Tungsten Head vs Kino w/ Tungsten tubes

[Tyler Clark]

Shooting a short narrative in an old antique shop.

 

I was set to have to deal with 4400k light. The lights seem to read closer to 3200 however.

 

Would 3200k Kino tubes be a better choice to match color to overheads or would a tungsten head?

 

Also What are your general thoughts on use of 3200k kino tubes? I dont use them often. Ive always felt they rolled a little too pink to match with normal house incandescents when I did.

 

 

[Satsuki Murashige]

Would you just be replacing the tubes in the existing fixtures with Kino or Optima 32K tubes? I guess you have to figure out how many you would need and if they would even fit or work with the existing ballast. If you can, why not test one or two tubes first to make sure it will work? You may get some flicker with those old ballasts even with new tubes.

 

I've seen 32K Kino tubes that vary from green to quite magenta, visible to the naked eye. I believe it has to do with the age of the tube. You can always make bunch of a Plus Green and Minus Green gel sleeves I guess. There are also 29K tubes that are a bit warmer and some people say they match better real tungsten units if you're using both in the same frame. The 32K tubes have been good enough for me, but opinions vary.

[David Mullen ASC]

It also depends on how precisely you need to match the color. If the faces, for example, are always being keyed by the Kino 32 tubes, then it doesn't matter so much if practicals in the background are slightly warmer (which they often are.) Or you could warm up the Kino 32 tube with some gel. And if everything is keyed by the Kino 32, then any slight green (usually from the fixture not getting enough air around the tubes) could be timed out.

 

It gets trickier if you try intercutting faces lit by the Kinos with faces lit by the practical sources, if that's the case, it would be better to use tungsten lamps, perhaps on a dimmer, to match the tungsten practicals.

 

My main point is just to find a consistent approach, i.e. faces always keyed by the Kino, or always keyed by tungsten -- makes life easier in the final color-correction. Backlights and fill matters less in terms of switching between Kinos and tungsten.

[Tyler Clark]

Would you just be replacing the tubes in the existing fixtures with Kino or Optima 32K tubes? I guess you have to figure out how many you would need and if they would even fit or work with the existing ballast. If you can, why not test one or two tubes first to make sure it will work? You may get some flicker with those old ballasts even with new tubes.

 

I've seen 32K Kino tubes that vary from green to quite magenta, visible to the naked eye. I believe it has to do with the age of the tube. You can always make bunch of a Plus Green and Minus Green gel sleeves I guess. There are also 29K tubes that are a bit warmer and some people say they match better real tungsten units if you're using both in the same frame. The 32K tubes have been good enough for me, but opinions vary.

 

 

It also depends on how precisely you need to match the color. If the faces, for example, are always being keyed by the Kino 32 tubes, then it doesn't matter so much if practicals in the background are slightly warmer (which they often are.) Or you could warm up the Kino 32 tube with some gel. And if everything is keyed by the Kino 32, then any slight green (usually from the fixture not getting enough air around the tubes) could be timed out.

 

It gets trickier if you try intercutting faces lit by the Kinos with faces lit by the practical sources, if that's the case, it would be better to use tungsten lamps, perhaps on a dimmer, to match the tungsten practicals.

 

My main point is just to find a consistent approach, i.e. faces always keyed by the Kino, or always keyed by tungsten -- makes life easier in the final color-correction. Backlights and fill matters less in terms of switching between Kinos and tungsten.

 

Thanks so much guys! Always appreciated!

[Phil Rhodes]

The low-risk approach is to ensure you're lighting everything with the same sources, or to ensure there's a clearly screen-visible reason why things don't match. Consistency and matching is the number-one problem of filmmaking at anything but the very highest levels, in my experience. Claims that HMI matches daylight or, as discussed here, tungsten kinos match real tungsten are almost always dubious in terms of both colour and character. If you want it to match, shine the same lights at people.

 

P