Matthew Parnell

It's important to note that the safety glass doesn't only perform the function of UV filtration, but also acts as containment in the instance of catastrophic globe failure.

At the 800w size, I would be looking at a joker bug instead of the M8, particularly now with the Beamer. Add a bit of chimera lantern kit (octopus, pancake, etc) and the joker becomes a very versatile piece of kit.

Because the LEDs that are used for RGB LEDs emit a very narrow spectrum of light, you miss out on a whole load of colour information that still gets transmitted when using gel on traditional sources. As a result they tend translate less than ideally on camera, especially when you start to move away from super saturated colours.

Rosco does ultrabounce by the roll, Called Cinebounce. It takes a bit of trial and error, but you could try tea staining white sheets to warm them up. Soak the white sheets in a brew of tea, and line dry them.

The snapgrids from dopchoice are nice units.

The Kelvin Tiles are very nice old units but are very dated by today's standards. The v-lock mounted power supplies were rubbish and had a habit of undervolting and dying, best replaced with the 20v supplies the Area 48s use. Even when they first came out they weren't the brightest units and that put a lot of people off, but they really made up for it in colour reproduction and flexibility (daylight to tungsten, plus all the colours of the rainbow). Nowadays, unless you are picking them up ludicrously cheap, there better options.

Check your flood spot rails to see if they have lubricant on them already. Also check the rails and worm gear is straight and square, and all the adjustments are correct. If the rails and gear aren't wet lubricated already, I use graphite powder on the rails and worm gear and work it in by flooding and spotting until smooth, then blow/vac the excess out of the housing. Lampheads as you have discovered tend to get really dusty, and using wet lubricant on the flood/spot gear I find attracts that dirt/grit and you can end up with the lube clogging up.

Unfortunately the atomics don't seem to fit the bill much anymore(it's unfortunate as I own a couple) I have found the atomics to be really problematic in causing half frames with cameras with a rolling shutter. The blinder function is a little better, and in a few circumstances acceptable, but it's still problematic. Definitely worth testing before the shoot day. Depending on your output and coverage needs using the flash function(or flashing using dmx) on most LED units is worth testing.

Magic Gadget works ok-ish on smaller units. Unfortunately there is a lot of filament lag with tungsten lamps, even using smaller units, meaning you won't get hard flashes. They will ramp on and off over a couple frames, and therefore the colour temperature also changes as the light comes up and down. That being said, perhaps with a rolling shutter sensor, the magic gadget might give you something to play with in post, without having to clean up split frames. Lighting shutters can also work. They can be a bit labour intensive, and need a little practice for the operator to get the right feel and timing. They do give a harder flash, without the colour temperature change.

Phil, You should check out the TLD 965s. 6500k, CRI of 93. The TLD930s are 3000k with a CRI of 91.

Phillips make a TLD-950 which are a daylight balanced high cri tube that perform very well, and match well to Kinos. They market them under the Graphica, Master or De Luxe names, and are designed for use in colour critical applications. They also do a TLD-930, which performs well as a tungsten balanced tube. Because Kino tubes are designed to be over driven (by all rights they are a 40w tube, with the chemistry designed to produce ideal performance when driven via a kino ballast to 75w) They tend not to play well in domestic fittings, both in terms of lamp performance, and at times working at all.

The huge difference is in the CTS range. Definitely try not to mix rosco and lee as they come nowhere near matching. As others have said Between the brands the CTB and CTO are different but in most circumstances not critically so.

Perhaps a HMI Par with only the safety glass will give you a bit of a punchy beam. Not as tight and contained as the molebeam. Another alternative is to spot up a large lamp into a 4x4 mirror from a bit of a distance. This can give you quite a hard directional beam.

I have seen some really good chinese knock offs, and some terrible ones. Sometimes the knockoffs solve a few of the problems both electrically and design wise that were just accepted in the original, and are obviously built with good components and strict quality control. Other times they are great new, but don't age well at all. Melted and easily broken flood/spot knobs. Flood/spot mechanisms that bend and contort. Lock offs that fail. Lampholders that fail. Ballasts that are poorly soldered. Connectors incorrectly terminated. Etc. The thing to be careful of is aftersales service in terms of parts, repair guidance, component quality and general quality control. HMIs in Australia are in the order of $100-150 per hour to repair plus parts. I have seen a simple $20 component cost upwards of $500 to replace, with a quick diagnostics check. Repair technicians get a lot of guidance from the manufacturers which saves a lot of time. Entire swap out of board assemblies can save time as well. Do your research into aftersales service in regards to parts and support provided. A single simple repair could turn costly if you have to rebuild a board because you can't get a spare. Over time repairing and maintaining HMI gear is inevitable and very expensive, so it is definitely worth considering. Another thing to consider is the base components of this gear. The design might be identical(it might not be either. http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pricey.html?m=1 ), but the components chosen may be much cheaper. A failure in a cheaper capacitor, or bridge rectifier can very easily snowball into much larger, more costly problems. Using a lower grade steel, aluminium or plastic can also cause problems. I know Chinese manufacturer Filmgear has done a lot to address these issues in the past few years, and have become quite innovative with their own product lines and designs. Doing your research is the answer here. You can get quality gear that can provide a cheaper option that just rips off the original manufacturer the hundreds of thousands of dollars of R&D and tooling, or you could get a dud, that will cost you the same or more than the real deal by time you pay it off.

Jaycar. You can then rewire them to 4 pin.

That is true of older induction HMIs. They draw more load at strike and the load decreases as the lamp comes to temp. Electronic HMIs draw less at strike and the load increases as the lamp comes up. Always allow some headroom when working with HMI. Because of power factor, older ballasts without Power factor correction tend to draw significantly more current. If you have a look through the posts by Guy Holt you will find an extensive amount of information on maximizing what you can do small power sources. Alternatively you can run a larger genset, have lots of headroom and fewer headaches.

There are a few good packages out there that usually use the iphone/iPad app, an artnet - dmx node, and a wireless router. The problem with any system like this is reliability and redundancy. If any part of the chain fails or develops gremlins you are in trouble. Purpose built consoles like those from ETC, MA Lighting, and in recent times Chamsys are built specifically to control lighting, and are incredibly stable, especially when mainly driving conventional lamps. On bigger productions the iPad or iphone is used as a remote control unit for a large console like a GrandMA or similar. All the processing is still done by the console, the majority of the programming, patching, etc, is still done on the console, with the iphone used to trim levels on set with the gaffer and DP, and hit the go button on cues. The big advantage to this is if the wireless fails, the board operator can just head back to the console all data intact, having never lost control of the system. Also, despite how stable the consoles are, more often than not you will have a redundant console, whether in the form of a second full console, or a laptop running as a slave so the ability to control the lighting system is maintained at all times even if the master console crashes or fails. I have used a laptop based system with an iphone as a remote before for a couple smaller sets very successfully, but never had complete faith in the system. LEDs make things a little more difficult again. Unlike conventionals where you can patch them into a feed that is patched through a specific dimmer channel, LED heads need to have DMX cable run to them directly, which with the way dmx works by daisy chaining fixtures can really slow things down once you start bouncing lamps around a set. Its a cool concept, but rather than making things more simple, on a small scale job, where you aren't using a complex lighting control network already, it can complicate things and add multiple extra points of failure.

What's stopping you from going a high quality tube such as a Phillips TLD-950 or TLD-930 and gelling it? At least then you would have half a chance to match any film lights to the cyan colour.

The M18s offer some great advantages as mentioned above, they are light, compact and very punchy. If you are using them as a bounce source, or punching them through diff they are plain awesome. The trade-off is they produce a pretty harsh, ugly light naked. You lose the ability you had with a fresnel lens to have a nice, even, hard source. They are very much the fashion of the moment amongst many DPs. Great marketing campaign Arri! The M18 is typical of Arri lamps of the last 10 years. Well designed, nice electronics, built to last, but with still the same flaking paint!

Shoot it all on an iphone, call it minimalist and retire to an island somewhere with your 'producers fee'.

7200K to 5600K is a 39 Mired shift. So you would be looking at a 1/4 CTO to start with.

For 6x6 it's common here in Australia to use 25mm aluminium box and use plastic corners like these http://www.bunnings.com.au/connect-it-2-way-corner-joiner_p1138466 . Being a standard size you can get the rags you need pretty cheaply. In 6x6 the plastic corners are really quite strong, the frame is really light, making it very easy for two to hand hold it for tracking shots ect. Also it's very cost effective. I find the foldaway design to be seriously over engineered for a 6x6 frame and a little too heavy.

These LEDs are just another tool, another brush to use when lighting. Yes, a 1k is highly versatile, renders colour way more accurately, is a better investment over time, etc, but slap a battery on an LED panel and you can do a lot of things in a lot of situations, a lot more quickly and easily than a 1k or any tungsten unit can do. the trade off being not so accurate colour rendering and that LED quality of light. It's a trade off, yes, but lets face it, with the quality of the latest generation of LEDs, except in particular circumstances, 90% of the time you can get away with it. It is very difficult these days to do a job without a DP requesting you carry a LED panel.

Producers are the owners of the bakery, they raised the capital to build their business. They have hand selected the recipies and worked with pastry maestros to perfect them, they helped select the flour and the yeast, they have employed the best bakers and bakers hands they can get to kneed the dough, practicioners who with the right resources and recipies can turn dough to bread. They make sure they had enough money when starting to get the ovens and proofers they needed to do the job. And when there is a fresh warm loaf sitting on the shelf of their bakery, they have to sell it before it goes stale. Some producers I love, some I despise. But despite this, their job is challenging and often starts with mere words on a page and the vision of something bigger. Work on a job with a great producer, then on one with a bad one... Then you truly understand what value a good producer brings.

The TLD-950 and TLD-930s are great tubes when filming in offices or anywhere you want to keep practical fluros on, but want don't want green/magenta casts. Have spend many hours swapping out domestic tubes for TLD950/930 tubes. They're a pretty nice match to kinos. I wouldn't uses these day in-day out in kino fixtures, with kino balasts, as kino ballasts over drive the tubes(the kino tubes themselves are designed to be overdriven as opposed to a standard tube) and the rendering gets a little inconsistent once the tube gets hot. Also the fragility of the tube doesn't really lend itself to the wear and tear being used arround set.