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Construction Light Towers w/ Generator built in


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 I hope all is well with you all. Has any one ever used portable light towers like what's below for making movies? You get so much power for cheap, I wonder if I could use something like this instead of an HMI. No one wants to ship an HMI to my location for rental and buying is not an option unfortunately. Thank you in advance.

https://www.unitedrentals.com/market...-light-tower#/

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Watch out for flicker, as well. It's possible that many of them will have electronic ballasts if they're really modern, but it'll be necessary to test.

Most of them are just metal halide lights of one sort or another. You could even maybe relamp them if you could find out what sort of bulbs they take. I would expect most of the options to have less than ideal colour behaviour, but it depends what you want. If you want an archetypal cool blue backlight for a night exterior, it might be fine.

There are, of course, LED light towers on generators too. Less likely to flicker, more likely to be basically cyan.

Edit: I googled around a bit and discovered one example, the ArcGen VertiTower, which takes 1000W metal halide bulbs with an E40 base. Bulbs with a colour temperature around 5000K are readily available in this style, but they have rather poor colour rendering. Again, if you want a general cool blue night exterior look, it might be okay. You need to be a bit careful about what type of bulbs they need, what type of starters they use, and so on.

P

 

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I actually used LED "wacker" construction lights for the demolished Capitol Building emergency worker scene in the pilot to "Designated Survivor" -- I wanted them in the frame with the cyan color, my only concern was the noise from the built-in generators which are not silent. I think we ended up powering them from our own generator.

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