aapo lettinen

making new electronics for a camera is not an issue at all.... IF the research and development of those new electronics is paid for up front to cover the costs. The issue here is that there is no dozens or hundreds of cameras to repair at the same time just waiting for the update to come out and thus the first customer(s) would need to pay for the whole r&d and testing of the new replacement electronics which makes the product pretty expensive for the first customers and leads them back down from the project making it impossible to develop the replacement electronics in the first place. That is an issue for sure. You don't have enough backers so you don't have any choice but to raise the price to cover the costs which repels the rest of the potential customers and the couple of real customers too who would have actually paid something for the product. And that makes the product "impossible" to make because you can't get any money from anywhere to make it happen. Another thing is that one must be able to repair the mechanics of the camera at the same time when installing the new electronics. That does not sound much but it is actually a HUGE issue with cameras which have built in electronic boards requiring disassembling the whole camera to get the old boards out and new boards in. This limits the electronics update installation to only the service shops which provide mechanical service for the same camera models and that is very very difficult to arrange. It is easy to arrange EITHER a mechanical CLA for the camera body OR the electronics update for it but NOT both at the same time. Ordering the from two different places makes it too expensive and difficult to arrange which again repels potential customers. Securing RELIABLE financial backing for a film camera accessory project is much more difficult than actually making the product. This is what ruins the perfectly good ideas and innovations the end users ask for. I for example have a huge box full of circuit boards I have designed and assembled for dozens of different film camera projects but because of the lack of financial backing I had to adandon them. It makes me sad to look at that box, maybe should take it to the garage or basement and try to forget that it exists 😞 For example I just had to delay the CP16R crystal sync update for a year because running out of money and it is uncertain if it ever gets finished even when I already have the circuit boards ready and most of the other stuff too. I love designing stuff but getting money back from it to cover even the basic material costs is devastatingly difficult and easily ends up having even the almost finished projects to be cancelled due to running out of budget

Thanks! 🙂 It looks like that I need to collect more resources to be able to finish the CP16R controller. I have all the circuit boards ready now and most of the software too, but finishing the parts to be installed inside the CP16R camera body and making the new back panel for it requires more money and time. Testing would need some resources too as well as finishing the front panel of the controller. So the project will be delayed until I will be able to collect more money to finish it. Probably will take less than a year or if lucky, about half a year if it goes well, making it available in Spring 2023 earliest. I already have the circuit boards and most of the software ready so completing it will be pretty quick when being able to find the rest of the money for finishing and testing. I will let you know how it goes 🙂

Yes it does not encourage designing anything new if even the r&d cannot be paid for and it is very uncertain if you can sell even a single product if you make it available. Well, probably selling one unit is not that much of an issue but selling two or more may be outright impossible even if the product is very good and pretty affordable. One business model could be, though, to sell 3D printed prototype mockups instead of the real cameras. That can be made for cheap and it is marginally possible to collect enough resources from selling mockups to make the real product sometime later! I think Logmar should try that approach. Print some hundreds of cool loking mockups, paint them to look really neat and sell them for reasonable price to collectors! Then if you get enough money out of it you may be able to make some dozens of pieces of the real product 🙂

The issue with real film based gear nowadays is pretty much just that... You can collect enough resources to actually manufacture the final products but the design work and rd has to be always done for free. Which essentially makes the companies kind of charity operations instead of "real businesses". They just want to help the community the best they can but it makes it really hard if even the materials and outsourced assembling cannot be reliably compensated for. I think the customer base fails to see the situation and thus makes it pretty impossible to launch anything new for film originating workflows even when there is lots of empty talk that something "would sell a fortune if it just were available"

yes the camera body has a standard arri bayonet mount and works without the lens blimp if needed. the lens blimp is usually mounted using the much larger outer special bayonet lock... just like a lens mount but much much larger. it makes it easy to take off the blimp when needed though one needs to be careful with the tabs which connect the taking lens to the blimp's focus-iris (-zoom) controls. have shot couple of times with the 16bl years ago, it had the kit angenieux zoom with blimp and it was easiest to remove the blimp and the lens together as a one unit when needed to take the lens off. The blimp's bayonet mount made it very easy. Probably different with primes

Windup has a relatively predictable way it slows down during the take and one can thus add a dynamic speed charge in edit to try to counter the spring motor slowing down. But it lowers down the image quality and the short max take length makes syncing more difficult because you dont have much time to get the slates done let alone the actual take. A 25 second take which has to include one or two slates is ridiculously short for a sync sound take and makes it difficult to act too. It would be much better to have a old eclair or cinema products camera for the sync scenes to get stabler speed and longer takes for sync shots. Then the mos stuff can be shot with k3 if that is easiest way to work. Saying, all stuff which is possible to do is not practical in real world situations and k3 for sound shots is one of those things

It is possible to try to correct some of the speed instability problems in editing to make the end result somewhat watchable but it does not make much sense if it is not a youtube challenge or something instead of a real project. I recommend trying the approach of shooting some scenes mos using the k3 to save money and then renting a blimped crystal sync camera for the sound scenes. The camera noise of the k3 can be a little bit blimped but the spring mechanism instability and the short maximum take lenghts of the spring are a real pita if trying to do any kind of sound work. You should get a basic sound capable N16 camera with lens or two for something like 2k if you can cut corners. If you really want to do sound stuff this would be the bare minimum to do that. A spring camera can be fun to make experiments with with sound but it does not work well in real shooting situations and is thus a very bad option. Spring cameras are great for mos scenes and I would use them for that instead

I would probably stick with the FX6 for a while until you can do a bigger step up than fx9 /c300III / Komodo and can update to the next price range / budget level. It might not be big enough leap forward if you just update within the similar price range than your current camera body already is. I would get a good quality and silent external raw recorder for your FX6 though if you already don't have one. This way you can get the most out of the camera if needed and it is a selling point if the customers ask for raw. Costs lots less than a whole new camera body too (from 1k to 2k compared to from 6k to 10k) so that you can save on the bigger camera body update til something excellent comes available (probably in the price range of from 15k upwards I think) OR just use the difference on g&e and lenses if that seems more practical 🙂

Ok then it would be even more practical to have lots of different type of lights. the way I use rgbww lights is to add accents to background or closeups and thus they don't need to be high powered or even if they need to be, one can usually manage with only one higher powered one and the rest of them can be smaller. One generally needs the highest power at 4700K to 6000K colour temperature range on "normal lighting setups" and because high powered leds tend to always be expensive I would try to get one of the highest power daylight-only ones you can afford with the budget which would probably be 300w daylight cob led with softbox and high efficiency reflector options so that you can get the highest light output with the budget available. Low colour temperatures can often be managed with tungsten lights and it might be useful to add a used 300w tungsten fresnel or two to your kit (perfect for small bounces or direct light) just to get more tungsten options which allows you save the leds on uses where you really need them like the foreground or overheads. Semi soft top light is often time consuming to make with tungsten etc. traditional units and it is a perfect application for led mats (very easy to rig for them being lightweight and flat and the light already coming from relatively large surface so you don't need as much height to make it soft as with pointy sources like tungsten units) . So I would add some kind of led mat to your kit, even if it being the cheapest one like Godox etc. Led tubes are kind of "semi-traditional" led units but they are handy because they are very fast to rig anywhere and they have built in batteries which last for hours. a 2ft led tube is my go-to light for making backlight for interview subjects and it is lightweight enough to handhold at the end of a microphone boompole if you need to make a very quick backlight in a movie shoot and have absolutely no time to rig anything: just switch the led tube on, get the boompole into position and done! took 30 seconds instead of 10mins rigging something high up to get the same end result. (made the backlights for the actors for an entire feature film using this approach because we had very tight schedule. Worked pretty well and the 2ft tubes usually have battery duration of approx. 4 hours or so) . Definitely get one or two of the rgbww 2ft tubes at least 🙂 If you want to experiment with rgbww you can first purchase some of the approx. 10w really small ones with built in battery like the Aputure MC and do tests with it to evaluate how much you would actually need the colours in real life. This very small led unit will become handy every now and then when you quickly want to add an accent to something in the shot and the low powered light is just enough for the job. So I would maybe recommend something like this order: - small 10w rgbww light with internal battery like the Aputure MC or similar. a 1ft led tube would work too - one 2ft rgbww led tube. personally I use Cinetubes for interviews etc. as a low cost option but get ones available for you and affordable enough, preferable with a basic wireless controller which can at least adjust the output power. You will like this 2ft light so much that you will probably buy another later 🙂 - one about 150w to 300w cob daylight led with a basic bowens mount softbox (you may want to test it before purchase because the cooling fans may be noisy on some models and you can't evaluate the fan noise based on user reviews) . This is to get the maximum daylight output possible with a unit consuming way less power and being way lighter than traditional units - one of the "normal style" rgbww led panels if you feel you need it based on your tests on the small rgbww light and the 2ft led tubes. If you don't specifically need this type of panel style unit with rgbww, then I would leave it out of the list for now - the bi-colour led mat, either a 100w or 150w one. If you don't need the "normal led panel" then get this style of led mat instead! I would purchase the lights one at a time so that you can get used to the previous unit first and see what you can do with it. Then you will have a better idea what type of unit you will most urgently need next. As said the Leds are most useful if used on battery power or if the light needs to move fast. For semi-permanent rigging like when lighting the backgrounds you can often manage with traditional units like tungsten fresnels just fine. It is the foreground where the units need to be most versatile and there the leds are often most useful especially if used on battery power, whereas you may not even need led for the backgrounds most of the time if the background lights move once twice during the whole shooting day for example (ANY unit can move once or twice a day, you don't need to have Led for that! even a old carbon arc light can do that)

Ok then it would be even more practical to have lots of different type of lights. the way I use rgbww lights is to add accents to background or closeups and thus they don't need to be high powered or even if they need to be, one can usually manage with only one higher powered one and the rest of them can be smaller. One generally needs the highest power at 4700K to 6000K colour temperature range and because high powered leds tend to always be expensive I would try to get one of the highest power daylight-only ones you can afford with the budget which would probably be 300w daylight cob led with softbox and high efficiency reflector options. Low colour temperatures you can often be managed with tungsten lights and it might be useful to add a used 300w tungsten fresnel or two to your kit (perfect for small bounces or direct light) . Semi soft top light is often time consuming to make with tungsten etc. traditional units and it is a perfect application for led mats (very easy to rig for them being lightweight and flat and the light already coming from relatively large surface so you don't need as much height to make it soft as with pointy sources like tungsten units) . So I would add some kind of led mat to your kit, even if it being the cheapest one like Godox etc. Led tubes are kind of "semi-traditional" led units but they are handy because they are very fast to rig anywhere and they have built in batteries which last for hours. a 2ft led tube is my go-to light for making backlight for interview subjects and it is lightweight enough to handhold at the end of a microphone boompole if you need to make a very quick backlight in a movie shoot and have absolutely no time to rig anything: just switch the led tube on, get the boompole into position and done! took 30 seconds instead of 10mins rigging something high up to get the same end result. (made the backlights for the actors for an entire feature film using this approach because we had very tight schedule. Worked pretty well and the 2ft tubes usually have battery duration of approx. 4 hours or so) . Definitely get one or two of the rgbww 2ft tubes at least 🙂 If you want to experiment with rgbww you can purchase some of the approx. 10w really small ones with built in battery like the Aputure MC and do tests with it to evaluate how much you would actually need the colours in real life. So I would maybe recommend something like this order: - small 10w rgbww light with internal battery like the Aputure MC or similar. a 1ft led tube would work too - one 2ft rgbww led tube. personally I use Cinetubes for interviews etc. as a low cost option but get ones available for you and affordable enough, preferable with a basic wireless controller which can at least adjust the output power - one about 150w to 300w cob daylight led with a basic bowens mount softbox (you may want to test it before purchase because the cooling fans may be noisy on some models and you can't evaluate the fan noise based on user reviews) . - one of the "normal style" rgbww led panels if you feel you need it based on your tests on the small rgbww light and the 2ft led tubes. If you don't specifically need this type of panel style unit with rgbww, then I would leave it out of the list for now - the bi-colour led mat, either a 100w or 150w one. If you don't need the "normal led panel" then get this style of led mat instead I would purchase the lights one at a time so that you can get used to the previous unit first and see what you can do with it. Then you will have a better idea what type of unit you will most urgently need next. As said the Leds are most useful if used on battery power or if the light needs to move fast and for semi-permanent rigging like when lighting the backgrounds you can often manage with traditional units like tungsten fresnels just fine. It is the foreground where the units need to be most versatile and there the leds are often most useful whereas you may not even need led for the backgrounds most of the time if the background lights more twice during the whole shooting day for example

Personally I would maybe have two cheaper daylight cob leds with bowens mount from 150 to 300w range and basic softboxes for them, one basic rgbw panel like those op linked and two higher power 2ft or 4ft rgbww led tubes. If you have some money left then a cheap 100w bicolor led mat. This is if the op does not need rgbw on the highest power lights but likes to use them for closeups every now and then. The tubes are great for making subtle backlights and for closeups and for faking practicals. The panels are by my opinion the least versatile units and best suited for close quarters battery powered operation when you dont have possibility to use cob leds for some reason. The main issue with panels being that they are relatively low power compared to surface area and semi soft light which cannot be made to look like a hard source. I actually prefer led mats over panels if rgb is not needed despite it takes a little longer to setup the led mat

Do you specifically need rgbw lights or would you manage with daylight balanced leds instead? Personally I try to always get different types of lighting fixtures with me when shooting something so that the kit is more versatile than if just having multiple similar fixtures and nothing more. You will get tons of more light output if the led light can be single colour balance and single colour which is why I asked. You can get from 2 to 4 times more light out of it with the same rated wattage if accepting single balance light depending on how the manufacturer rates it wattages

As for the potentially usable film material, I would build a smaller collection out of them which are of the shots and scenes worth being scanned in 4k later when you have time and resources. Collection mostly the material which you will know you will want to have a top quality scan made of afterwards and you are sure can be used for future projects. If there is mediocre material you don't want to invest on in the future ("regular shots" instead of "I will save money to get this scanned in best quality" material) it is pretty safe to assume that it can be scrapped. Though if you are still unsure if you dare to do it, just get the most affordable flat prores scan made out of it and THEN scrap it (then you can tell yourself that the material is saved in digital form and you will not need to have the physical version anymore laying around and taking storage space)

one method is setting up a large box where you can throw the stuff you know you will not want to have anymore. It is not a garbage bin but a box with "I am sure I will never need this anymore" items which will either be sold or scrapped. Then when you have this special box setup you can go through your stuff and whenever you see something you don't want to have or don't need anymore, just throw it to the box! It can be a camera or a filmcan or slides or just about anything. If it needs to go, then into the box it goes, no questions asked 😄 when the box is full you will check what's in it and evaluate which items will be sold and which will be scrapped immediately (do this next to a garbage bin so that you can immediately scrap the items which cannot be sold or given to others for free. For example you can scrap the film you don't need anymore but can keep the film cans if someone still needs them.

one common misconception is that film would havea "exact aspect ratio" mandated by the film format and that the ratio would be exactly the same independent of the camera and post pipeline used. In almost all cases one does not want the camera's gate mask edges to show in the final image because of the uneven edges and rounded corners, so one would at least crop the gate edges out of the final image. Additionally the camera's gate mask aspect ratio never is absolutely exactly the absolute aspect ratio it is marked for and some further adjustment is needed in post. Then the viewfinder framelines are different from the gate mask and one needs to decide if one follows the framelines or gate mask when doing composition adjustments in post. The framelines are not possible to follow at one pixel accuracy either so some kind of guessing and adjustment is needed in post either way. And one reason why one does not want to show the gate mask in the final movie is because the cuts would be then shown more clearly which disturbs the viewer. It is thus common to use a slightly larger mask in the camera gate than the final aspect ratio so that post cropping to the intended aspect ratio is easiest to do. This leads to one practically ALWAYS cropping the final image in post when shooting on film (even if doing photochemical release). Leading to the "absolute aspect ratio" of the film format being a matter of taste and cropping habit instead of being something "absolute" like one would expect with digital formats. 4k digital formats are usually not final aspect ratio either (for example 1.89 movies are rarely done but that is one of the common ratios to shoot a movie in camera and then it is cropped in post to something between 1.85 and 2.40 for final delivery)

4k in movie theaters is normally either 3996 or 4096 pixels wide. the 3996 is normally used for 1.85 , 2.0 and 2.35 aspect ratios by letterboxing and the 4096 used for 2.40 ratio. If one's aspect ratio is different than the native dcp aspect ratio then it is common to letterbox it to keep it fully compatible with the dcp standards. Like Tyler said the 3840 wide formats are not generally referred as "4K" but they are generally called "UltraHD" and only the 3996 and 4096 wide formats are normally called 4K. But a "4K scan" can be much wider than 4096 depending on the scanner's maximum resolution depending on how the scanning is most practical to do. It can be for example something between 4100 and 4600 pixels wide with some overscan area included which needs to be cropped in post to get the final image. The exact final resolution depends on how much you crop it, one can either crop the native final resolution (4096 or 3996 wide) or crop the exact composition wanted according to the framing chart shot in camera and then up/downscale a little to get to the dcp standard

I have one spare Kinor 16 motor which I don't need and I am building crystal sync electronics for my other motor in Autumn 2022 to use it for personal projects so I think I could easily modify the spare motor at the same time and sell it for someone who would need it. Is there anyone here still actively shooting with Kinor 16 cameras and who would like to purchase a custom made crystal sync motor for it? The price of the motor + the modification work is around 650usd + shipping. It is a 12-speed crystal sync modification with variable non-crystal speed knob for speed ramps. Does not have a display or other advanced features (adding a display would raise the price a lot so I think it would be more practical to not include any displays to keep the motor relatively affordable). I am removing the old electronics housing from the top of the motor and installing a black aluminium box in the place of it which houses the new electronics. The speed selector of the new motor can be either on the top of the motor or on the back or the right side of it. Please let me know before August 2022 if you are interested in this Kinor motor. I will need to know well beforehand modificating my own motor if anyone wants to buy this spare one so that I can modify them at the same time.

some low noise cameras (like astronomy cameras) use Peltier elements for cooling down sensors to low temperatures, don't know if Arri does this but it is possible (though using Peltiers consumes lots of power. "digital cinema camera" users are used to having huge power consumption though so if one could save on signal processing power needs there would be some power available to run cooling systems)

Hi you all! I made a crystal stabilized stroboscope light to easily test the accuracy of my cameras and for checking how well my different crystal sync designs work. To test how well the strobo light works in first real world situation, I tested it on my Aaton LTR7. The main reason for this was to determine if the camera has 24 or 25fps crystal speed because the crystal fps of it is not marked anywhere. From the previous owner's use I guessed it could be set to 25 and it definitely was 25fps accurately when I tested it. But when I tested the other fps's of the camera they were not very accurate at all, I did not measure the difference but the 12fps and 16fps presets were maybe close to half a fps overspeed. Is there only one crystal speed on the LTR's and all the other speeds are non-crystal RC oscillator generated with not very accurate results on them? From the strobo test it surely looked like they would be not crystal because they were so much off whereas the 25fps was very accurate like it should be. BTW if someone needs a crystal stabilized stroboscope light for testing movie cameras, I am manufacturing them and they are relatively affordable and very easy to use. Just DM me if needing one. The best method I found was to shine the strobo through the viewfinder optics and look how it reflects from the mirror: extremely easy to see if it hits the mirror at exact sync OR if it is off, how much off it is (calculating how many seconds it takes for the camera to overrun or underrun the strobo exactly one frame. you can even see if it is over or under speed by inspecting the apparent rotation direction of the shutter under the strobo light)

I stopped selling on eBay after they changed their seller policy so that I would have needed to send a full uncensored photo of my ID card or passport to them "to prove my identity so that I would be able to continue selling on their site" and they would have permanently stored the ID card /passport photo on their server somewhere, just waiting for someone to hack the server and sell the millions of ID card /passport photos to the highest bidding criminals. The criminals would of course at least cause a lot of financial damage to the original ID card owner if the data is stolen but they could even enable terrorist attacks in the worst case if wrong criminal organizations would get their hands on the stolen information. I don't see this kind of risk worth it considering how time consuming it is to try to sell stuff for profit on eBay in the first place and how difficult it is to get your money out even if you manage to sell something without getting scammed

additionally the Z6 had multiple dead pixels out of the box which had to be corrected by the manual "sensor cleaning" which has combined automatic bad pixel mapping function. It is just that when the camera heated up or I cranked the ISO up the mapped out bad pixels often started to show again and one needed to map them out again in the middle of the shoot. This is one of those annoyances which start to really bug the end users after a while. Though one of the worst features of the Z6 was that the video processing of it was not very sophisticated. It had pixel overflow/black hole sun correction added of course but the correction was not sophisticated enough like on real video capable cameras and thus the Z6 got confused if, for example, you had a sun behind a tree with the leaves and branches having a overexposed edge. the Z6 handled this kind of shooting situation by showing a black pixel overflow edge around EVERY branch and leaf making the image almost unusable and a very weird looking (the tree parts should only have had a white edge from the light but instead it was white-black-white edge which was just too weird to use in any kind of end product and is pretty impossible to correct in post ) so I just was not able to shoot this kind of images AT ALL. Pretty much every other camera can handle this type of shooting situation correctly but Nikon? not in your dreams... Nikons are perfectly good photo cameras but they are NOT suitable for video use, never were. The reason I purchased the Z6 back then was that there was no alternatives at the moment (the only alternative camera was Pocket4k but it was sold out back then and could not be obtained from everywhere before the start of the production. I had to have SOME camera to shoot with and I just ended up picking up the Z6 from the nearest photo store because it was a model capable of outputting 10bit via hdmi and was only such camera in the price range which was available without 6month wait) . It was not horrible to shoot with and one could often live with the bad dynamic range. But the last year I had it, I noticed I just did not want to shoot with it anymore because I pretty much hated the thing so much. I was so glad when I got rid of it and got even SOME money back from it so that I did not have to give it away for free. When you figure out you try to avoid shooting with a certain camera, almost hating it even, it is evident that it is worth nothing to you anymore and it is time to get rid of it as fast as you can when it (hopefully) still has some value so that you can maybe trade it for some other camera model which is actually useful for you

Falsified yes. The manufacturer claimed about 14 stops of dynamic range and the camera is incapable of doing even 10 in real life. The Z6 has some kind of hardware issue in the sensor which every now and then unexpectedly causes flashing in the green channel and which cannot be corrected via any kind of upgrades or firmware (one would need to change the entire sensor which would cost millions for Nikon and they are not going to do that). It is present in every video recording whether being internal h264, external 422 hdmi output or raw video from the hdmi. It is a real pain to try to correct the green flashing in post and it was more practical and less painful to sell the whole camera for loss and purchase another type of camera which is from the same about 2k price range with the kit lens but is 2 to 3 times better in every aspect (the Panasonic S5) and even uses cheaper memory cards (the Z6 uses really expensive cards especially considering that the internal recordings are of relatively poor quality so one does not even need a fast card for video, only for fast photo shooting) Nikon falsifies the video specs of the newer cameras too. the Z9 is claimed to have huge dynamic range but the real performance is relatively poor and not on par with any of the competitors in the nearly 7k price range ( I think it was claimed to have something like 15 stops and the real performance is somewhere around 12 stops which is the kind of performance acceptable for a 2k price range camera but NOT for a 7k one). It is just dishonest scamming of customers to claim your camera has 3 or 4 stops more dynamic range than it really has and they just keep doing it. Nikon cameras are not really suitable for video use, almost ANYTHING can be better, even the cheapest Z-cams have the dynamic range advertised and don't do green flashes all over the place

I don't have much live event experience, but here in the case of film & tv it is common to call sparks "lighting technicians" in end credits if the end credits are in English. Gaffers are called gaffers or in the case the end credits are in Finnish the gaffer can be called "Valaisija" which roughly translates to "Chief Lighting Designer" ... though "Gaffer" is almost exclusively used even in Finnish credits nowadays. The gaffers here contribute a little more to the lighting design than in the States depending on the set and dp+gaffer relationship so the gaffer position is not exactly the same here than it would be in the US, here it is pretty common for the DP concentrating on the storytelling more and giving the gaffer broader guidelines how the scene should look like and the gaffer can then decide by him/herself what exact units to use to create the requested mood for the scene (so they contribute a lot on the lighting design part as well and not just running the technical side of things)

the difference between a LED and a HMI in daylight use is that you buy the HMI light once and then it lasts for at least 20 or 30 years easily. If the HMI bulb ages you just change the bulb for 60 to 200usd and you are good to go for hundreds of more hours of shooting time. Same with tungsten: if the bulb goes bad you will just change the bulb and it costs 10 to 30usd. No need to buy a whole new light every 1000 burn hours or so. With LED you may burn it couple of thousand hours and then it may be visibly dimmer and so green that you start to despise the thing. You cannot just change the Led chips inside the unit so you will need to purchase a whole new light instead for full price and it may be very difficult to get rid of the old green one unless you practically give it away for free. It can become expensive if you whole lighting kit is led based and purchased at the same time (aging at the same time) so I would advice using a mix of led, hmi and tungsten instead, using leds only for stuff where their practical advantages outweight their lower power and limited lifespan and the possible much lower durability of led units in most cases (fragile connectors, more complicated electronics than on traditional lights, possibly worse quality cables, possibility to destroy leds if folding or transporting it the wrong way, possibly not sealed against moisture because that makes cooling problematic, etc) . Hmi's can be got very affordably when being used older models and especially if they have magnetic ballasts so you get lots of daylight output for the buck. Hmi is mostly practical from 1.2k upwards and lower power lights are more practical being Led. Leds are easy to battery power, lightweight and easy to rig and adjust and remote control but they are relatively expensive, fragile and have limited lifespan which makes them more expensive to use. Tungsten is cheap and durable but your colour temperature span is more limited and they waste tons of power and generate lots of heat which becomes problematic on indoor shoots and when power is limited (like it almost always is)

Yes led lights tend to turn dim and green when aging and even a 2 years old light can have issues depending on the type, usage and luck. So don't expect your very expensive led light to last 20 years... You can maybe manage with it for couple of years before it starts to age and then you start to hate the thing and it falls out of use even if you still keep it. That said, leds can be amazing for some stuff, especially if you need to run them on battery power and rig to weird places quickly. If purchasing leds I would concentrate on getting mid powered daylight stuff from about 150w to 600w range (led mats or cob) and the smaller internal battery led tubes (the 2ft tubes are a great balance between output, battery duration and size. 1ft is ok but the battery duration is short and I like to use other units instead the 1ft ones). If purchasing leds only purchase one piece of each type because versatility is the key advantage of them and you want different style of units in your kit. So maybe start with a 2ft led tube and then when having used it a bit figure out what you want to have next? The next one might be a daylight cob led from 150 to 600w depending on what you need. These two I know you will use all the time because them being very handy and you needing daylight all the time especially for having tungsten kit at the moment. The next might be a cheap-o flexible led mat, maybe from 100 to 150w or so. After these you may develop a need for bigger daylight units. That would still be used hmi nowadays. If needing bigger or more punchy tungsten one can try 2kw units and 1kw nsp or vnsp par cans.