Mark Kenfield

Ouch. Ouch, ouch and ouch. And here I was thinking the price gouging down here in Australia had improved somewhat in the past year or so. For reference, retail on a single 4' 4-bank Kino kit down here is $2,739 AUD, add 3200k and 5600k tubes (with two spares of each) and that adds another $594 AUD to the price, making it $3,333 for a single working fixture. The Area 48 by comparison, works out to $2,910 AUD with both 3200k and 5600k panels (or $3,170 once you add the battery plate as well). So clearly international waters muddy the price comparison considerably. Certainly, if I could get the Kinos for that sort of price down here I couldn't justify the Area 48 (and would happily take 2 Kinos fixtures for the price of a single remote phosphor unit) but unfortunately that's not the situation down here, so I'm not sure where that leaves me (other than screwed over on prices, or forced to buy Kino-knockoffs that many clients don't take seriously).

Guy, no one's disputing the superior colour rendering of tungsten, or the versatility that a fresnel offers. But tungsten has its own limitations (there's a reason HMI and flourescent fixtures have become industry standards). But I think it's safe to say that no one is thinking of remote phosphor units as a replacement to tungsten fresnels - they're an alternative to kino-style flourescent light banks. And offer some compelling advantages for a roughly equivalent price per lumen. An Area 48 offers equivalent output to a Kino 4' 4-bank, and purchased with just 3200k and 5600k panel and a battery plate works out to basically the same price as the Kino plus 3200k and 5600k tubes (or a few hundred more when compared to a Diva 400 plus tubes). So I'm not sure the price argument holds all that much water when comparing the remote phosphor units to 'equivalent' fixtures. And the simple fact that, as Matthew says, you can throw a battery on them and run around - opens up options that simply didn't exist before.

The ceiling looks nice and white and reflective. You can probably improve things a lot by just switching off the overheads and firing a bunch of blondes or HMIs up into the ceiling for general illumination, then perhaps some extra lights bounced of umbrellas or through softboxes on one side of the court to give the players an edge light and pull them out a little.

Cheers Guy, would it right to assume that the impact of CC filters passing through surfeits or deficits of particular colours is minimised by using lower density filters (1/8, 1/4) as apposed to higher density ones (1/2, full)? It seems like the remote phosphor units must offer some advantage here by allowing you to simply switch out the phosphor panel to a colour temperature closer to what you need (thereby minimising the need for high-density correction filters. There also doesn't appear to be any noticeable green spike to contend with in the first place (which certainly helps). I've seen interviews with both Cineo Lighting and BBS where they have explained how removing the phosphor from the diodes (and manufacturing it in much larger sheets) allows for significantly improved abilities to compensate and correct for the spectral weaknesses inherent to LED, which I'm sure must play a part in all this. I'm waiting to hear back from BBS about the TLCI rating they received for the Area 48 fixture, but Cineo have published the results they got for their remote phosphor units, and they secured a TLCI rating of 98, which apparently matches HMI and surpasses fluorescents: http://www.sourceshop.com/downloads/CineoTest2013.pdf So both by eye, and by technical reports - I think it's safe to say that remote phosphor really is breaking new ground for LED lighting. These things really are on another level to the LEDs we're used to.

Good point. In the 'Info' section of the the 'Inspector' panel in FCPX there's a little drop-down menu box at the bottom. By default it sits on 'General View'. Click 'General View' and change the selection to 'Settings View'. This brings up a 'Log Processing' checkbox, which you can then simply de-select if you want to work without a rec709 LUT applied to your footage. This is explained in Apple's user manual, but it's explained really badly - so try as I might, I couldn't find the 'Settings View' option until Oliver helped out. Hope this helps.

Have to say it - I can't even find the words to express how happy this sentence makes me. It's not something I'd ever have imagined hearing just 5 years ago!

Let us know how you go with it Travis. I think the Dana Dolly has a tonne of appeal as a quick-setup, longer track run alternative to a slider. Though of course you can never operate a slider move as precisely as you can a ride-on dolly move, so it's a win-some-lose some affair.

Yeah, I just pull out the jib and whack a wide-angle lens on for these sorts of shots. Also allows you to very easily do a gentle 'push in' towards the subject, and the setup time is only 5 minutes.

The Arris are actually cheaper than the Ianiros (and you won't get me within 20 paces of the Chinese knockoffs - I've seen two of them explode so far), and at any rate - the last couple of gaffers I've worked with have both had Blondies that were 15-20 years old. What's $100-$200 extra for a light that you'll be carting around for the next 20 years? Might as well get one with the benefits of the heat-proof handles and the much nicer beam of the arrimax reflectors. I don't mind paying a little extra for features that make my life easier (and burn fewer besties hands/wrists). Haha, I feel like you finally 'get' me Andrew! :D I was doing electrics on a VCA short a month or so ago, and we had a 2nd storey bedroom that needed bright blown out sunlight coming through the window to create a silhouette on the actors sitting on the bed - problem was, the day was dark and overcast and the window was too high for the windup stand holding our HMI. In the end I had to awkwardly rig up some ultrabounce on a diagonal from the awnings of the window and we fired the HMI into the ultrabounce from down low. But it wasn't a pretty or easy solution, and we lost a lot of lumens in beam spill that fell outside of the ultrabounce - if I'd had the Dedo with a couple of my rigid reflector frames the whole thing could have been a much easier 10 minute setup, rather than taking half an hour of faffing around hanging out 2nd storey windows. (... and good lord I want a couple of those M18s!) Cheers Phil, I've heard a bit about TLCI but haven't investigated it yet (since no manufacturers seem to go to much effort to publish it). I'll have to look into it further.

Cheers Jax, that's a good price on the Arri from Videocraft, I haven't seen them that cheap anywhere else. That said, I'm a pretty handy swindler ;) so I'm still looking at a fair bit less than twice the price of the Arri. I think I'm pretty set on getting the Dedos I originally listed, however I agree with the various suggestions people have made in this thread about having a higher number of fixtures and having some fixtures with broader beam spreads, so I'll definitely have to pony up the extra for a couple of other units. The new Arri Plus open-face lights are really nice (for blondes/redheads), but I'll have to figure out whether I get a couple of those, or whether I opt for some fresnels instead.

Thanks David, I'll definitely try pulling apart the next 4' Kino I get my hands on. That would be really handy. I've actually got two bi-color 1x1 panels already, and being battery operable they're incredibly useful for some things - but those things all involve lighting up sections of background and keeping them as far away from the talent or important parts of the frame as possible - because the color and light quality is horrible. Hi Guy, your articles on the spectral qualities of different light sources have been a huge help in my understanding of how different fixtures render colours and how and why some do well, where others fall flat. I'll certainly have to run some tests comparing the remote phosphor units to tungsten when looking specifically at reds, oranges and pinks. But I put the Area 48 to work the day after I got it on a corporate talking heads shoot, and couldn't see any real weaknesses in rendering skin tones. It handled a range of skin tones from quite pale white skin, through to deeply olive mediterranean skin beautifully, it's in a whole other ballpark to the colour rendering of any other LEDs I've used previously, and certainly seems an easy match colour and quality-wise for a good batch of fluoro tubes in a Kino fixture. Obviously full-spectrum sources would always be preferable (and I think plasma is going to be the really interesting technology to watch on that front), but if there are any serious or worrisome weaknesses in these remote phosphor units - I'm struggling to see them personally (and I'm one of those gits who has to throw a +/- green up on any fixture that's not quite right).

Thanks Jax, Down here it's actually only 28% more for me to purchase a Dedo 650w over an Arri 650w, so the premium for the extra control the Dedo offers isn't too bad really - if it were a case of 2-3 Arris for the price of one Dedo, then the Dedos would probably have never even entered the discussion. My plan with the Area 48s is to simply call them 'Remote Phosphor' lights and gush about what they do without mentioning the 'LED' part of things - should give me just enough leeway to show people just how nice the light quality is before the LED stigma can kick in :p The Hive Plasma lights sound terrific, I'm really excited for plasma lighting - though the price/output ratio is too steep for me at the moment. David, I've heard several people talk about pulling kino tubes out of the fixtures and mounting them in all sorts of interesting places, but I've never seen a kino with enough spare wiring to pull the bulb more than a foot or so from the fixture itself. How do you actually wire the light to get that flexibility of positioning?

That's precisely why you should look into the remote phosphor units. I can't stand regular LEDs either - the multipoint sources look nothing like anything you find in nature or civilisation, which is why they look so 'wrong'. With remote phosphor the phosphor that was previously placed inside each individual diode (to turn their natively blue light white) is instead placed as a large single sheet in front of the led array, the uncorrected diodes then shine in to the phosphor panel and excite the material which then radiates the light outwards. So the panels you see on remote phosphor units aren't diffusion sheets - they're the actual light source - so instead of having a multipoint source, you're getting a large A4-sized single source. The light quality is beautiful and you have zero issues with multiple shadows, because it's a single source unit. You also maintain all the great benefits of regular LED panels, in that you can run them off batteries, and fit them into tight spaces.

I disagree. Colour always matters.

Cheers Adrian, those are very much my concerns. Though given the propensity for most DPs I know to work with bounced light, I think I could win them over pretty quickly to how this kit would allow them to achieve that - I'm just very conscious of how expensive a gamble that could turn out to be! I'll definitely be taking the DPs I know out for a beer to have a chat about it, and asking them whether or not (and why) they would or wouldn't be interested in using such a kit for small jobs. On the not liking liking Kinos or LEDs, I'd strongly suggest you take a look at some Remote Phosphor LED lights - the colour rendering (particularly for tungsten) is perfect, I've been blown away by it. You can mix it with actual tungsten/halogen units seamlessly. And the spill is much more easily controlled than fluoro units.

Such a tough question! I could never narrow it down to one, but Dean Semler, Denis Lenoir and Claudio Miranda would all be at the top of my list.

Also very good points. I'm going to take my 1.2k PAR in to compare it side-by-side with the Dedo for output, beam flexibility etc. (I'm worried that you're spot on about the "awesome, just you wouldn't buy it first" point) so I'll have to make the decision whether having that more specific tool is worth it, over adding a 2nd conventional HMI PAR to the kit, and the benefits that would provide. As for saving time packing and unpacking. That's just for me. If it saves me 20-30 minutes at the start and end of the day (which I'm quite certain the setup I have in mind will) - then that's money in the bank as far as I'm concerned. I'm still pretty young, and I've got a few years to go before I hit 30. So my goal with figuring out the package I should go with (and how I'll fit it all into the ute) is all about setting myself up for the next 15-20 years. I very much see this as a long-term investment, which is why I'm looking at fancier gear that sits on the more expensive end of things. I want gear that will last, and a setup that will make my life easier each and every time I use it. (so I really appreciate you allowing me to bounce the ideas off you Andrew!)

I'm sorry Maxim, but that's ridiculous. The Producer is the single most important person on ANY production. They pull everything together, they're the ones that make things happen, and NOTHING happens without the. Directors, Cinematographers, cast and crew etc. they just shoot the thing... and none of them would be there to shoot anything if it weren't for the Producers.

All good points Andrew. The Area 48 is so much smaller than the 4' 4-bank that I agree it's rather a different beast. I think the more apt comparison is a Diva 400 (just with added output, superior control when you add the softbox, and perfect dimming with no colour shift). I suppose it seems like I have an aversion to tungsten fresnels, and I think that's because in the last two years of shooting, I don't think I've ever once used a fresnel directly on talent (except as a back light - and most times that I have used a fresnel as a backlight, I've wished I had the beam and control of a Dedo that could do a better job of it). So when I do use fresnels, they're always bounced off an umbrella or reflector (I prefer bounced light to firing directly through diffusion, so I'm not a big fan of softboxes generally), and most of the time, I'd rather have the higher output of an open-face unit to do the same thing. The Dedo 650w units can be bulbed down to 300w very quickly and easily, so that is a nice option to have. The 1.2k Dedo is obviously quite unlike any fixture commonly used (except perhaps a Jo-Leko conversion of a Joker Bug HMI), but I can see a lot of uses for it personally. It's a level of output and beam control that no one is really used to having, so I think it opens up some options that wouldn't otherwise exist (like creating a toasty backlight outdoors on an overcast day, with only mains power). I couldn't agree more about efficiency coming from easy access to the gear - so I have a pretty ambitious sliding shelving solution planned out for the ute, which should make loading, unloading and transporting the gear to and from set about as easy as possible. It won't be cheap, but the time saved in packing and unpacking will almost certainly pay for the whole thing within a year. The more I think about, the more I think you're right on me needing some fixtures with a wider beam spread. So perhaps if I added 2x Arrilite 2000+ and 2x Arrilite 750+ units? (i.e. 2x Redheads and 2x Blondes). It'd probably start making things tight for space in the ute, but they would open up some other options (and perhaps reassure people not used to working with the other fixtures).

No need to apologise Andrew! This is precisely the sort of feedback I was wanting to hear, I appreciate it - I know why "I" want this particular setup, getting my head around what other's hesitations towards it might be is the whole reason for posting this thread. The Area 48 certainly isn't cheap. But at the same time it's pretty much the same price as a Kino 4' 4-bank (and actually cheaper once you add sets of daylight and tungsten tubes, along with a few spares, to the Kino). So it's basically the same outlay for the same output (albeit from a much physically smaller source). But at least your not paying a premium for the output (beyond the premium you'd usually pay for Kinos at least). And I couldn't agree more with you on versatility and control - those are my primary reasons for wanting these Dedo units in the first place (they also have the added benefit of vastly longer bulb life compared to conventional tungsten fixtures, so that certainly does help amortise the higher initial purchase price over the long run. I'll definitely run the idea for the kit past some other local DPs and see what they think. We are at the end of the world down here, so sadly very few people locally are up to date with the latest in lighting tech (and the benefits that the good new fixtures can offer). Which is a large part of my concern - I think there's basically two possible outcomes - people will either embrace it as a different, more efficient approach to lighting, or shun it completely in favour of the tried and true systems they know, and I suspect it will probably be one or the other.

"Tungsten equivalent", I'm just talking about total light output. For vague-math's sake, a 1.2k HMI gives you roughly equivalent to 4800w of tungsten, and the 150w HMIs are roughly equivalent to 650w tungsten fresnels. So when you add two of each of those to the four tungsten Dedo fixtures, you've got roughly the equivalent of 12,000w of tungsten (in terms of total output, colour temperature's a separate matter obviously). And the Area 48 lights (according to photometrics) each output a little bit more light than a 4' 4-bank Kino. And there would be two of those as well. So in terms of total lumens we're talking about roughly the same amount of output anyway - for a small lighting package. Which (as I mentioned in the OP) is what this kit would be - because I don't have the physical space to transport much more (or the larger-scale gigs to justify a larger package). So I suppose what I'm trying to say is that this theoretical package would have a similar level of output to most standard small packages (like the two you've just described), just with different fixtures to the norm - which is what I'm wondering about - whether having those same basic lumens in a different form would put people off?

What kind of talking head TVCs are you shooting that demand more output than the equivalent of 12,500w of tungsten hard lights and 3 4-bank kinos? And what sort of lighting package would you take to such a shoot as standard?

No the Dedo 1.2k is very much real, seen it and played with it in person - though I get the feeling there's hardly any of them out there - I've spent a lot of time trying to find info on it, and seemingly no one on the internet has ever written about them (outside of Dedo's own brochures). It's quite something to behold - the precision of the Dedo lenses with the sheer output of a 1.2k bulb (well technically I think it's an 800w bulb that you can run at either 800w or 1200w - just like the Dedo 400w HMIs can be boosted to 575w via the ballast). For lighting through windows, fighting daylight or creating window-blind or leaf-shadow effects I think it'll be tremendous. The control you have (relative to even the most spotty PAR lenses) is really impressive. I think it's a lot like the 650w Dedos in many ways, a lot of people don't know they exist because they're only familiar with the little 150w units. This is part of my concern - would having units that no one is used to or has worked with before hinder my ability to get hired out with the package? I know what the lights will do, and have specific reasons for wanting them - but if no one writing the cheques wants them, they only really help me on my own projects.

Hi Guys, This is a bit of a long one I warn you, but I'd really appreciate any advice or suggestions people might have. I've reached a point in my career where I want to focus more purely on lighting and camera, and move away from the various ancillary creative freelancing jobs that have (till now) supplemented my film work. I'm pretty good at what I do now (and perhaps more importantly - I'm good enough) so I want to put together a small lighting and grip package that will allow me to gaffer on projects when I'm not shooting others (and basically just spend more time on sets). Now I am limited by the amount of space I have in the back of my ute (that's a "pickup truck" to my international friends!), but the following package is something I can get away with once I install some custom shelving. In terms of the lighting package my primary goals are speed, precision and control. Any time I can save setting up additional flags/cutters, means more time spent on takes (where it belongs), it's also more efficient - and I like that. Which is why I'm thinking I'd prefer these particular fixtures. The Dedo units offer more control than anything shy of a Leko, so it's easier to get the effects you want with them (having larger 650w units, and a daylight balanced 1.2k HMI version simply extends the scale of what I can do with them - relative to the standard 150w Dedos). I just picked up my first Area 48 Remote Phosphor softlight yesterday after comparing it directly to a Kino Flo Diva 400 (the standard softlight that I'm most confident and familiar with using) and it beats both the light output and colour accuracy of the fluoro unit by a considerable margin (by eye, I'd guess it's got about 1/2-stop more output), and the Area 48 offers the added benefits of being battery operable, lightning fast to switch from daylight to tungsten, and has no colour shift as you dim the unit (so your not having to add +green gels like you often do when you dim a Diva with tungsten tubes - so there's time saved there as well). Now obviously this kit is a fair bit different from the standard small lighting package you get these days - which seem to generally consist of a couple of HMIs, Blondies, Redheads, Tungsten Fresnels, Kino Softlights & a couple of 150w Dedolights. So what I'm most interested to hear, is whether people would actually want to bring in a gaffer with a package like this? I feel pretty confident that I could light everything that I'm used to lighting with a conventional small package, faster and more precisely with this package - but that's irrelevant obviously, if no one wants to hire me with a package they're not familiar with. So what do think guys, is this a solid package? Would you want to work with it? And if not, what would you want to be different and why? This is going to be a substantial investment for me obviously, so any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated! Cheers, Mark (items in bold are the things I don't own yet) Lights: 1x 1.2k HMI PAR 1x 1.2k HMI Dedolight 2x 150w HMI Fresnels (capable of 5600k and 3200k, 650w tungsten equivalents) 2x 650w Halogen Dedolights + dimmers 2x 150w Halogen Dedolights 2x Area 48 Remote Phosphor Softlights (capable of 5600k and 3200k - they're Kino Diva 400 alternatives) 3x Z96 Small LED Panels Grip: 5x 40" C-stands + Grip Heads + Grip Arms 6x standard light stands of various sizes 2x 4'x4' Floppies + assorted blacks 2x Gel/Diffusion Kits 4x Umbrellas (white, gold, silver) 1x 2'x3' Digital Juice Flag Kit (nets, silks, black block etc) 1x 6'x6' Overhead Butterfly (with silk, and ultrabounce) 3x 4'x4' Diffusion Frames (216, 250, 251) 3x Scissor Clamps (for ceiling frames) 2x 2'x3' 4-in-1 Reflector Frames 3x Cardellini Clamps 6x Super Clamps 2x Magic Arms 10x Shotbags Power: 1x 3.5kw Portable Generator

Hi guys, I'd be keen to hear any feedback or suggestions people might have on the new reel I've cut. It's a bit different from most of the cinematography showreels I've seen because it shows sequences rather than montage, so I'm wondering whether people think it works, or whether I'd do better to have a montaged reel that shows shots from a broader range of projects? I figure that for narrative work, the more important aspect is to show that you can shoot cohesive scenes, but it does play very differently to a montage cut to music so I'm a little unsure whether it's a good idea or not. https://vimeo.com/77570224 Password: showreel Any thoughts or suggestions on the cut would be much appreciated. Cheers