Exit Lighting in Regal Theaters

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

This is a worldwide problem. Planners for exit lights use the type they specify in their daylight bright shopping venues. As if nothing else is available.
I do not know about codes that require super bright light to be hung.
A visibility must be ensured, in the lighting conditions of the room. So, when the movie runs, house light down, you don't need much. 10 candles or so, not 950. Even with house lights up, you're not even in the range of a shopping space, which needs bright light for good color rendition. Probably your house lights give an illumination, that's actually dimmer, than the screen brightness.
Even if people order dimmable lights, I found they bring PWM modulated LED signs, driven at a low frequency, so they harshly flicker in peripherial vision, which is very annoying. Again, planning failed, well thought of, but wrong type. Another engineers used a higher drive frequency, where the lights emitted an audible high pitched humming noise, very detractive to many patrons. Another fail.
Even though the first failure is an exit door next to a screen, or within the viewing angle of patrons. A clear fail of the theatre architect, and I do not follow "There was no other way" (Well, yours was the one with lowest co$t involved)

Here in the US (and probably Canada and most other countries) there are Fire and Life Safety Codes which strictly specify locations and brightness levels of egress signage, and most jurisdiction's inspectors are NOT flexible at all about allowing reduced brightness levels.

Having said that, I am aware of SOME cases where the area's inspectors have granted permission for lower brightness on exit signs, but that is a rare exception rather than a rule. None that I am aware of have allowed them to be dimmed by any kind of electronic control, (because dimmers can and do fail, plus most exit signs here have built-in battery backups whose chargers don't get along with dimmers) but were instead allowed to use lower wattage lamps. (Obviously this was some time ago and modern exit signs are mostly all LED now.)

You may not follow the "There was no other way" but out here, the Fire Marshalls and inspectors can and will shut down a business for even the smallest of Code violations. Fighting them rarely if ever works out to your advantage, as you may win that one battle, but the war will go on as they nit-pick and dig in to find other "violations."

[Marcel Birgelen]

Here in the US (and probably Canada and most other countries) there are Fire and Life Safety Codes which strictly specify locations and brightness levels of egress signage, and most jurisdiction's inspectors are NOT flexible at all about allowing reduced brightness levels.

Having said that, I am aware of SOME cases where the area's inspectors have granted permission for lower brightness on exit signs, but that is a rare exception rather than a rule. None that I am aware of have allowed them to be dimmed by any kind of electronic control, (because dimmers can and do fail, plus most exit signs here have built-in battery backups whose chargers don't get along with dimmers) but were instead allowed to use lower wattage lamps. (Obviously this was some time ago and modern exit signs are mostly all LED now.)

You may not follow the "There was no other way" but out here, the Fire Marshalls and inspectors can and will shut down a business for even the smallest of Code violations. Fighting them rarely if ever works out to your advantage, as you may win that one battle, but the war will go on as they nit-pick and dig in to find other "violations."

Most modern countries have pretty strict laws and regulations when it comes down to fire safety, the way they are enforced may obviously differ. I can't really vouch for the U.S or Canada, but I guess the situation will be somewhat similar with what we have here.

Emergency exit lighting is important, you're potentially playing with people's lives here, so checks on it should be strict. That being said, there also needs to be some flexibility in how those rules are applied, to get to a workable situation. Nobody is being done a favor with a bunch of overly bright exit lights literally blanking out the content on screen. You're already in a dark room, there is no need for exit lights to burn holes into your retina to get the job done.

Obviously, you can face some uphill battles if the local brigade of inspectors consists of unreasonable assholes only there to make your life miserable, but I've also, quite often, seen the opposite, where exceptions to the rule can be made, if there are sufficient precautions being taken. What those precautions are, may differ between localities. The minimum requirement is to couple those systems to your fire and evacuation alarms, but I've also seen some additional requirements, like playing a bunch of slides in front of the show, showing were the emergency exits are in the auditorium, something which is usually not really a problem any more in the digital age of cinema.

If everything else fails, you still can add lightboxes to your exit lighting or put them at an angle with an arrow pointing towards the exit for example. There are always solutions to minimize the impact, but I often have the impression that many exhibitors, simply don't care...

[Mark Lane]

This year we added hot water to our 74 year old theater. When we did that we had to bring up other parts of the theater up to code. We had to replace some cool glass antique exit signs because they where not bright enough. The new ones looked like a shinning spot light compared to the old signs.. so bright they where distracting.
Our state approves green and/or red signs. We tried both green and red but both where to bright.. We found that a red light with a green covering, dimmed the light output enough to make the movie experience more enjoyable. Since we used approved parts and colors, it passed code.

[Martin Brooks]

Most modern countries have pretty strict laws and regulations when it comes down to fire safety, the way they are enforced may obviously differ. I can't really vouch for the U.S or Canada, but I guess the situation will be somewhat similar with what we have here.

Emergency exit lighting is important, you're potentially playing with people's lives here, so checks on it should be strict. That being said, there also needs to be some flexibility in how those rules are applied, to get to a workable situation. Nobody is being done a favor with a bunch of overly bright exit lights literally blanking out the content on screen. You're already in a dark room, there is no need for exit lights to burn holes into your retina to get the job done.

Obviously, you can face some uphill battles if the local brigade of inspectors consists of unreasonable assholes only there to make your life miserable, but I've also, quite often, seen the opposite, where exceptions to the rule can be made, if there are sufficient precautions being taken. What those precautions are, may differ between localities. The minimum requirement is to couple those systems to your fire and evacuation alarms, but I've also seen some additional requirements, like playing a bunch of slides in front of the show, showing were the emergency exits are in the auditorium, something which is usually not really a problem any more in the digital age of cinema.

If everything else fails, you still can add lightboxes to your exit lighting or put them at an angle with an arrow pointing towards the exit for example. There are always solutions to minimize the impact, but I often have the impression that many exhibitors, simply don't care...

It's not just that the exhibitors don't care. The Fire Marshalls don't care. And they have the last word.

[Geoff Jones]

My brother's friend shared the photo below from the Regal UA Court Street & RPX in Brooklyn, NY (Auditorium 4).

Someone else replied to one of my tweets a few weeks back that the Regal in Union Square had the same problem.

Has anyone been in a Regal auditorium (outside of their premium auditoriums) that doesn't have green light shining on the screen?

image000000.jpg

[Carsten Kurz]

Well, quite obviously, there is light shining from the exit light onto the screen. No audience will ever be at the screen location, so, there is no need for emergency light shining into that direction. These lights are still bright, but it should not violate any code if unnecessary light is blocked from the screen. In most cases, this is simply caused by operator ignorance. I remember watching AVATAR in 3D with a Dolby 3D system at very low light levels with a similar exit door and light close to the screen. It was hardly watchable and extremely stressing to my eyes. The companies/installers dealing with these lights simply follow standard procedures and don't care for presentation aspects, probably also because they install these lights when projection is not up and running yet, and then later no one has the balls to question them.

[Lyle Romer]

Well, quite obviously, there is light shining from the exit light onto the screen. No audience will ever be at the screen location, so, there is no need for emergency light shining into that direction. These lights are still bright, but it should not violate any code if unnecessary light is blocked from the screen. In most cases, this is simply caused by operator ignorance. I remember watching AVATAR in 3D with a Dolby 3D system at very low light levels with a similar exit door and light close to the screen. It was hardly watchable and extremely stressing to my eyes. The companies/installers dealing with these lights simply follow standard procedures and don't care for presentation aspects, probably also because they install these lights when projection is not up and running yet, and then later no one has the balls to question them.

I don't understand why the exit sign can't just be slightly angled towards the audience. It is still somewhat distracting to have a bright green light in that location but at least it won't project on the screen.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Because it would take some planning and care.

[Carsten Kurz]

Typically, there are no standard mounting systems for these lights for an angled position. That's why they are mounted straight to the wall. A little bit of thinking could prevent this.
However, it is easy to mount a piece of cloth, black board, or just a small piece of blackwrap to prevent that light falling onto the screen. If only someone on site would care.

[William Kucharski]

That exit light problem is similar to the issues at the AMC Flatiron Crossing 14, except there it’s the rope lighting they use on the floor to illuminate the edge of the aisles; it throws a nice red glow onto the lower two corners of the screen in their big premium theaters (Dolby and IMAX.)

When I asked the manager they told me corporate said they couldn’t do anything because of “safety regulations.”

So I do the only thing I can and don’t go there now.

[Gordon McLeod]

I am still a fan of the tritium based exit signs that just glow in the dark and need no external power

[Jesse Crooks]

This problem got really bad when the manufacturers switched to LEDs. They got SO much brighter, and the spec sheets don't list lumen output so there's no good way to shop for lower output models. We solved this problem by installing neutral density filters behind the red gel in our exit signs. I took them apart and used the red gel as a template. We dimmed it down as far as we thought we could get away with and it passed inspection, no questions asked. You can get cheap sets of filters on Amazon that include a few different densities, so you can mix and match to find the ideal dimming level.

[William Kucharski]

That's a problem with electronics, too, so now you can get these, they're called LightDims:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CLVEQCO

[Frank Cox]

I had to put a piece of black electrical tape over the "power on" led on my digital cable box because it was so bright it was bothering my bird.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I had to put a piece of tape onto my phone charger, because my new USB "super charger" had to put a bright white LED into the USB-C connector emitting from BOTH sides. Not that it's of any use other than telling you that it's "powered", imagine you'd do something useful with it, like changing color when it's actually charging.

Ever since those ultra-bright LEDs came onto the market, I don't need any kind of lightning any more to stroll through the house, there is always some bright shiny LED casting its rays somewhere...