Stuart Allman

Anna, I know this jumps pretty far forward in assumptions about your shoot, but I was recently at an event where Rosco was showing off their new trans-light backdrops. You can send them a picture (Photoshop in what you want) and they will print the backdrop for you. However, this assumes a set camera height because obviously there's no parallax with a fixed background. If the camera is fixed, then you can always composite in moving stuff onto a trans-light, but that seems like a lot of work compared with a good green screen. I remember on "Ugly Betty" they composited in NYC "stuff" using plates shot elsewhere. Do a search for "ugly betty visual effects". FilmmakerIQ.com has a good entry about it. Hope this helps. Stuart

Stephen, I recently had to do a shoot where we started the "day" in late afternoon and daylight had to extend well past darkness. One thing that helped me sell daylight is mixing color temperatures. Skylight is typically around 9300K, whereas direct sun might range from ~3200K to ~5600K, depending on the time of day. So if you can use large bounce sources as sky fill you might want to try to use a 3/4 CTB or full CTB to emulate sky - maybe less CTB, depending on taste/camera. Then the more direct "sun" source will look like sunlight. Unless it's a cloudy day, this is what you would typically see in a house. To me it just looks a slight bit different. Stuart

James, I faced a similar situation two weeks ago while shooting in an abandoned hospital here in So Cal. In the ER there wasn't a really great way to hide lights and the 2nd unit absconded with our kit! What I did to add a bit more flattering look is I tape a large piece of diffusion over the fluorescent lights and billowed it down just above frame. That way the multiple overhead small fluorescent lights became one larger, softer light. The actors didn't seem to have any issues with eye shadows and it only took 5 minutes to setup. For a more intimate scene I used a 4' black floppy on a c-stand and put it overhead to strategically block a few overhead fixtures. That created a nice contrast to separate the characters from the brightly lit background. I imaging you can create a more subtle effect by taping a 6' double net scrim to the ceiling. Hope this helps. Stuart

Kelvin, Gels are very lossy, so you would lose significant light output trying to filter an LED source to match an "ideal" spectrum. It's not worth it. You can mix LEDs, however that's a very difficult problem. The LED technologies involved in producing different colors have different linearity and thermal responses. It would require nearly real-time calibration to keep the LEDs semi-sane. What is you goal in all of this? Are you looking for an ideal D65 backlight for your color grading suite? I'm no expert on this topic, but I would think any reasonable D65 lamp would do. You could even use the Kino K55 bulbs since they run in the 6500-6900K (CCT) region. That's probably an excellent question for the color grading forum folks to see what works best. Stuart ---------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Kelvin, I'm not a color scientist, but my (paying) job has me dealing with color science issues. Standard illuminant D65 is defined by CIE xyz parameters. Google "Wikipedia D65 standard illuminant" and you'll find exactly what you're looking for, including information about metamerism. Keep in mind that D65 is not necessarily the same as 6500K. In fact D65 is closest to 6504K. 6500K is defined with a specific power spectrum emanating from a black body radiator, whereas D65 can be emulated with any source that produces a similar spectral power distribution. So it's possible for an LED or fluorescent lamp to produce D65, but they would be hard pressed to produce true 6500K in the visible spectrum. Most people don't understand the difference so vendors just use 3200K or 5600K to describe their light output, even though the lamp doesn't technically doesn't match the black body radiator spectrum. That's where the CCT - correlated color temperature - comes in; because to our eyes (not necessarily a camera) the lamp and the black body radiator appear similar...but still has problems with metamerism. Stuart

Vincent, As for a dark future there is probably no better reference than Jordan Cronenweth's work on Blade Runner. Perhaps you should take a look at that film as an idea generator. Obviously you're not going to recreate that film's look with 3 lights and without an extremely talented production designer, gaffer, and grip crew. but it's always good to start with inspiration. Some things to think about... 1. Do you have access to power outlets (how many circuits) or do you need battery power? 2. How large is your grip crew? 3. Do you have money to buy gels or rent lights that can produce deep colors? 4. How much time do you have to do a location scout? 5. A hard light can easily be made soft with diffusion, but it's more difficult to make a soft light hard. You might want to consider harder lights and some basic diffusion to gain versatility. 6. How far do your lights need to be to be out of the shot? ...i.e. how many foot-candles do you need. 7. Do you have access to or money to buy diffusion, flags, and reflectors. How about number of c-stands and sand bags? 8. What can you add in post to complete the look...not that I personally like CGI. Hope this helps catalyze your planning process. Stuart --------------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

James, I used a set of Hive plasma lights with great success in a similar setting. Tungsten would have generated too much heat. The daylight Kino's don't match daylight color temperature very well (they are actually 6500-6900K) in mixed lighting situations. I've also been use the Cineo LED lights lately and love them. Shooting a few of the plasma lights or LED lights through a large piece of bleached muslin should give you a nice soft key for your talent. It's too bad you can't throw some light through the window to add a bit of pop. That made a great deal of difference in my shoot. http://illuma.blogspot.com/2014/05/hope-cooks.html Stuart ----------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Graeme, One idea I might throw out for your location is to do like Roger Deakins did on Skyfall and use a set of high placed angled mirrors and narrow beam lights from the ground. That might give you some selective shafts of light, depending on how wide you intend to be. Maybe the shafts from "open" windows come from beside or slightly behind the camera if you need to use them sparingly? Also, you might want to consider covering up some of those top windows to create pools of light to make the area look more dramatic. I'm not exactly sure if it will work well given the diffusion on the windows, but if you have adequate location setup time..what the heck? Maybe you can use some solids on the ground the actors to move in and out of shafts of light for mediums and close ups. If viewers are truly caught up in the action of the fight they probably won't notice the difference between the wide and medium light quality. Then again, you could just "accidentally" take a crow bar to some of those top windows. Stuart Allman -------------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Hayden, Are you sure this isn't a matter of your NLE preview settings? Are you using full resolution during playback. I know in Premiere Pro I can set various resolutions for playback and I usually edit with 50% resolution for screen space reasons. I set my paused resolution to 100% so I'm not looking at artifacts of the fast scaling algorithm. Maybe you have your edit setup similarly(?) I imagine the Sony raw viewer might have similar settings, but I've never used it so I can't provide any advice there. Stuart ----------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

...Oh, and the C-700 was quite a good lie detector when we went around the NAB booths looking at LED lights. I'll just say that Fiilex and Cineo scored very well with regards to color rendering. Some other common brands didn't score nearly as well as they would have you think. That's not to say that I measured everyone's lights and those were the only good performers. For the record, I have no association with any vendor of LED lights. Wish I did. I want some free lights.

I had one on loan through NAB. We did our blog video with it, as per the agreement I had with Sekonic and then the meter had to go back. So there's at least one back in the demo pool. I expressed the same desire to have a table of spectral data output to the Sekonic product manager. Maybe they'll add that in the future. The Sekonic meter is really meant to match and correct lights on set. It does that function very well. I had the UPRTek MK350 on loan from a friend a while back. I vaguely remember that tool allows you to download a csv file with the spectral data. So if you're looking to do more scientific measurements there are deals on those devices on Ebay. I looked a few weeks ago just out of curiosity. However it doesn't do a lot of handy functions of the C-700. I don't remember it providing color rendering numbers on the individual CRI patches, but maybe it does by now. It certainly didn't have a database of Lee filters with recommendations on how to correct a light. Stuart Allman --------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

David, Maybe this is a topic more for the art department and post folks, but if he was to do like you did in the Astronaut Farmer and put a bright sunset gradient on the matte screen behind the set (Billy Bob in the car)...and then pull a luma key, do you think that would work? If so, the brighter false gradient could be replaced with a sunset, while maintaining the foreground in semi-silhouette. The luma key could be masked off to just the exposed window area in After Effects. Like has already been said, there's a million ways to do this. Kugan needs to be much more specific about set design and photographic intention. When I read about Oblivion's use of large format projection in American Cinematographer I was like...yep, only in Hollywood. But now that I see the results above I see why Claudio did it that way. Beautiful.

John, Not to hijack the thread, but I run the blog for Video Gear here in San Diego. This weekend we're going to produce a tutorial video showing the color spectrum and color rendering of each class of light we have in the shop. I'm hoping the video gets released before NAB, but the marketing folks want to add their marketing "stuff" to the head and tail. So hopefully that will give you some useful information for comparison. When it's available you can view the video at video-gear.com/blog I also put a mini review on my personal blog at... illuma.blogspot.com/2015/03/review-of-sekonic-c-700-spectrometer.html The first picture shows the spectrum of the late day sunlight. Stuart ----------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

David, It's funny that you mention using a 3200K source. I recently received a demo unit of the C-700 spectrometer and measured 6pm sun coming through my window. It measured almost exactly 3200K. Then I went outside and measured the overhead sky fill and it came out somewhere around 11000K, but that might look too blue to be realistic on camera - dunno, haven't tried it yet. Fun toy, but unfortunately I have to give it back at NAB. ;( Stuart -------------------------------- illuma.BlogSpot.com

A long time ago I was working with a director that wanted to get some shots of dogs swimming and we found this company... http://www.deepsea.com/products/lights So if you need some waterproof lights you might want to consult with them. They normally work with marine applications, but seemed interested in film work. Now, how you power the lights exactly?...I'm not sure. I wasn't the DP for that shoot.

Sorry Albion, I don't have a direct link. I've been haunting the posts on his lighting forum for years, but unfortunately I lost my password and their admin has been unresponsive in restoring my account. You should be able to do a search on his forums to find some examples. I think some of the older information was lost when his site went down a while back. I know he used this setup multiple times in the Jesse James film and others (I don't remember specifically). I guess it just really depends on how comfortable Tom feels with such a large wiring job and whether of not he has the budget. As we all confer, lighting a large area evenly isn't a task for a meager DP or one man band. If this was my DP job I might look at renting a series of Kino image 87 lights and hang them overhead like shop lights. With double diffusion they would probably be nice and even. I just have no clue how much those cost to rent. My experience is limited to using the gaffer kit. S.

Tom, Perhaps you can use an approach I hear about quite a bit over on Roger Deakins' site. He uses a rig of 60-200W tungsten bulbs in a circle and hangs that overhead as a soft space light. If you have the time to build rigs like this, then it might be an option. You can always double diffuse, using bleached muslin from the fabric store. None of these things should be very expensive to buy. As far as the diffuser that's seen in the picture...well, you might have to rent a large fabric if you want it to be continuous across the expanse of the set. Stuart ------------------------ illuma.blogspot.com

I have tried to use the Nila lights in the past, but have run into issues with the particular model I was using being very green. We tried to mix lights between Fiilex and Nila and found that the Fiilex remained pretty neutral, but the Nila was clearly giving off a green/yellow cast on camera. So my advice would be to test the Nila before using it. Perhaps my experience with their products was limited to one model and not all their lights perform similarly. I used the UPRTek MK350 meter to measure the spectrum and CRI and found that the meter reported a CRI of 69 from the Nila Varsa. www.video-gear.com/blog/011514.php That said, I did like using the Fiilex Q500. It doesn't have anywhere near the output of a 2.5k HMI. However, the color rendering seems to be OK so far. I have a C-700 spectrometer on loan from Sekonic right now and we're going to do another blog video that shows the spectral measurements of each of the lights we have in the shop. That video should be done in another two weeks or so. Stuart Allman ----------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Marco, If your director is biased against HMI's and the Brite Shot fixtures aren't what you hoped for, you could consider Plasma lights as a compromise. They do have a warm up time of a couple minutes, but unlike an HMI you can immediately re-strike them. The ballast runs at such a high frequency that you won't get the audible whining you can get with some HMI fixtures - i.e. the audio person will still be your Facebook friend. I use the Hive fixtures quite frequently and I haven't had an issue with color rendering yet. The output from the Hive lights seems to be somewhere in between a larger LED Fresnel and a 575 HMI in my experience.

Marco, I haven't personally use the Brite Shot products, but I did see them at NAB and talked with their company rep. Their target market was originally effects lighting - like fire flicker and police lights. In fact, they were originally used on police dramas to emulate police car roof top lights. The lights come with a handheld controller that lets you program effects into the fixtures. If you look at the user manuals you'll see that programming lighting effects is their main concern. I haven't seen anywhere where they publish CRI or TLCI information yet. If you're absolutely stuck on using LEDs then I might recommend the Fiilex Q500. It's one of the few LED fixtures I've used where the color rendering seemed pretty decent. I think that's reflected in the latest TLCI report that includes Fiilex. The Cineo lights also scored very well in color rendering.

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Albion, One insightful trick Shane Hurlbut told us about during his recent seminar tour is that he used Home Depot par cans with strong gels on them down the block to make colorful bokeh highlights - just to pretty up the frame. If the location lacks some character and you need to motivate some of the odd colors coming from storefronts then you may consider adding this cheap trick. Phedon Papamichael used quite a few film lights hidden in store fronts in Monuments Men (see American Cinematographer issue from last year) along with a strong single source backlight from down the block. I saw a video from an ASC talk last year (Owen Roizman, I think?) who set up a mobile light that travelled with the camera and he would manually flag the light on and off the actors as they walked along with the motivation being the street lamps in the background. Maybe you could use this technique while the Steadicam op walks backwards if a grip has a battery powered 1x1 (or whatever) on a pole. Maybe all you need to do is adjust the dimmer on the LED light. Stuart -------------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Quinton, These are just my opinions, nothing more... First, the moiré on his shirt is terrible. Very 5D mark II era. Hopefully that's not a bad AA filter on the camera, since the BMCC had nasty issues with moiré. I think you can go with a bit more contrast. A 4x4 frame of half soft frost or light grid might be better to give more definition to a Rembrandt style of lighting his face. Considering using a front overhead fill 3-4 stops down just to make sure nothing goes completely solid black, but flag it off from the background. Contrast on his face is OK, as long as the background is darker. If you go with more contrast on his face and don't darken the background it won't look right. Since you put a light over the subject's left shoulder, that would be a natural direction for any backlighting. Right now it appears you have the kicker coming from the opposite direction. It's perfectly OK to have a key and back kicker come from the same side. I might scrim down his shirt with a double because his shoulder is really popping out at me. Currently you have the subject with the lines of the window frame going through his head. I would personally consider moving the subject such that his face isn't cluttered with stuff behind him. Maybe placing his head where there is a dark corner so he pops out with contrast, or use leading lines within the room, or even a framing of his head in the picture using the background elements, or place his head directly in front of a light so that this head "blooms". It really depends on what the interview is about. The background elements could use a little work to be less busy and distracting, but that's really a subject for a production designer - i.e. not me. Hope this was helpful. Stuart --------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Ville, My experience in shooting raw is limited to the Red cameras, so I don't know the caveats of doing it on the BM cameras. What I've had on set in the past is a DSC Chroma Du Monde chart. Since the footage is shot in raw it should be just a matter of having a *good* white reference (not a white piece of paper) and using the color grading software to balance white to that color as a first pass color correction. So unless there is a BM specific limit on correcting green in camera, as Tom suggests might happen, you'll probably be as good as it gets just balancing it out in post. That doesn't mean all the primaries and secondaries will look right, but at least the neutrals should look neutral. I was playing around with my friend's A7S last night and noticed that when you do a custom white balance it shows you not only the color temperature it chose, but also the amber-blue and green-magenta balances it chose. This could be a nice little tool to have to balance out your film lights so you can check that they mostly match the fluorescents.

Ville, Typically cameras allow you to do a custom white balance. Can you do a custom white balance to the fluorescents and then add plus green (or whatever compensation needed) to the non-fluorescent lights. That seems easier than filtering both your lens and the non-fluorescent lights and taking the double light loss. I've never seen a filter that can actually remove the green spike from a fluorescent light. The filter takes down the entire green-ish range of wavelengths, which includes the green spike. S.