Cheap LED lights – remove green / spikes

[Craig Alan]

Care to share your list of LEDs?

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Bob Cole]

[Todd Terry] “all-LED shoot”

Sounds great. Which LED lights do you like, and why those, for exterior shoots? I really like the idea of being able to operate without AC.

Bob C

[Todd Terry]

Well I have to admit Bob that I didn’t jump in with both feet and buy great gear right off the bat (although I always recommend that… do as I say, not as I do)… but we went a bit on the cheap route just to try LEDs out since we’d never really used them before.

We bought several Chinese knock-offs of the LEDZ Brutes, like this one…

https://www.led-z.com/brute16.htm

…except ours all have 20 cells each instead of 16. Now those are pretty expensive (about $2500 a head) but the ones we bought were much less. I’m on location and don’t have them with me but I’ll look up the exact models later.

We did heavily modify them though… primarily power. I opened them up and did a bit of wiring and added a goldmount to the back of each so they can be powered with an AB battery (which is the way we always use them… I never plug them in). I also added a mounting receiver on them so I can attach an umbrella or diffusion frame to each… and I drilled angled holes in the gel frame brackets to create a built-in speed ring so they will accept softbox rods without any additional hardware.

Luckily, for cheap instruments they seem to have an extremely high CRI… we’ve scoped and color-metered them and they seem right on the money at 5600°, and zero green spikes.

For smaller lights (like hair lights, accent lighting) we use the Switronix TorchLED instruments…

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/824710-REG/Switronix_TL_BT200_TorchLED_Bolt_On_Camera_LED.html

They’re awesome, and bi-color… you can dial in the exact temp you need. Now these don’t have enough punch for any exterior use, but they are great for interiors. The only problem is they natively only have a shoe mount since they are designed as on-camera lights, so we had to rig adapters so they can be used on the baby pin of a C-stand or a grip arm.

What I really want is one of the big instruments from Aadyntech. They have an LED fresnel (well sort of fresnel) with the same output as a 1200 HMI, that will run four or five hours on battery. I think the head and battery still top about $6K though, so maybe down the road… not right now though.

T2

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

[Ben Edwards]

Interesting, not sure if CRI is appropriate for LEDs, in fact it is fairly lacking generally from what I can gather, it, for example, only tests for relatively low saturations.

Have you tried doing any real world comparisons against incandescent?

Ben

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

i5 550, Windows 7 / Mac Lion, Nvida 550 Ti, 8GB Mem

[Mark Suszko]

We just recently got our first LED fixture.

I lobbied for an LED PAR can light with built-in DMX controller from American DJ, thru Markertek; it was a pretty inexpensive purchase, under $200, but I got it so as to have one light that can wash a wall with any of 37-odd colors, and there’s no gels to keep track of or buy. To you guys, that may not mean much, but here it could take me a year to order just basic replacement gels.

Now I won’t have to.

This little guy looks great: even has a sound-sensitive setup you can invoke where you can tap on it to simulate lightning, or the flicker of a campfire.. cop car mars lights, or radar/computer display light spilling onto the operator’s face… it has variable rate blink sequences for that “hotel vacancy sign outside the window” effect, etc. And of course if the office birthday/retirement party needs a little more “oomph”, we can just set this to strobe colors to the beat of the music:-)

With help from a COW member, We found a very inexpensive external DMX controller for it as well, enabling highly precise color mixes in the studio.

[Rick Wise]

Mark, can you please identify your happy LED light? Perhaps a link?

Thanks,

Rick

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

[Mark Suszko]

$150-ish, here

https://www.markertek.com/Lighting-Background-Effects/Par-Can-Lights/American-DJ/64B-LED-PRO.xhtml

There are more powerful versions, for more money. This one seemed like a good compromise for the small walls I will be using it on.

[Rick Wise]

Thanks, Mark. Looks like there is no easy way to mount one of these on a light stand. But fun to use.

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

[Todd Terry]

[Rick Wise] “Looks like there is no easy way to mount one of these on a light stand.”

Rick, if you’re anywhere near as big a packrat as I am, you probably have a few of these doohickeys around….

…stolen off an old or broken instrument (I can never throw potentially useful bits and pieces away). Bolt that onto the bottom of that rear “leg” and you have a pretty conventional yoke that will fit a baby pin.

T2

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

[Rick Wise]

Thanks Todd. Also something like this Avenger “super clamp” (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/3575-REG/Avenger_C1575B_C1575B_Super_Clamp.html) could do the job.

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