Jump to content

Do Tungsten/Incandescent Lights Have a Future in the Industry?


Recommended Posts

As the film production shifts towards more sustainable practices, do high-energy consumption lights still have a place in the future of the industry?

Production's are now more wary of their carbon footprint than ever before - with more advice and legislation continuing to come out; aiming to reduce this footprint. The advancement of LED technology brings further questions about the relevance of tungsten lights in the near future. Will tungsten lights have a future in the film and TV industry or are their days numbered?

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The volumes of production, and consumption, are very different when comparing consumer and media lighting. Tungsten will continue to be popular to some DPs for its unique qualities. Unlike the consumer market, where tungsten bulbs are now too expensive to buy and run where they are even still available, the price of lamps, and of running them, just isn't that significant in the context of a film budget. It will continue to be worth someone's while to produce them IMO.

Of course, for independents, LED fixtures are a boon, particularly for practicals. Who puts a hot photoflood in a lampshade anymore?

 

Edited by Mark Dunn
Link to comment
Share on other sites

IMO No

I believe that they will exist but I don't think that there will be a use for them on modern film sets, as LED technology continues to advance and become better and better.

I feel like it can be comparable to how Digital cameras overtook film and how digital is now at the point where it is superior; other than the aesthetic quality that film produces of course. I think it will be similar in this way 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

I still don't much care for LED"s, I'm forced to use them because I don't get to decide my G&E kit quite often. The Gaffers have been switching over and rarely have much Tungsten on the truck anymore. Usually just small lights like an Arri kit or something. I really like the Arri LED's, the Skypanel and Orbiter have been my "go-to" recently and they're the only LED's I've used that appear to have some sort of compensation for the missing wavelengths. I feel the look in camera, is so similar to tungsten, I don't think anyone would notice. However, many of the cheaper LED's with companies like Lightpanels and Ikan, they're nowhere close to that of Arri. I find consistency between lights to be an issue AND you can see they're missing wavelengths. The almost smooth look of the Arri lights, just doesn't exist. 

I think tungsten will still be used until the lamp manufacturers stop making the lamps honestly, same goes for HMI's. There just isn't an LED solution which is that bright. The convenience of LED's is difficult to pass up these days, with on the fly color balance, low power consumption and nearly no heat. But in terms of quality of light, I'm gonna still argue that tungsten has that beat to this day. If you can afford to light with them power wise and heat wise, I'd go 100% tungsten. I do on my personal shoots to this day outside of odd light placement where I use LED. 

Edited by Tyler Purcell
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

Certainly tungsten light looks the best, but similar comments were made when HMI's came along about the superiority of carbon arc lighting in terms of color and sharpness, but that didn't save the carbon arc. Same thing for when Eastmancolor replaced 3-strip Technicolor, or when Kodachrome disappeared. Things don't always get better with new technology but the convenience, efficiency, time savings, cost, etc. become overriding factors.

I suppose if 3-strip Technicolor never went away it would be using T-grain b&w emulsions and maybe have gotten up into the 320 ASA range... but it was doomed once single color negative became a viable option.

  • Like 1
  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member
7 hours ago, David Mullen ASC said:

Certainly tungsten light looks the best, but similar comments were made when HMI's came along about the superiority of carbon arc lighting in terms of color and sharpness, but that didn't save the carbon arc. Same thing for when Eastmancolor replaced 3-strip Technicolor, or when Kodachrome disappeared. Things don't always get better with new technology but the convenience, efficiency, time savings, cost, etc. become overriding factors.

Very interesting, I have no experience with Carbon Arc's. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

My experience with carbon arc is limited to follow spot use in a theatre setting; but, let me tell you it is unique.

The light is brilliant, sharp, hard, crisp, and very crystal clean. It has a wrapping quality to it, but with a quick fall-off to shadow on the unlit side.

Vilmos Zsigmond shot some scenes from "Cinderella Liberty" at our local train station in which he utilized Carbon arcs.  It was a perfect example of taking existing afternoon light and boosting it for (artistic) exposure.  (He used 9-lights behind tracing paper to crosslight through windows in the walkway leading down to the train).  As my reporter and I had to go to a story we could only spend about 15 minutes or so observing.

It was enough time to note the smoke, and some noise generated by the arcs, and verify that it required a person standing by to trim the arc rods and be ready to change them.

So, while whatever problems HMI's have, they are more convenient...  but they do not project the quality of light that a Carbon Arc does. Not even close. They just do not move through the air and cause it to vibrate the way an arc does. (And put it on the screen to be seen).

Mole Richardson youtube Carbon arc videos give a hint of what I mean.

Since someone is trying to resurrect the dodo bird,  maybe interest in arcs could be rekindled, but like a movie theater dedicated to reruns a decade ago found out, good rods are hard to find.  (Bad ones sputter and flicker abominably). Arcs consume a lot of power also.

My two cents worth.

A final thought,  hooray for the fresnel lens!!

 

 

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

So long as you liked your light to be a hint of cacky green/grey, "cold arc lamps" which were a form of HMI were okay. Tight-arsed cinemas ran them until they stopped. Carbon arc-lit film projection is the absolute best but if you haven't seen it, you don't miss it. They were no longer practical when large platters and mutts near-to automated the biobox as there remained no opportunity to replace the rods during the changeovers. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

I have been a tungsten fan for a long time.  I always carry tungsten on the truck.  However, I see two things happening from  my experience that will color the future.

On the one hand, depending on budget, small independent features may not be able to afford led lighting packages, however I have shifted small fixtures over to led because I can now get a good enough 650 replacement.  That color science will get better, and I believe can replace tungsten lamps up through 2000w of output.  Beam patterns are getting better, as is color accuracy.

On larger budgets or studio shoots where there is a green mandate, we might be asked to run as much as 70% led.  This is problematic because even above $10m, that get expensive really fast.  Zips still go in the perms because soft panels can't be ordered in sufficient quantity to meet the budget requirements.  Productions can either meet their green mandate, or their budget line costs, not both.  At some point, this will change and I have no doubt that LED's will get cheaper.

Again this is why I often carry a mixture of small LED fixtures, and small tungsten fixtures.  But David reminds us of something I talk with Aputure about often, the 10k problem. Making a big soft source out of LED's is easy.  Making a 20k point source is not.  There are several manufacturers working on the issue, but the technology does not exist yet.

The second thing is camera sensitivity.  A lot of lower budget shows, even shooting on the Venice, choose to shoot at 4000 iso.  I cannot tell you the number of problems this creates for the gaffer.  I constantly ask DP's not to do this.  On set yesterday, I had 4 litemats, a few tubes, a few other fixtures, and nothing was above 8% on the dial.  The levels were so low the actors were complaining they couldn't see where they were going.  On camera, it looked like bright daytime.  I asked the DP if they wanted to raise the level in the room, and close down a stop for the sake of talent, and was denied.  I am 100% sure closing down from 1.8 would have made no difference in the quality of this film.  I had enough light in the room to raise the whole thing 2 stops, but that's the way young DP's have been cultured to shoot. 

Suddenly, tiny sources contaminate the scene, and I have to cover status LED's on control panels!  800iso is fine, but I feel we really need to get away from pushing camera technology in this particular direction.  If we shoot everything at 10,000 iso, we won't need to solve the 10k problem.....

Food for thought, and just my opinion.

  • Like 3
  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

If they are just shooting at ISO 4000 for the look, not to balance with a dim background, then why not put an ND on the camera, like an ND6 and get back to ISO 1000? Even at ISO 800, I often am using a Litemat 8 at 10% indoors at night, which is a problem because you cannot do a smooth dimmer adjustment on-camera at those low levels, a single point drop or rise is a visible pop, unlike if using the light at 50% or higher.  Sometimes for that reason I have to put ND gels on the Litemats.

 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

I think this particular DP was scared there wasn't enough level. I lit the background outside windows with several LED lamps through VS Cyan at 20% intensity.  There was plenty of room to go up.  I am not really sure why that choice was made, but we dealt with it as usual.  As far as I recall, all of the daytime EXT was shot at 800 with internal ND's as needed, and a pretty healthy stop.  I didn't add anything except a bounce for closeup work.

Yes I always carry ND for those times we need to dim from "0%".  

This is something I run into more often with inexperienced DP's.  High iso shooting means they don't need so much level in the room, but it causes more problems than it solves, in my opinion.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't work in the rarefied circles that most of the other respondants here do so I have little to no experience with high dollar fixtures.  But I ponied up for some LED fixtures during the past couple of years.  The lower power draw is the biggest plus for me.  I generally don't have to worry about tripping breakers.  Modifiers that don't have to have high levels of heat resistance are cheaper too and I can easily use the same soft boxes etc for still photography.  

However, on a recent job, I started setting up my lights and one of them just shut down.  Less than a year old (but fortunately still under warranty).  Turned out to be an overheating issue now known to be common to that fixture. What saved the day?  The Arri 650 I brought as a back up.  I wound up using a Tota as well.  

The LEDs kind of make me nervous now.  I don't really expect them to last more than a few years.  My Arris are probably 20 years old.  Tungstens have their drawbacks but they basically just work and they're simplier to diagnose and repair if there is an issue.  

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, Stewart McLain said:

The lower power draw is the biggest plus for me.  I generally don't have to worry about tripping breakers.

Always useful but less of an issue outside the US (OP is in the UK) as we have 230V. You can easily run two blondes and a set of redheads off a modern domestic ring main.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

I shot some stuff last week which was pretty dingy, working at around f/4 on an 800 ISO camera. I could have gone to 400 and opened up for lower noise, but I was pulling focus myself and even then it was restricting the amount I could really follow people around without it all going soft, and that leads to a rather student film look in which nobody ever walks anywhere during a shot. I'd much rather have had another two stops of light. It was an area about twenty by forty feet with a big greenish night-time backlight on it, keyed with a simple pop up softbox on a stand (which should really have been overhead, but I didn't have the rigging facilities to do it). Both lights were 600W LEDs and could easily have been twice or four times that. I'd have happily put a 2.5K HMI in the background, at least, as the key was deliberately rather underexposed. The problem with doing that would have been that we just didn't have the power for it, or at least it would have been a case of running cables all over the (quite large) location in order to keep things on different breakers.

In short it wasn't as dim as some of the horror stories here, but it wasn't that bright. 1200 total watts of LED sounds like at least a moderate amount, but it wasn't all at full power and putting in colours robs it is of energy.

In short, I'd have loved to have another two stops of light, camera sensitivity, or some combination of the two.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 hours ago, Mark Dunn said:

Always useful but less of an issue outside the US (OP is in the UK) as we have 230V. You can easily run two blondes and a set of redheads off a modern domestic ring main.

Really? I always understood one blonde and a redhead to be effectively the maximum on one ring main. 3K in other words. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Patrick Baldwin said:

Really? I always understood one blonde and a redhead to be effectively the maximum on one ring main. 3K in other words. 

Off a single wall outlet, yes, but our 1991 ring main has 32A breakers, so 7kW. Minimum for an individual leg is supposed to be 20A. So you'd connect the others in a different room. If not, the breaker wouldn't trip, but you'd be over-running the room wiring a bit.

The 3kW limit is based on the highest rated plugtop fuse, 13A. Before circuit breakers you wouldn't test the house fuses with anything more. So in a house without a modern consumer unit, definitely 3kW.

I am not an electrician and I am talking about non-US 230V mains.

Edited by Mark Dunn
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

I dont know how things are going in terms of "green producing" overseas, but here in Germany and Austria it has become such an important part of the entire filmmaking process that I feel the days of using tungsten on narrative features are kind of numbered. Here, almost all features are state funded, so they want the money spend in a resource responsible way. Sure it pains my heart, as an M40 does something entirely different then a T12 (aside from the obvious fresnel par difference). As there even is special funding to receive for fullfilling certain green producing criteria, a local rental has let me know that during the most recent talks with the national funding agency the idea to ban all tungsten entirely for all state funded movies was discussed in the room, but ultimately stopped (for now).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The funny thing is: When using electricity generated by wind/water/solar power, then Tungsten/incandescent lights are more friendly to the environment! (That’s because you don’t have to throw away the old devices and new LED lights don’t have to be produced.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

Love tungsten still. And on a few projects each year, where it fits, I try to use only tungsten lights, to stay sharp in the discipline. But admittedly, it is very hard sometimes to forego a SkyPanel or the mega-useful Astera tubes etc. 

My six favorite tungsten lights are, in no particular order:

1. Rifa 88. They keep telling me that a SkyPanel in a Chimera does the same thing, but it just doesn't...

2. Covered Wagons. If you have to do soft under lights and soft stuff from below/ground level, nothing even comes close. It's just an amazing look.

3. Maxi Brutes. Yes, the shadow pattern can be a little distracting, but nothing comes close to achieving the same "parallelleness". Single heads never replicate the sun in the same way as a broad multi source. Just used one the other month in Chicago, actually.

4. Molebeam. Extremely useful at times for those parallell beams that need to cut through a frame.

5. Mole "Big Eye" 10K. With its oversized fresnel lens, this is a lovely beauty light. Used to hang it right above lens, swap the bulb out for a 2K or a 5K globe, dim it slightly. Used it on tons of cosmetic commercials and music videos.

6. Mole Zip soft lights. My favorite is the 2K, but also the 4K. They're just delicious when dimmed down slightly, and so quick to use. Somehow the hood makes them spread less, without feeling "egg crated" like the SkyPanels do when you try to contain them.

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Adam, those are all valid lighting points but the question really is, as Alex mentioned, will going "green" eliminate Tungsten?
 

No one is discussing getting rid of a light because LED is "better"

It seems as though germany is certainly is looking to eliminate power hungry Tungstens. It certainly is an interesting future.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm thinking LED's will be the future. CA has already banned small gas generators at some date. CA is the model for all of America. I don't know if production crews will get a pass with gas gens. But if you have to use a battery generator on set (aka a bank of batteries) then LED's will draw less power on the batteries. 

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...