The city that never sleeps isn’t going to light up itself; the new custom sign atop ABC Studios is packed with custom components making sure that corner stays lit until 2017.

by David Mantey, PD&D Editor

The ABC Studios super sign features 3,550 custom-made LED modules.

On the world’s biggest stage, working for an American corporate giant, the D3 LED digital display specialists were charged with the 3,200-square-foot custom retrofit of the ABC Studios super sign.

As a bright beacon of commercial entertainment poised to bring in more than $2.5 billion in revenue by 2010, this was not a project for amateurs.

The biggest obstacle for Meric Adriansen, managing partner of systems and engineering, and his roster of D3 engineers, was posed by tight curves and odd dimensions. The sign’s tightest points feature 3-½-foot curves, and it would be difficult (if not impossible) to take the 15” square modules that LEDs are typically made of and squeeze them into such a small space.

The solution was to create custom components and custom module sizes that allowed D3 to fit into those spaces, yet develop an efficient design that didn’t include a catalog of custom models and components.

According to Adriansen, his team came up with a 3.24”-wide by 40.5”-tall by 1”-deep module that fit the exact incremental space that was available on the sign. The 12 ribbons are exactly 40.5” tall, so D3 decided to come up with the “long and skinny” LED sign module that allowed the team to create the tight curves and, at the same time, build the entire sign out of the exact same module.

“We first looked at the problem and created all the scale drawings that showed all of the tight curves,” Adriansen recalls. “Based on that, we came up with a perfect-sized module. The big challenge was to be able to come up with [a design] in the time frame that was allotted. We had to come up with the design for this very rapidly.” Settling on the design was an achievement, but facing what would become 3,550 custom modules for a single job, there was little time to spend second guessing.

Get With The Times
The old sign that was being replaced had a dot-pitch of 50 mm (one pixel on your computer screen equals a 2.5” square block of LEDs on the sign).

“It was a pretty coarse resolution for signage,” Adriansen says. “Of course, it was a good resolution when the sign was originally erected in 1999, but as time passed by (and as Times Square is a very competitive area) you want to be able to differentiate yourself from the competition. The 50-mm pitch was outdated.” D3 recommended a 10-mm pitch, increasing the resolution by a factor of 25.

With greater resolution comes greater responsibility. As Adriansen states, “When you have pixels on the sign that are 50 mm apart from each other, if you’re off by ¾”, you’re not going to see that difference. If you’re building a sign that has 10-mm spacing, you better believe that you are going to see that difference.”

Consistency would be an issue on a straight sign with 10-mm spacing. If the modules are off ever so slightly, vertical dark or light spots would appear between modules. Trying to execute the ambitious spacing on a sign with inconsistent, changing curves, D3 came up with a mounting mechanism that would assure that the LEDs' spacing on each module would be 10 mm.

A look at sketches from D3 LED’s ABC Studios super sign retrofit.

D3 built the sign on location using feeler gauges that measured to the 10,000th of an inch to be able to accommodate the change in spacing between the modules. Whether it was a tight inside curve (LEDs bunched close together at the boundary) or an outside curve (LEDs more spread apart forcing the installer to move the modules closer together), the spacing between every module boundary LED, is, in essence, exactly 10 mm.

“We found out that if we were off by thousandths of an inch, you could actually see it, by the imagery being brighter or darker at these boundary edges. So we spent a lot of time and effort to make sure that the sign would be perfect,” Adriansen says.

“We would put the modules up there using the feeler gauges based on what we had calculated. But you realize that in the field, your scale drawings are never as perfect as they once seemed. So after they put up each section, they would light up the sign and further fine-tune it.”

The crew had to light up the sign quite a few times when they first started. But after the installers became confident in deciding what feeler gauges would be needed, they color-coded all of the gauges, depending on the thousandths of an inch differences, and eventually knew what to expect with each different curve.

Bright Lights, Big City
“Trying to do this in the middle of Times Square for a month and a half (the project started in mid-July 2007 and wrapped up the second week of September) in the middle of the summer, with the sun beating on you and the whole world watching you, is not an easy task,” Adriansen insists.

Future ad revenue wasn't the only obstacle lying before the company. As D3 fought the weather and the sunny New York City disposition, the company didn’t have the luxury of ripping the old sign down and slapping a new one on the building. The project was a complete retrofit that had to remain functional throughout the job. “We had to keep the sign working as each old part was removed,” says Adriansen. “Any of the old parts that were not immediately affected were left on so ABC advertising revenues were not greatly affected.”

The existing steel tube structure and mounting brackets from the old sign were reused and covered with new stainless steel sheet metal panels for mounting the modules. D3 also had to fit the new design into the same 600-A energy print.

Another sketch D3 LED used to retrofit the odd dimensions and tight curves of the ABC Studios super sign.

“[600 A] was all that was available and we had to work with it. Not only did we have to increase the resolution 25 times over, we had to make it work with the power that was available,” says Adriansen.

Currently, the sign is only running at 25 percent of its brightness capacity. The sign was designed so that as the LEDs weakened, the brightness capacity could be increased to compensate.

At that rate, the sign could last 10 years; however, Adriansen notes that Times Square signs average a seven-to-eight year lifespan as companies look to stay competitive.

The new ABC Studios super sign is the only LED display in the world that has nine horizontally arranged, three-dimensional curving, undulating ribbons with a cumulative length of 935 feet and radii as tight as 3.8 feet. The ribbons can be configured as one giant display with its own content or in unison with its high-definition center display.

Manhattan. Times Square. To the casual camera-clad tourist, these places can be overwhelming, a vibe Adriansen certainly doesn’t give off as he describes his “playground." “Almost half of the signs in Times Square, D3 LED has, in one form or another, been involved in,” he admits. “We know the Times Square area very well, but that doesn’t make it any easier, or less stressful, what you’re putting these things up.”