of cine film, you have a long strip and if you look at those strips,

All of the pictures seem relatively the same, but there's one very slight difference. If there's movement involved, if you look at one, then to the other, then to the other, you have very, very small, tiny areas. Let's say if the person is moving their hand, you could maybe see in one picture the hand here, the next one there, there, there and so on. Now it's sort of what happens, let's say, when strobe lighting is being used in a nightclub. You look at your hand and you can see your hand's almost doing that. It's a great effect but first of all very important, if you're going to have a strobe light don't use it all the time. In other words, don't leave it on continually all night because there could be a possibility of people getting seriously ill.

1:29 Two strobe lights

From strobe lighting, if you are going to use strobe lighting at your event, it's highly advisable that you say have somewhere, if you're organising an event, you need to have by law now, I'm pretty sure in England, you need to have a sign on the side of the door saying strobe lighting in use. Now I'm going to show you two strobe lights. That one is knackered. This is an old unit. Now you can see the bulb there and basically what happens is there's a sort of electrical charge that goes from one side of the bulb to the other and that electrical charge logically is turned into a white light and as soon as you get that, that white light hits the area around there. It's a bit like a bowl and then the light is facing forward or the light pushes forward on the back of this guy.

You've basically got sort of in and out. You've got intensity, speed, so you can increase or decrease the speed of the flashes from maybe once a second or one every four or five seconds up to quite a few in a second. Now I've got this one here. Now this one here is from American DJ and it's slightly different because there's LEDs in there and there's quite a few of them. A screen. So I didn't necessarily have this facing the crowd, it was behind the screen and I had it flashing at the screen and it looked fantastic. If I can ever find a video I'll link them together. Now on the back of this one we've got dimmer so you can increase or decrease the brightness. I've also got speed. So at the moment if I just turn the speed up like that and then turn the dimmer up you can see. Let's have a look. 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2. There you go. Sound to light at the moment.

3:20 Again, because it's got LED technology, it does not take much power at

But you can use this DMX. Now again, because it's got LED technology, it does not take much power at all. Let's have a look. Right, lamp LED voltage and again the voltage may vary from country to country. 230 volts, 50 hertz, fuse is 1 amp. This unit must be grounded. So in other words, if you've got a plug on it, positive, negative and earth. That's quite important. So there you go. Alright, it's basically a quick look at a strobe light and you can see exactly the sort of effect. Now if I just turn the camera onto the wall there, let's have a look, if I just put that up, you can see the sort of effect you get. Weird. And if you imagine now, if I turn this up, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 5, 3, 152, 4 and 7, 21. Legs 11. Right, OK. Been a bit of a nutter there. Right.

Let's put that down there, punk TV guys. So there you go. Bit of a look at a lighting effect called a strobe and these are used in most nightclubs, mobile, anything really but unlike this guy or let's say, put a similarity, say you've got a moving head or maybe I don't know an LED light with loads of different colours. Most of the time you'd maybe have those on. Something like this you would use Thank you for watching.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.