Torben Greve

Good point... it just bothers me there's no middle ground :D I'm so spoiled I want the best of both worlds: low wattage + full spectrum white + nice throw and quality of tonage = win. Hehe... I know this is unrealistic for now, but man... I guess one could just choose to look past the spike issues. I know the Danish tv stations don't give a rat's. The amongst other lamps use TecPro.

Thanks for sharing that... quite a nice effect to a simple shot really. Nothing fancy, it just works.

Keep an eye on NAB... according to AbelCine, the next step in LEDs will fix some problems that might make them more interesting. I for one have not discounted them, just like everything else, they need to evolve... Ofcourse they might get sidewinded by plasma lights, but lets see :)

Yeah I read that Guy Holt post, which is on all the major forums. But to me that seemed more like a lot of sales talk / paper talk, rather than actual battlefield tests / comparison tests. However in the meantime I learned that even though the De Sistis were announced last year, apparently the pricepoint is not out till after NAB this year O_o In regards to LEDs... since you can control the L7 in detail, wouldn't that solve the spike problem that most LED suffer from? From what I read it sounded like ARRI had a nice color rendition in those lamps. And who wouldn't want key lights that consume very little wattage :D

How about the Arri L7-C? Any of you tried that... I mean since you can dial in the color wouldnt that be optimal?

Hey guys... I'm caught up in decision making and looking back and forth on the forum doesn't make it any easier... The short story is that Im selling a steadicam and an importer of steadis approached me and is now offering to do a trade in. I told him I was about to buy ARRI L7-C but then he made me aware of De Sistis latest LED adventure. The photometric data looks nice. Seems like their 40w lamp is almost as powerful as the L7, but then I start looking even further into it, and find out that a lot of you guys shun De Sisti because of quality.... that it's made for stage lighting and not location lighting. This also correlates to what the importer told me... that BBC skipped an entire L7 order and went for De Sisti. They wouldn't need lamps that require rugged use. So... Am I about to be had on this little trade-in? My own use would be lights for moving about on locations etc and the occasional rental. I don't need lamps that break after being hauled around for a day or two in less than ideal surroundings. It just bugs me that the De Sisti 120w LED is sooo much more powerful than the ARRI L7... :( Any tips and opinions would be welcome.

Thank you... well, in all honesty, it was my first video lighting job. But being a commercial still photographer, I made the assumption that I could more or less directly translate the way I light from shooting with flash to shooting with video. I did try to read up a little in the Set Lighting Techs handbook and used the Arri calculator. I'm glad I did... the production team wanted to rent 650w to begin with before I stepped in and demanded 1.2K hehe. Having seen it a couple of times myself now, I can't really tell if I should have used a key light with the same temperature as the HMIs instead? I keep telling myself "It's supposed to look like the fluorescents in the ceiling...", but then again, maybe it would have looked more pleasing with a divalite or something.

By chance, the low fog wasn't available, so we rented the smoke instead and I think that really did the trick for the video. I'd like to share with you the end result of what I asked in my initial question. Lighting was done with 1.2K and 2.5K Arri HMIs. The keylight in the walking shots down the smokey hall were done with an Arrilite 850w only filtered with some white diffuser. The explosions were shot with F8 on the FS100 at 1/120s and 50FPS. It was a fun job, hope I can work on some more like this, since this was my first real lighting job. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfg4DIzxMnQ

Hi... Basically this my first thread. Been exploiting your forums for a while since they are a pretty good resource of anything cinematic :) But here's a question I couldn't find the answer to through searching. There are some threads about fog and such, but I'll be shooting a video on tuesday where the production wants to add low dry ice fog in some shots. The premise is a pretty large room in an old warehouse. There are angled steel columns in the middle and around 10 meters of space on each side. This room will be a general shot in the video, and also marks the scene where 8 meter warm colored explosions will appear behind the artists. So far I'm counting on stop 8 to avoid overexposure of the explosion, therefore I've settled on 2.5K HMI 8 meters away at 1/120s for key light (camera is native 500 iso, Sony FS100), but this is where the low fog comes in... Can I get away with backlighting the low fog with 1.2K HMIs on flood or do I need to sacrifice one of the 2.5K on that as well? I was hoping to use the other 2.5K for enhancing the depth of the room by lighting the columns. Or maybe I should just use the 2.5K so it works with both the fog and the columns? I'm up for any ideas at all... The lights I have available for this job is: 2 x 2.5K HMI Daylight fresnel 2 x 1.2K HMI Daylight fresnel 2 x 800w tungsten Camera settings: stop: 8 exposure: 1/120s iso: 500 FPS: 50p (needed for a general slow mo mood throughout the video) Thanks!