Barnaby Coote

Hi I remember seeing pretty bad performance in older reds under tungsten lighting. Specifically lots of noise, odd colours and IR pollution. Is the DSMC3 komodo/raptor generation any better ? Do I need any extra IR cut filters with bigger lights ? Anyone shot with them with good old tungsten ? thanks

Hi I recently inherited a lovely SBM kit in perfect working order. It has a kit zoom lens, the switar 12.5-100, which comes with the aspheron 6.5mm attachment. When I attach the aspheron 6.5mm, I am unable to get focus. It seems to extend the minimum focus beyond infinity. Am I missing somthing ? Is there a shim attachment for the back of the lens that was lost ? thanks

Little gel 'sleeves' cut to size on cheap fluos work great, you can use little bits of tape or a strip of 1/4 inch gaff, then rotate the sleeve around the tube so the seam is hidden. It looks as if the tube was made to that color.

I'd suggest trying Rosco ND frost or dark grey translucent acrylic for back projection, it keeps contrast and saturation a lot better than anything white. The highlights will pop a lot more than with black material too.

I haven't used them personally but some rental places carry 'venetian blind' type shutters that are controllable via dmx. They are designed for HMIs in a variety of ratings so you could dim a high power, unreachable daylight source if you want to. Might help you get the hard light through the window effect you want for the interiors.

I find a good way of guessing lux or fc based on a distance is using the root of two scale, which are basically the lens f stop numbers (1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6 etcetera). You lose half your intensity (or a stop) for each of these numbers, whether its feet or meters. So if you know you have 3000 lux at around 2.8m you will have 1500 lux at 4m and 187 lux at 11m. Same goes for feet and fc, so footcandles would be halved between say 11 and 16 feet or quartered between 5.6 and 11 feet Around 250 lux or 25fc will give you a T2.8 @800 iso which can help you do a rough estimates on what size lights you need for a given space, if you only have basic data for a light.

Some variety of matthboom that fits a baby pin, like a Matthews baby boom. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/33149-REG/Matthews_427801_Baby_Boom.html

The PWM dimmers I was looking at were in the 200Khz range, which is higher than HMI ballasts, and can take a lot of power. Plus not they're not overly expensive ($30-50) and have bi-color options. I'd stay clear of anything from amazon and ebay though.

The diy perks setup looks cumbersome and a bit flimsy Yuji have high CRI mono and bi color strips, and high frequency dimmers https://store.yujiintl.com/ Was planning on having a go at DIY-ing some 2x1 panels, using thermo-conductive epoxy to glue strips to aluminium plate, then encase it in diffusion silk and black ripstop fabric. Maybe with eyelets or velcro in the corners to assemble a larger panel out of several 2x1s. A 200w panel would run for about $200-300. Would love to hear from people who have made their own.

the Arri photometrics app does this and covers all arri brand lights

Omg, that's worse than I thought. I had some info from a small but reputable manufacturer who said the main problem with carpets (even the ones from aladdin) is that after a certain number of bends the copper wiring in the mat will almost certainly break. The only other viable option apparently uses fairly exotic automotive industry tech for the wiring but that makes the mats prohibitively expensive. Nice to hear that they improved that much on the 300d mkii. Did they fix the leaky fresnel ?

I wouldn't say the noise is a deal breaker for sound rec. The mark i has the ballast separate from the dimmer and has an extension cable available which means you can put the ac ballast outside the room. That little ac unit makes a lot more noise than the actual light. When set to "auto" the fans in the light make the same amount of noise as some cameras, but the noise will increase if its at high power and you don't set it back to "force" between takes. Its manageable but an extra thing to deal with. I haven't tried the mark ii. It's still probably one of the most versatile lights you can get for the money. You can make a very nice close soft source out of it. Maybe rent it once and see if you're ok with the noise ? I really like the litemat 4s and 8s but they are more expensive. I haven't tried any carpet style lights yet but I have heard they are fragile and need to be sent back and repaired very often. The intellitech litecloth looks better, the tile design is appealing and could mean it would last a lot longer ?

I hadn't noticed the prizmo in your list, I wasn't aware of this one. Has anyone used it ? How does it measure up to an s60 ?

What sort of shoots are you doing ? Interviews and b-roll or more narrative stuff ? The lights you listed are a mix of soft and hard lights, Rgb/mono/bicolor. maybe you should figure out what you need to prioritize in regards to color temp, softness, battery mobility, case size, etc ? It's hard to find a light that will do everything and that will also fit in a small bag. The 300d is handy and pretty versatile in lots of situations but it does have quite a few drawbacks, namely lots of fan noise from the ballast and the not terribly practical accessories. The barndoors won't fit the basic bowl mount, making the fresnel a must have, unless you are putting a softbox on it. Its power ouput is ok, definitely not on the level of small HMIs but competes well vs gelled tungsten (but less so at 3200k, which tunsgten does better for a lot less money). The fresnel mount is also pretty much mandatory if you want to bounce it precisely or punch it through a window. That said the v1 attachment is pretty cheaply built and needs to be flagged or wrapped in cinefoil to not spill everywhere. Not sure if the v2 fixes this. I find the cheap panel soft lights almost all lack either surface area or power for most stuff, especially if matching to the ambient daylight at 5600k. I find myself using them mostly to supplement other sources, or as hidden practicals (tv or ipad screen) or as back or edge lights (or maybe for a very light bounced fill). I got away with rigging a large flag above a 300D in a light drizzle for 4-5 hours, but I was still a bit nervous doing it. The housing is very open to the elements.

Your reference pic seems to be mostly lit with dimmed practicals. There is an overhead lamp which is giving the room a sort of base level, then the close lamps right and left are lighting the actor's face. They are pushed against the wall to create nice shapes that quickly falloff, and they are dimmed down to make them warmer. The light to the bg right could be used as a soft-ish key or backlight if an actor moves towards the foreground table (where they would also be lit from top). But it also provides a nice contrast between the two spaces on that particular wide shot. Placing practicals close to things (walls, furniture, actors faces like here) will allow you to keep the light contained and create the contrast you want for a moody look. You can put them on one or several dimmer circuits to warm up the colour and have them adjusted to be not too bright when in frame. If you want some practicals around the sofa area as key, like the reference, it might limit your actors movements too much so you might need to supplement with a bit of extra light in a similar direction. If you use the overheads as a top light in the centre sofa area I's suggest trying to keep the light off the walls to not interfer with the background. That way you can get nice moody pools of light from the background practicals. Skirting a toplight or using barndoors/snapgrids for instance works well. You have a built set so that gives you options to remove walls. But black solids out of frame (black curtain on speedrail or in a frame) can help you get more contrast and avoid bounce from the white walls if needed. You could also ask for the walls to be a mid to light grey instead ? They'll look sort of white but just darker. Should give you a bit more margin if you want to keep the light moody ?