Stuart Allman

Great advice. Thank you all. I'm in a very small market in San Diego, so my choices jump between Martin MAC 700's and American DJ tri-phase/revo lights when it comes to rental houses. I've been telling the director and producer that we would be better off just finding a night club and paying their manager and AV person for a day, but I'm just the lowly DP dealing with two very artistic people who refuse to think/are in denial about technical problems. One alternative I might explore is using fixed colored lighting and having a couple assistants wave around high brightness LED flashlights with a gel on it. No, it doesn't look anywhere near the same, but I'm being penny pinched super-duper hard on this production. The problem I face there is that there isn't any good location to hide the assistants in the shots without making all the shots tight. The location is essentially a large industrial park garage bay, so the room is deep, but narrow. Because of the build out of the space I have about 10ft to fit a dolly, the minimum focus distance on my lens, and 30 dancing people in front of a stage!...then shove lighting somewhere.

I looked through my quote from the local rental co today and sure enough, there's a DF-50 on the list. It's going for $85/day locally. We're on a pretty minimal crew, so the hazer might be the lower maintenance, more manageable solution. They aren't giving me the resource to have a dedicated fogger-duty-dude/dudette.

I called around the local rental shops today and the quote for size robotic fixtures, controller, and hazer came back at just over $3600. I didn't realize that each of those fixtures is about $10.5k each! I'm looking for something that will work for high frame rate footage (120-180fps) without flicker. Any suggestions on what I should be asking for? The other problem with these is that we need an overhead light grid or some solid bases for the lights since they heads have a lot of momentum when they're swinging around. The other option is the American DJ Tri-phase and Revo fixtures, but those don't move. It's more "high school dance" than night club in my opinion. However, those fixtures are 1/10th the cost to rent. I also learned that we need to get someone trained in DMX control software. The "auto" function of these lights operates on brightness and strobe effects, which seem like a no-no for getting consistent footage on a rolling shutter camera. I keep telling the producer that it would be cheaper to use a night club after hours and hire in the house lighting person for the shoot. Thanks for the suggestions Aidan.

What should I request if I need light streaks inside of a night club set. I know that SAG limits what we can use and only certain types are safe to breathe for a long length of time (i.e. a whole production day). We plan on having the robotic dance club type lights, but I would like to see the beam projected in the air like it's a smoked up euro night club. Someone last night mentioned that there's a fogger and a hazer. Is there a real difference? If so, which one should I be looking at? How about the fog juice type? Stuart ---------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

A lot of the time I just need to tape something and it doesn't need additional durability. An inexperienced grip that was brought into a project I worked on put gaffer tape on a wood door to hold some diffusion and the wood stain peeled up with the tape as we struck the set. So when possible I try to use painter's tape to be on the safe side - I don't like damaging other people's property, especially when we're using it for free. I wouldn't want someone to do that to my house.

John, I know I'm going to come across as the lame voice of semi-reason here, but you may want to think about setting aside some of your $400 budget and rent or borrow whatever is cheap in your locality. (Don't shoot me) It's not necessarily about the gear, as much as knowing how to shape it. Get experience with the cheap of the cheap lights you can get your hands on to determine if you can get by for now. Owning fancy looking gear is cool, but wasting money on things you "think" you might need isn't. There are some things I would recommend to buy, simply because they'll move with you as you progress and you can use them with whatever lights you have. 1. c-stands or simple photography stands. Get 3-4 of these. You can never have enough. 2. bleached muslin, unbleached muslin, white silk, thick black cloth from the fabric store (probably about $10-$12ea in the US) 3. translucent shower curtain from bath store (i.e. Bed, Bath, and Beyond in the US) 4. Black wrap 5. Gaffer tape or even painters tape to be low cost 6. wooden clothes pins (aka C-47's) 7. power extension cords 8. A plastic container to carry this grip stuff 9. A few gels such as various CTO and CTB, maybe plus green to match office fluorescents ($5-7ea) 10. A fold out circular reflector 11. Work gloves that can handle high temperatures. After that, either rent/borrow film lights if you need them or buy some cheap clamp lights. After a production or two you'll figure out what you really need to buy and you won't have blown your bank.

Steven, From what I've read Bob likes to use a bounce off of Muslin into a diffusion material (dunno what). Considering your fixture size, you may want to try a book light configuration with various diffusion types and distances from your actor. With the lights you have, you'll probably need a more efficient bounce material than Muslin. You can see the general light direction Bob used from the shadows on the child's face. Hope this helps. Stuart ------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Jake, I recently did a blog post discussing a shot exactly like this for a music video a director friend of mine wanted to do. You may find this useful as technical information. http://illuma.blogspot.com/2014/09/we-might-need-bigger-lighthow-to-know.html Stuart ----------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Karl, One thing to watch out for when using a light meter with a DSLR for video is that the metering device (I own a Sekonic L-758) assumes that your lens has 100% optical efficiency. No lenses I know of have 100% optical efficiency. There's always some loss due to coatings and whatever... So the meter is useful for measuring T-stops, as on cinema lenses, since this takes the optical efficiency into account. F-stops are not an accurate measurement of light through the lens since it only takes mechanical dimensions of the optical system into account. What you'll find on sites like the excellent DXO Mark is that some lenses that are rated at f/2 are actually T/2.2 or T/2.3. Usually the cheaper the lens the more difference there will be between the f-stop and T-stop rating. I've run into this problem before on shoots where people showed up with a DSLR and a cheapie SLR lens. After I metered the key light the exposure was visibly off between the two same camera bodies with different lenses. So if you meter a scene also know the optical efficiency (via the DXO Mark data) of the lens or use a lens that has marks in T-stops. Then you'll be better off at accurately metering light, if that's what you're really trying to achieve. The article on "F-number" on Wikipedia is an excellent tutorial. Hope this helps. Stuart -------------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Ville, First, I'm with the others in saying that minor adjustments to aperture and shutter angle are probably your best options. However if you really want to be picky about aperture Tiffen does make a 0.1 (i.e. 1/3rd stop) ND filter. Buy two of those and you can tweak all day long to your heart's content. On a lot of these cameras you can adjust the ISO without too much of a change in highlight range as well. I would personally go for the less expensive option that makes the production run faster. A camera setting change takes 2 seconds. An ND filter change always seems to take 2 minutes. S. --------------------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Zac, I know this doesn't seem as fun as shopping for new gear, particularly with the Arri logo on it (drool), but in my experience you're better off renting on a dollar for dollar basis. I know when I started out I bought a bunch of stuff thinking I needed to own it. The reality is that I didn't because I couldn't buy a whole grip truck worth of stuff to fit every production. Now I ask the producer to provide a small stipend to cover what I need after explaining exactly why I need it. Usually it works out OK. Since you can turbo-charge the rental allowance with the $5k that's burning a hole in your pocket it will afford you many, many productions worth of rentals for exactly what you need on that day. Sometimes you need a 1.2k HMI and sometimes you need a Kino Diva. If you buy a kit then that's all you're probably going to be stuck shoe horning into everything you shoot. As for an outdoor kit - I keep a small number of inexpensive items like a reflector as well as fabrics. In my case I just went to the fabric store and bought a few yards of bleached muslin, unbleached muslin, and thick black (duvatyne) cloth. I might add a bit of silk to that soon. It was something like $30-40 last time I went. I also have a few lightweight stands that can pack up into duffle bags, which were inexpensive. I don't do grip/gaffer work so I don't need heavy duty stands. We rent those (cheap) along with sand bags, if required. As for learning lighting, I found this is an excellent forum. I also recommend joining the "Friends of the ASC" and getting American Cinematographer magazine, reading forums on rogerdeakins.com (many thanks to his amazingly generous time), reading the cinematographer documents on stephenmurphydop.blogspot.com (he's on this forum as well), as well as paying attention to any post by M. David Mullen, ASC. The ASC hosts master classes a few times a year. Your $5k might be better spent on attending a master class or two. Shane Hurlbut, ASC has a new lighting tour that's going around the country. You might want to look into that as well. He's known for buying a lighting package from Home Depot when the story allows. I know, I know...this isn't as exciting as a box of new gear to play with. Sorry. I guess what I've learned is to use all of this equipment, THEN decided what you REALLY need to haul around in the trunk of your car. I've already made more than a few regrettable financial mistakes with regards to equipment. Thank goodness for Ebay and Craigslist.

On the way to work today, I was thinking about the K55 Kiva tube measurement being 6942K. If we consider the nearest camera setting of 6900K, that's a CIE 1931 of (x,y)=(0.308,0.318). In that case the K55 tube seems to rate really well as a 6900K source. I wonder where Kino-Flo got their K55 (seeming to allude to 5500K) name from? It would be interesting to hear their comments if they have a representative on this forum.

Sorry, my stupid mistake...I was looking at my (u,v) data instead of (x,y). Stack it up to an early morning. Edit the above... A 3100K source should have a CIE1931 color coordinate of (0.419,0.401), NOT what I stated above. So a K32 bulb with a measurement of (0.422,0.382) is a bit more orange-ish/red.

A while back I measured the Diva K55 and K32 tubes using the MK350 spectrometer. I thought you might be interested in the results. http://videogearsandiego.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-do-video-lights-really-perform.html The pictures show the CCT, CRI and CIE 1931 coordinates. In this case the K32 bulbs were a bit closer to target than the K55 bulbs in terms of CCT an CRI - but that's not the complete story. In theory a D55 (5503K) illuminant should have a CIE 1931 coordinate of (x,y)=(0.332,0.347). The K55 bulb showed a reading of (x,y)=(0.308,0.315), which is much more blue. The bulb is performing much closer to a F1 (fluorescent daylight) standard illuminant. Since I don't have a good reference for the color coordinates for 3200K, nor time to calculate it, I'll reference a 3000K illuminant. This is pretty close to the CCT the MK350 spectrometer said the K32 bulb is anyway. That should have a CIE 1931 coordinate of about (x,y)=(0.25, 0.35), whereas the bulb measures (0.422,0.382) which is WAY more green. It's much closer to an F12 (3000K fluorescent) standard illuminant. If you look up "CIE 1931" and "D55 standard illuminant" on Google the Wikipedia pages are actually quite good. The half-ellipsoidal chart should immediately pop up when you type in "CIE 1931". That will show you how (x,y) coordinates correlate to colors. Stuart ----------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Megan, I recently watched an ASC talk by Owen Roizman where he spoke about lighting Three Day of the Condor. The scene involved two men walking along a sidewalk in Washington DC. What he did was place a light over the camera (camera was on a dolly) and manually flag the light on and off as the characters walked along the path to simulate the lights along the path - in your case street lamps as opposed to his sidewalk lights. Maybe you can do something similar with a handheld flag and some diffusion. Obviously a good low light camera will help. Passing car headlamps may provide nice backlighting, as well as a Chinese lantern on a stick held just overhead and behind the characters as they walk along. As David said, you need to define a look then work toward it with allowable budget. Hope this idea helps, Stuart ----------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Jon Paul, You might want to consider the Hive plasma lights. The ballast runs at 450MHz, so 800fps isn't an issue. I heard about one rental customer doing some work at 3000fps recently while using the lights. You'll probably want the "Killer" or even the 4-light Killer. They were trying to light the project with just the Wasp and Bee and it wasn't enough, however you probably already know how to pre-calculate your foot-candle requirements. Stuart ---------------------------- illuma.blogpsot.com

Karl, Art Adams had an interesting article over at provideocoalition.com that you may find helpful. http://www.provideocoalition.com/aadams/story/the-art-adams-zone-system-for-hd Stuart -------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Mark, I'll post the 2nd of three technical overviews today on the videogearsandiego.blogspot.com site. Today's subject will the Wasp. I'll post about the Bee next weekend.

I'll be blogging about it the week after next on the Video Gear blog. The kit we had came with a set of scrims, lenses, and barn doors, so it's a little more versatile with those items included. All of those items are just standard Arri 6.5" size. I think I ended up scrim-ing the light down a stop. Aside from the price, what I like is that the color temperature is tunable from 4500K-14000K so you can handle daylight to moonlight with a point source light and no gels. It's also a bit smaller, with the caveat that it uses an external ballast that has to sit somewhere at the foot of a c-stand. I told the sales rep that they should make a holder or bag that can go up on the stand so I don't have to drag the ballast around anytime I need to move the stand. Other than that, it was daylight and a good little fill light. When I set the knob to 5600K I didn't notice any color difference between it and the other two fixtures that have fixed 5600K color. I haven't had a chance to take the Mole Fresnel out of the shop yet. I played with it briefly and it appear to be robustly built, as you would expect from a Mole product. The spectrum shows that the LED they chose does better in cyan and deep red than most of the LED fixtures I've measured. However, I haven't had a chance to measure the Arri light yet. (Hey Arri rep...wanna send me an eval kit? :) The Fiilex LED kit the shop owns is pretty anemic on light output, but uses a multi-die LED package like I believe Arri L-series does. I'm going to take that out next week on a doc shoot up in Venice Beach. The multi-die solutions are *supposed* to have better CRI and spectrums.

Mark, The "Wasp" and "Killer" are self/yoke contained units, but you are absolutely right. They are both significantly bigger than the Mole LED fixture. The shop has both in rental. I'll be writing about the "Wasp" and "Bee" lights on the videogearsandiego.blogspot.com blog over the next two weeks. I already did a technical post about the "Killer." You can also see screen shots of the FS-700 with the Hive lights on my personal blog in my signature. I just wish I had that MK350 handheld spectrometer back. It's a great analysis tool to double check vendor performance claims. Stuart ------------------------------ illuma.blogspot.com

Define "high power"(?) I used the "Killer" light and it put out a lot of light for my purpose even with bleached muslin diffusion. You can gang two of them together on a frame to make a maxi type light. No, they don't make a 24k HMI Fresnel equivalent but I haven't had a use nor budget for something that size...much less rolling in a generator truck! That, and plasmas are well balanced to daylight whereas the HMI's I've measured have typically been 6100-6400K, despite manufacturer claims. I used the "Wasp" PAR to punch through a window and provide a hair light on our talent on a SoCal sunny day. It puts out quite a bit of light as well. Everything was powered via normal household sockets in a residential house. Each fixture uses a single plasma bulb, not an array. Obviously there are two fixtures on the "killer". I just want to make it clear that I am NOT affiliated with Hive and I'm not trying to sell anyone anything. These are solely my opinions based on using the lights in a real world production. I do blog for a local rental house that rents these lights, but they will gladly rent anyone tungsten, HMI, LED, fluorescent, or whatever you want. I use it all, based on needs of the production.

Mark, Here is a link to a blog article I wrote with measurements on various fixtures we had in the shop - including one of the mole daylight fresnels. http://videogearsandiego.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-do-video-lights-really-perform.html The CCT was good at 5500K and CRI was 91, but the CIE color coordinates indicated that the light runs a bit magenta with respect to a true D55 illuminant. You can look at the results and make your own judgment. I think this was on a junior fixture(?), but I don't recall exactly. It might have been the baby. Alternatively, I used the Hive plasma lights this last weekend and really liked the results. Given the choice (and budget) I would personally choose plasma over HMI or LED. Hope this info helps. Stuart

After you shoot it, please post something about what exposure you had to use. My instinct is this is largely going to depend on the size of the camp fire your director wants.

Guy, I certainly don't mean to intrude on your very helpful advice - I appreciate reading it myself - but Vadim's examples show the fire light being blown to near white in the center of the flame, so I assumed he was OK with that. How blown out it is depends on the intensity of the camp fire, so a simple solution might be to use a smaller camp fire. I was able to hold a small camp fire even on a 5Dm2 when I followed a group of 24 hour mountain bike racers a few years back. The kids in the example photo are all under exposed by 1-2 stops, so that should give Vadim latitude to hold the fire better, especially with a 13-stop BMCC. He could also use framing to just show the upper tips of the fire, which is simple to hold, or use a 2-stop grad ND on just the center of the fire. Just for the record, I like big lights and have nothing against them. Tim "the tool man" Taylor grunt inferred. Stuart --------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Vadim, I back what the others are saying. Battery powered LED lights are probably your best way to go. A couple bi-color litepanels 1x1's, or some tungsten colored LED Fresnels would do just fine. With enough batteries you should be good for a couple hour shoot. Check with your local rental house and see what they have. I would add another full CTO to the lights to make them look more like campfire color. One thing I did to create a fire light look on the cheap is use a Fresnel light shined into a handheld beauty mirror. If you wiggle the angle of the mirror so the light flickers on and off your subject it's pretty convincing as fire. Have two to three grips so this and you should be able to light up the circle of actors. Works great with LED lights because you can wiggle the mirror or wiggle the light while handholding it. Stuart ---------------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com