Home cinema lightings for beginners

Perfectly designed home cinema lighting system is what makes a home cinema room unique and not just another room of your smart home with a large projector screen. Combination of colour, brightness along with smart control features creates the perfect lighting condition for the cinema room. You cannot just place some lights here and there and hope to achieve the perfect lighting. This requires experience and expertise. However, if you are a bit of a tech geek and wants to try something yourself – read this guide for basic understanding of what needs to be done for a good lighting system for your cinema room.

There are many different types of lights at your disposal for designing your home cinema lighting system. Star ceiling lights, Cove lights, Stair lights, Table lamps, LED downlights are the most common types of lights in a home cinema room. Let’s find out more about them.

These star shaped lights are attached to the ceiling with a black background panel to give an impression of a romantic night sky. The black felt covered panels full of stars made from fiber optics looks very nice when they are turned on. Normally these lights have LED light source. Make sure you do not use the same sized stars repeatedly. Use variations in sizes. They are very popular among home cinema owners. The starry night sky probably gives them some nostalgia about driveway cinemas of the 80s.

Lights are carefully placed under stairsteps to help people navigate their way in the darkness of the cinema room. If your cinema room has raised platforms to elevate guests above the row in front, then stair light is particularly important. You should place LED strips on the riser of the stair. You should be very careful about selecting the right colour and brightness for your LED strips. The light must not collide with the intended darkness of the cinema room.

Simply speaking cove lighting is an indirect way of transmitting lights to the subject. For example, if you are holding a torchlight/flashlight close to a white wall – the whole room dimly illuminates from the reflection of the light, right? Essentially that’s a kind of cove lighting. And in-home cinema room we can use this to our benefit to create awesome lighting. We can place LED Strips around the top edge of the room, this can give the room an impressionable indirect light source at the same time makes the room appear greater in height than it is.

Cinema room will need place to keep drinks and refreshments. These places can be lit with table lamps especially suited for cinema rooms. These lamps will gently illuminate the tabletop containing refreshments without hampering the dark setting of the room.

Using LED downlights is a great way to keep the movie room illuminated before or during the movie. Other than the main cinema room, these lights can also be used above the hallway to the cinema room. The brightness of these lights can be controlled, so user can set the level of illumination they feel perfect for their movie room.

You have the option to integrate all your lighting systems of the cinema room with your existing home automation system. Then you will be able to create specific lighting scenes and control them using your mobile phone. For example, wouldn’t it be nice if the main lights turn off and lights at the starry ceiling and stairs turns on as soon as the movie starts? This can be done using an automation system which connects the home cinema and the lighting system. However, for that you will need a home cinema installer who is experienced with smart home systems because it requires technical expertise.

So, there you have it, now you have the basic understanding of what kind of lighting systems make up a cool home cinema room. Set them up, grab some popcorn and enjoy a movie.

AVITHA is London’s premier home cinema installation specialist. We are CEDIA certified installers. We offer consultation service to all our clients. Contact us today for home cinema or home theatre system.