Fluorescents in a bank

[Naim Sutherland]

Hi everyone,

 

I have a low budget show coming up with a couple of days in a bank. The location is fairly spacious, and has a lot of fluorescent lighting.

 

I am going to go ahead and get a quote for enough tubes to replace everything, but I am looking at several hundred bulbs, and I am very concerned that the show will not be able to afford it.

 

Do I have other reasonable options here?

 

I intend to bring in significant levels of daylight through the windows along the side, but it will not reach through the whole space (nor do I want it to), and I will have huge areas in the back of the bank that will not have any direct HMI or any spill.

 

I've never used minus green gel. Will that take out the green spike on the fluorescents? That will bring them back down closer to tungsten temp, correct? Not quite ideal... How much punch would I lose doing that? I intend to stay at an F2 and I'm on the old Red sensor, so 320 ISO.... feels like I can't afford to lose much stop. Even with minus green, the spectrum is incomplete, so I will still end up with a bit of an odd tonality under those lights, right? I can avoid lighting my main subjects with them, but certainly 'staff' extras will be hit by them.

 

I don't anticipate being able to bounce off the ceiling, as this problem is chiefly a concern on the wides where we would likely see any hot spots like that.

 

Today I told them that I was concerned there wouldn't be a viable backup plan if they could not afford to rent the bulbs. I said I would look into it and get back to them with anything else we could do, but I can't figure anything else out. I seriously can't hide stuff in there, I see so much of the space... anything I would be able to hide would be behind cubical walls, but it would be on the floor and have the wrong light direction.

 

I don't know.

 

Any wise thoughts out there?

[Matthew Parnell]

A tube swap is not only expensive for the tubes, but for the time and labor to swap them out.

 

Probably the most common alternative I have seen DPs requested for this problem is rather than correcting the tubes, (which would take as much labor and time as a tube swap, if not more), is to correct the lamps you are using to match the tubes (ie 1/4 Plus Green on HMIs and Kino). Therefore your Green/Magenta bias is the same over all your sources. Some DPs then correct the resulting image in post, others do it at the front of the lens with filters and others meet halfway between the two.

[Adrian Sierkowski]

As Matt said. One of the most important things, however, is to make sure all the bulbs are consistent up in the ceiling... so look at which bulbs are most prevalent and then purchase more of them and swap out any odd-ball bulbs up there. Then correct any supplemental lighting you bring in to match. You will need a color meter for this... well, ok you don't NEED one, but it's sure helpful.

- and + green don't loose too too much exposure.

[Naim Sutherland]

Thanks for your replies everyone.

 

I have picked up extra 1/8th plus green for this location. Sadly, the production cannot provide me with the extra powerful lights that I wanted for this location, so I will have to make due with 3x 1.2k par, 4x 575 par/fres and some kinos. This will change our plan a bit, and we will aim to make our world more contained than we would otherwise like. It will force us to shrink the fov in key areas of the location to avoid seeing world that can't be managed properly. To a certain extent this also means we will be spending more in colour correction, and I think that is understood by the production.

 

I am still concerned that I will have a couple of different temperatures through the day in the same frame. Sometimes it'll just be my lights and the fluorescents, sometimes I can keep it to real daylight with just HMI and turn off the fluorescents, but sometimes I'll have to mix with real daylight and have fluorescents and my lights all at once. The Red with Ye Olde Mysterium sensor isn't the best at smoothing out different temperatures, but I don't really think I can do much about it.

 

I guess my next thought is won't my HMIs feel cool compared to the fluorescents? Should I warm them with some CTO? In that case, what should I do when I can see outside and inside at the same time? I have at least 1 shot where I think I will be forced into using the fluorescents, will be able to see outside, or see daylight spill at least, and will have to sweeten the subjects with my own lights (at quite a distance) all at the same time.

 

To a certain extent I could see situations where real daylight may be in a unique luma value that would be fairly colour correctable on its own, so I think my main thing now is just the difference between HMI with + green and fluorescents (which to my eye are "Cool White").

 

I think the answer is white balance and manage colour temperature with a spectrometer (hah, as if we have that) or my eye in the eye piece and be prepared to shift around as needed on a case by case basis, but I wanted to see if you guys had any other suggestions.

 

Sorry for the horribly rambly post... I think you all understand where my energy level and my head is at right now.

 

Thanks,

 

Naim