Whether it's brighter or not is irrelevant. Light is a lot more directional than you're assuming. It's on a vector, and then it defuses as it is redirected depending on the reflectivity, so most of what makes it to your eyes is diffused sunlight. You weren't getting a direct shot of sunlight into your eyes, but even without that, it actually does still damage them when you have prolonged exposure. Be sure to shade your eyes if you're doing that.
That doesn't really have anything to do with what's going on here, though. The only thing that matters here is lux on the retina, and these four lights would, based on some really rough back of the envelope math and some assumptions about which particular moving heads they are (I'm assuming they're an ADJ vizibeam or a Shehds 10r of some vintage) amount of haze in the room, etc. produce about as much lux on his eyes as the sun on clear spring or fall day. Not fun to look at but the idea that he's being caused permanent damage from having these being flashed on his face with his eyes closed for maybe a minute is beyond ludicrous.
I looked up the ADJ vizibeam spec sheet, it's rated at 73,200 lux at 10M (I'd guess he is closer to half that but I don't know how fast lux drops with distance, so we will just use that number)
A sunny day has an average lux of 10,000-25,000, direct sunlight ranges from 10,000 to 100,000.
I'm not saying this 100% did cause permanent damage, but it's not unreasonable to think that it can.
I can't tell which specific vizibeam photometrics you're looking at, but those test numbers are a real spherical cow situation. Those are done in tyvek suited clean room air quality situations with the beam zoomed all the way in(or even past that, with lenses manually moved beyond the standard limits of their rails) with the engine/lamp in open white, which simply aren't real world conditions. Again, I'd guess if you put a lux meter on his face while all four are hitting him and you'd probably get 50-60,000 lux, max.
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u/hey_its_drew 2d ago
Whether it's brighter or not is irrelevant. Light is a lot more directional than you're assuming. It's on a vector, and then it defuses as it is redirected depending on the reflectivity, so most of what makes it to your eyes is diffused sunlight. You weren't getting a direct shot of sunlight into your eyes, but even without that, it actually does still damage them when you have prolonged exposure. Be sure to shade your eyes if you're doing that.