Cheap LED lights – remove green / spikes

[Erik Anschicks]

Not sure about post as it’s not my forte, but an easy on-set fix is to get some 1/8 or 1/4 minus green gel and gel your LED’s with that. The eighth should be all you need for most cases. Much easier than fighting that battle in post and a couple sheets of it will cost you around 15-20 bucks.

[Bill Davis]

Its a bit more complicated that that.

The reason that some LEDs and some Fluors have a “green spike” is NOT because they’re putting out extra green. But rather that they are deficient in creating photons in the rest of the color spectrum.

So it’s something MISSING compared to “full spectrum” lighting.

Clearly, it’s hard to BOOSTE something that’s not there in the first place. So the issue with any non-full spectrum light is how much or little of what’s “not there” is truly “not there.”

Better LEDs and CFLs might have spectral deficiencies, but they’re smaller and can be corrected.

This is what the “CRI” metric is all about. How full is the color rendering capacity of the light coming out of the device. The higher that metric, the easier it will be to finesse it to create the look you like.

BTW, it’s not just CFLs and LEDs. Other light technologies, (e.g. sodium vapor – common for many years in local Little League ballparks, etc) can be much worse.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Craig Seeman]

FCPX HyColour plugin has a feature that removes the green spike from what I’ve heard.
“Remove Greencast”
https://www.hyfx.tv/hycolour/

[Richard Jacana]

This was the shoot and as I told the client, not too bad for shooting in her living room with a cheapy $200 LED lamp. ( lighting a little flat but ok I guess) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyI46HjZqTM

Did a test with my DIY fluorescent bulbs with CRI of 83 and I could see the difference. It does seem that the green / or deficiencies are baked in and hard to change in post – at least with FCPx someone simplistic color correction.

Is anyone here actually shooting paid gigs with LEDs. The Academy of Motion pictures and sciences have a video basically dissing all LEDs but this was with film and from 2009 I believe.

I actually bought a gel to correct it a while back but didn’t use it for this shoot – – but I am going to build one of these – and see what’s up!

Desktop Spectrometry Kit
The KIT $40! – https://store.publiclab.org/products/desktop-spectrometry-kit
Some results: https://spectralworkbench.org/tag/led

[Mark Suszko]

It might help your coloring sessions to shoot color chip charts on location in the same lighting setup, to have a numerical basis for how much of each color you need to add or subtract. Macbeth charts are pricy, but there are cheap pocket sized cards on ebay or amazon that might be helpful.

[Todd Terry]

[Richard Jacana] “Is anyone here actually shooting paid gigs with LEDs.”

Definitely. Not just me, but many others I suspect as well.

I predominantly do daylight lighting and mostly direct and DP television commercials. For about five years my principal camera (when not shooting 35mm) was the Canon XLH1. The camera is not super light sensitive, plus we used it with a P+S Technik lens converter which ate a lot of light. Even though my primes are pretty fast superspeeds (f/1.3) I still needed a lot of light, and big instruments and HMIs were the norm.

Now I have retired that camera (as well as the film cameras) and moved to the Canon C300PL… where the ISO will go up to 20,000 (and not really any gain noise below 16,000). This has completely changed the way I light things. Not only is my lighting much more subtractive now instead of additive, but I rarely have to break out the HMIs and almost rely solely on LED instruments. LEDs are definitely my go-to lighting instruments now… in fact on many shoots (when I know exactly what the conditions will be), that’s all I take.

As much as I like the look, I really appreciate the ease that they bring to a shoot. Last week we had a big exterior location shoot that kept me busy all day for four days (in our city’s botanical gardens). I generally had about a half-dozen lighting instruments in play, and with the one exception of a single 1200w HMI I had in the mix, it was an all-LED shoot. It was (almost) a total extension-cord-free shoot too, as all the LED instruments were running off batteries. In fact, the power cable to the HMI ballast was the only stinger on the set… the only one. Everything else was powered either with A/B bricks or smaller batteries, depending on the instrument. That really helped on a location where A/C power sources were minimal and sometimes 1000 feet away or more.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Rick Wise]

Rather than a chip chart, I find a Kodak gray card is a much easier solution. Zoom in to fill the screen. Make sure the card is lit with the main lights of your scene. Provided your NLE has a Vectorscope option, in post color correct the card until there is NO color; all the dots are clustered in the center of the center circle.

Years ago telecine colorists told me they find the gray card the easiest way to set up my footage. That’s only the beginning, of course. After you roll into the scenes you may want to make all kinds of adjustments but at least you are beginning with a neutral color balance.

Shoot the card at the head of each change of lighting.

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Erik Anschicks]

Bill was correct in his reply to my earlier post that the color spectrum lacking in these LED’s is the key issue and yes, it is more complicated than just putting on minus green. However, your comment seemed like you understood that the lights aren’t great, so minus green is a solution to help with what you have.

To the other question about using them on paid gigs, yes I do. But I rent them. I’ve found that unless the LED is SUPER high-end, and therefore jaw-droppingly expensive, you are going to run into some issues. From my (somewhat limited) personal experience with them, the TruColor or the new Aadyntech ones are great, but you’ll pay and arm and a leg for them and that’s just not feasible for a great many shooters. Anything less than that, I’ve been disappointed with relative to what they cost. I realize that’s painting with broad strokes as bit as I’ve not used every brand out there and some may be great (heard great things about the Locasters, for instance), but with the Litepanels or Dedolight ones for instance, I’ve found them to have some green issues and have had to fight in matching them to other units I am using.

At the end of the day, I love the issues of power/heat they solve, but not at the cost of thousands if it’s not giving me a look I’m very happy with.

[Bill Davis]

In the hopes of not mis-leading some into staying away from all the the most expensive units, there are a lot of useable LEDs out there and not all of them cost and arm and a leg.

LED technology continues to improve. In the early days, it was often expensive or total crap. Now the middle has a lot of useful players.

If the color rendering index is even decent, you can either gel or post correct and get looks that are really nice with LED units with CRI ratings in the high 80s and 90s. And some of these are very affordable.

It also depends on what you’re using it to do. In a dark set with tungsten wall wash and your camera expecting 3200k – then even a 90CRI LED might skew too green for your taste.

That exact same instrument used outdoors for facial fill in open shade for an interview might be a totally great solution.

In lighting it’s never one thing. It’s how everything balances out and what you’re trying to accomplish.

So please newer folks coming here to learn, don’t just read how a particular lighting technology has an aspect that people mention and think that means that every use of that light type or brand means you’ll face a problem.

This is part of why there’s no single “best” light for everything.

I’m going to spend part of my Thursday late night on a Canon C300 music video shoot in the middle of the desert. Am I brining all my LED lights? You bet! Battery power is worth it’s weight in platinum for a shoot like that! And since the lead singer has an amazingly outrageously shockingly pink mohawk – I don’t imagine anyone will notice if there’s a little touch of green competing with the road flares, fire poi, coleman lanterns, car headlights and patio torches lighting the rest of the thing!

This is kinda why lighting is known as a “creative” art IMHO.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Ben Edwards]

A few months ago I went to a talk from a Arri guy, it was very interesting (an not just trying to push there kit). The simple answer is use good LEDs/Flow or stick to tungston.

He has a spectrometer (I think that is what it is called) and showed the spectrum different types of light produced. Florescent and LED both have two VERRY pronounced spikes (they are massive) and tungsten has a nice curve (I think the spikes were green and yellow).

He also have some split screen video showing tungston, Ari LED and two other LED packs (I think the the 2 were chap hong kong ones and lightpanels), there were white balanced but no other correction.

The tungston and Arri LED both looked good and very similar. The other two were on nearly as nice (the colours looked slightly wrong).

LED (and Flows) both work by using the main light source (I think it looks blue) whitch exites phosphorescent material (which is the light you are seeing. Cheap lights only use a few so get spikes. More expensive ones use a lot more different phosphoruses (lots of research to work out exactly what is needed) so have less gaps in the spectrum.

Hope this helps.

Ben

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Ben Edwards – Freelance Picture Editor
https://www.funkytwig.com

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