Joshua Hesami

We have a lot of the peripherals we need --matte boxes, monitors, decent PL lenses, Teradek, follow focus, batteries and CFast cards.

Aside from those things, what else is really needed to operate a Mini aside from the body? I can purchase a brand new body for $47K but why do kits add up so much? Are there proprietary Arri parts which are needed to run the camera?

I have $50k available to purchase a system but I would want to have a kit which is fully operational, preferably with the ArriRaw license. Is this just wishful thinking?

Do you guys know where I might find one for that price? I'm aware of Arri's preowned program but they don't have any available.

I always love coming to you guys for help. This is a wealth of information I couldn't easily find.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of people at my stage of dabbling with use of bigger lights or more power. Most everyone I find is using tow-gennys with a crew or sticking to smaller lights and LED fixtures.

I light a white cyc wall like this quite often. What's very important to remember for these is to keep the white light from spilling onto your subject. You need to use negative fill very close to the edge of the frame around your talent. Get good distance between your subject and the wall.

I see this done poorly quite often but its much easier to light as a medium shot than a head-to-toe on white.

Check out this guys photography setup (his lighting isn't great but he explains the negative-fill solution very well:

Is there way for someone like me to start using a generator so that I might power an M40 or an Arrisun 60?

I love the M18 because I allows me to work with a decent amount of light on a very small budget. I've been shooting commercial projects on a thin budget by running with one M18, a few fluorescent fixtures a great deal of light modifiers.

In the states, I believe an M18 is about the most powerful light you can run off a house or office circuit. (If there are more powerful options, I'd love to use them)

Is the answer as simple as renting or buying a 6500 watt portable generator or is there more to it?

Book lighting through a 4x4 isn't going to necessarily be any softer than going directly through a 4x4 diffusion -- the softness is determined by the size of the source, book-lighting just makes sure you are softening enough to fill that source (the diffusion frame) more evenly. But if you go directly through a heavy diffusion material like a 4x4 full grid or 129 diffusion, a book-light version isn't going to be any softer if all it ends up going through is a 4x4 frame.

 

I guess I'm just a bit tired of people promoting book-lights as some sort of magic method of achieving extra softness. The only way to increase softness is to increase the size of the source, so if a book-light allows you to fill, let's say, an 8x8 frame of diffusion in a small space, then it makes sense. But a 4x4 frame is not hard to fill in a small space so there isn't a lot of reasons to book-light it unless you can only get ahold of some weak diffusion material like 250 or Opal and thus need to soften the light before it hits the frame.

I've been guilty of this. The first time someone walked me through building a book light, they explained it like Voodoo. Common sense eventually helped me understand how it actually works but it's always reaffirming to hear.

David, along with everyone else, I love the look of that gym.

I'm just curious, were you originally aiming to see shafts of light in your shot coming from the windows? Would you have been able to get some pretty clear light shafts coming off the frames of the windows using the brutes?

The reason I ask is because I recently fired an HMI through a much smaller window in a much smaller studio set and I was really hoping to get nice even shaft of light and it became more of a general glow once I fired up haze. I'm sorry, I'll post a frame when I get back to the office.

Wow. You guys are awesome. If anyone had trouble before wrapping their mind around brute fixtures, you guys about covered here.

Thanks guys. Yeah, simply searching for information on brute lights yields very mixed results and there is very little conversation or instruction to be found about their use.

That's a great look Adrian.

No one in my circle tends to use them but, occasionally, I'll see a look in a film that I like (usually similar to Adrian's frame) and I later find out they used brute fixtures for the set. I would have just thought to fire two M18s straight on or bounce an M40 off a 4x6 card but I prefer the results of the Brute fixture.

I checked the local rental houses and I don't think anyone carries them around here. ...Dallas.

Thank you, David. That's genius to throw spots in the top row. I posted a new topic about these lights before I saw your reply because I didn't know if it was inappropriate to hijack this thread.

I'm trying to understand more about lighting fixtures with multiple lamps arrayed between 9 to 24 total lamps. I've seen these called brute lights, dino lights, I've heard theater guys call them blinders.

How do they fit in? If you need a big light, I would think to use a few big Arrimax lights. Are they more economical? Are the lamps exclusively incandescent with these fixtures? Do any of you still use them frequently? If so, then what for?

How do fixtures with lamps in an Array compare to fixtures with a single lamp? Is the purpose to replicate a larger source of light?

And lastly, what is the most commonly accepted term for these fixtures?

(Sorry for posing so many questions at once)

Whether a 6K will work instead of a 12K is partly a matter of how much exposure do you need and if you are mixing this artificial light with natural soft daylight and want the hard artificial light to really overpower the natural light.

 

But even a 12K or 18K isn't going to fill a 30' tall window evenly from top to bottom unless it is very far away (and then it would be hard to separate three 18K's from spilling into the other two windows at that distance.)

 

If you don't mind a spottier light creating a shaft that doesn't fill the window then a 6K would work.

 

Truth is that also something like a 24-light Dino with spot lenses from far enough away would create a shaft in haze and might have a better shot at filling the window.

Hey David, I'm very glad you mentioned the Dino because I'd love to know more about Dino lights or the brute lights. I understand very little about them and I'm finding it hard to dig up. I'm not even certain I'm referring to them correctly. Has anyone discussed those lights in depth on these forums? Where do they fit in and serve best? Or how using the lamps in an Array compare to a single lamp fixture like an Arrimax or a par?