Phil Rhodes

When you say ribbon lights, are you thinking of the 8-10mm wide flexible strip with LEDs on it? Assuming you are: If you want white, there are a few manufacturers who make high-CRI stuff. Literibbons are widely used but rather expensive. I have some Yuji LED stuff which performs very well in tests with a UPRTek CV600 colour meter, and looks nice on most of the cameras I've used it on. These types have reasonably consistent batch to batch colour and are available in specific colour temperatures. You can go even cheaper on eBay where there are listings for LED strip described simply as "cool white" or "warm white" with CRI above 90. Assuming the CRI claim is accurate, they should be vaguely reasonable. I haven't tried them. Below that there's the standard warm and cool white stuff. Stuff described as "warm white" tends to read rather greenish-yellow and unhealthy-looking on digital cameras in a way that probably isn't that useful. The cool white can look cold and cyanish in a way that recalls industrial lighting and might find application on a sci fi movie or in an industrial setting. The coloured stuff is potentially useful; I've made quick and dirty lights out of the green strip to illuminate greenscreens. There's a need for a bit of caution with the blue stuff which can read magenta on at least some digital cameras. This happens because of the wider problem that most coloured LEDs are very monochromatic, which is to say that they're a tiny spike on the spectrum of visible light. This means that they can sometimes produce strange and unpredictable results, particularly if you try to illuminate brightly-coloured objects with them. They're totally usable, but test. The RGB strip (as well as assemblies of separate red, green and blue strip) may be useful. Remember that mixing very narrow red, green and blue sources does not create an unbroken spectrum of white light, it creates three spikes on the spectrum which may look like white light to eyes and cameras but, again, may behave oddly when used to illuminate brightly coloured objects. Most of the low-cost commercial controllers intended to operate RGB strip use pulse width modulation, risking flicker, and are not suitable for film and TV work. Most (not all) RGB strip, or RGBW strip with the extra white channel, is wired in a way that can't easily be operated with a stack of standalone dimmers to provide colour mixing. (If you want to do this, look for "common cathode RGB LED strip." Most is common anode.) Phosphor LEDs are better. Some LEDs, including the pinkish-magenta-purple colours, are made using blue LEDs driving phosphors. All white LEDs are made this way. This is good because the phosphor has a wider, less spiky spectral output and is less likely to cause strange colorimetry problems. Pinkish-magenta LEDs are usually made this way. Red and green phosphor LEDs also exist, but are not usually found in LED strip. You can tell the difference usually because non-phosphor LEDs have clear encapsulation which leaves the inner electronics visible. White LEDs look yellow while other colours tend to look close to their emission colour. Do not stick rows of LED strips side by side; they will overheat. If you buy the very cheap stuff, run it at two thirds power or less for better life. It's not exactly expensive; just use more for more brightness. This is doubly true for phosphor LEDs where the phosphors tend to degrade with excessive heat, turning white lights purplish. Do not run it directly from camera batteries or anything else that's more than 12V. Most LED strip is designed for 12V and 14.4V lithium ion batteries may be more than 17V fully charged; this is an overdrive sufficient to cause overheating and damage. You can use low cost DC to DC converters found online to drive LED strip from variable voltages. You can use the adjustable voltage output to dim the strip, although the cheaper stuff is not very consistent and will go blotchy when dimmed in this way. That's about all I can think of about LED strip. Does that help? P

The technical reality is that Skypanels do not have the best colour performance on the market and they are very expensive. I fully understand the brand recognition issue and there may be business reasons to buy them, but as lights I would be cautious.

I thought the purpose of these things was to facilitate spectacular car chases in action movies, but this one seems to have several inches of water in it. What's going on?!

That might lead to... Well. Side-effects?

Now I'm in Los Angeles for a week and with no Chevys I have no idea what I'm supposed to live on.

I get to Vegas tomorrow afternoon. I'll be in LA for a few days thereafter, too, if anyone wants to say hi.

Was that supposed to be an empty message and an empty quote, or is the forum software being strange?

75W ballasts are available; you'd be looking for a ballast intended for 6-foot conventional tubes, which ought to drive a four-foot Kino at design power. It's also possible to wire some dual-36W ballasts to drive Kino tubes (or any tube, really) at double the usual power, which will put it roughly where a Kino ballast would drive it. The Kino tubes are not being overdriven, specifically. It's just that their design power is essentially a notch up from conventional tubes of the same length. They have heavier electrodes to compensate. It is important to get this right, for more reasons than just output. Underdriven fluorescent tubes (including Kino tubes) go purple; overdriven tubes go yellow, to a degree that will cause problems.

Racks upon racks of hard disks. There's warehouses all over the world which provide storage to places like Amazon, Google and Microsoft for their cloud computing platforms, as well as things like YouTube. P

Ooh, engineering... How did you implement the cable release?

Time lapse controller, presumably.

I hate to fall into my accustomed role as basher of unions here, but this sort of shenanigans is exactly why I find it all more than a little hard to stomach. You can't really find a good way to defend the indefensible and frankly I wouldn't try; you don't want to be held responsible for idiotic rules imposed by other people. P

Hi folks. Further to my earlier question about Panavision's Panacam standard-def camera of the early 80s, did they ever look at the contemporaneous analogue HD stuff? Sony had an 1125-line HD system by 1984, and there are instances of it being used to shoot stuff for filmout. Did I read about Panavision looking at something like this, too, or am I remembering Panacam again? P

Aha, thanks.

Do I recall that Panavision tried for a movie-style setup for some sort of electronic camera, perhaps in the early 90s? Was it a very early analogue HD system, or standard-def? I think it was a tube camera, perhaps set up to shoot things like the sitcoms that used to shoot 35mm on studio pedestals. Sorry to be so vague. Does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about? I don't even know what to google for.