Why do my lamps require an insane "strength" value of 1 million? recently, I was using mesh planes to emit some light, and they had a strength of 8.0.. this worked well
now, I want to swap these out for area lamps (to improve performance)
i've positioned these area lamps in the place of my emitter polygons
i've scaled them such they have 1.0 transform scale, and in the lamp settings, I set the size to 1m across (to size-match the previous emitters)
the problem is, the lamps require a crazy "strength" of at least 1 000 000 (one million!) to produce any reasonable amount of light... this seems bonkers!
point lamps, area lamps, and the others, are all effected
my scene is scaled using the Centimeters preset.. the foreground is only a meter a way, and the more distant background is more like 5 meters back
i've paid special attention to the sizing and scaling of this scene, I can't figure out why the mesh emitters are working with a sane Strength of 8, and the lamps require something out of this world? something must not be right...




Edit: Remastered scene corrects scales, problem persists



stage-crazy-lamps-2.blend


i've remastered the scene so that all of the objects have a proper scale factor of 1.0
this should correct any sizing discrepancy/confusion
my scene must be in centimeters preset, all my other work is in centimeters
the area lamp size is now definitely 1m, as highlighted in the above screenshot (and it is not affected by the 1.0 transform scaling factor, also highlighted (I also verified the delta scale is also 1.0))
despite correcting the scaling of my scene, strength 1 000 000 is still required
is blender simply not accounting for my scene's Unit Scale setting?
Your area lamp is not 1m across, it is 100m in size, hence the strength required.

Your Blend file seems to have pretty messed up scaling factors, for starters your viewport has a clipping distance of 50µm which is causing all sorts of display precision issues and Z-Fighting.

Your whole scene is huge in reality, most objects are several meters high, have very high scaling factors, and your room is more than one kilometer long.

Most problems probably stem from the fact that your whole scene has a Units Scale factor of 0.01, which is giving you a false sense of scale, and falsely reported units value

Go to the Properties Window > Scene > Units > Units Scale and set the value to 1