Work Lights for Production Lights.. Am I mad for even considering this…?

[Mark Suszko]

No, you are not crazy, if you see these only as a short-term stopgap solution, which is all they erally are. IF you’re doing this to save cash up so you can eventually buy real “big-boy” lights, I think you are on the right track.

The price seems high, though for simple work lights, and I think you’ll find the range and power of those little tubes is not what you’d hoped for. If I was going to go the Home Depot route for temporary lighting, I’d still go with halogen, or I would use long shop light tubes to make a 2-tube to 4-tube, 4-foot diffused soft bank with a head that will fit a light stand and allow some aiming. The halogens can be bounced off of white foamcore boards, or you can make a Chimera-like soft box for them. They need diffusion no matter what else.

[Dennis Size]

Buy the cheap crappy Home Depot fixtures and outfit them with Kino-Flo Tru-Match 2900K lamps

DS

[Bill Davis]

Like everyone else here indicates, there’s NOTHING wrong with using what you can afford in your early days. I remember hauling my fluorescent shop lights on stands into stores back in my early days.

Just understand that what ALL of these do is simply vomit a LOT of generic lumins in a general direction. It’s fine for brining up the overall light level and even filling in eye-socket shadows that can come from overhead fluorescent lighting in stores. PLUS if you can populate your shop lights with EXACTLY the same kind of tubes that light the rest of the store – you won’t have ANY color temp issues.

HOWEVER. All of this has as LITTLE to do with actual movie or quality video lighting as house painting has to do with fine art. Both shop lights and video lights put out visible radiation. But while there’s craft (and a LOT of hard work) involved in painting a house and nobody would or should expect that the time someone spends painting houses in ANY way gets them prepared to paint a person’s portrait. If you aspire to be a portrait painter, you MUST get the proper brushes and canvas and start learning portrait techniques. Time spent doing ANYTHING else is time NOT progressing toward your goal.

And in video lighting, time spent with shop lights and rigging work-arounds might be fun, can certainly can be financially necessary – but it simply doesn’t start your REAL skill development.

Just so you understand.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner

[Todd Terry]

[Bill Davis] “I remember hauling my fluorescent shop lights on stands into stores back in my early days.”

I remember doing that last week.

Seriously, we have a number of Home Depot shop lights that we use… although they don’t usually travel out of the studio, mostly for wall washing and greenscreen illumination. We did doctor them up a bit… they’ve been painted black, they have 5/8″ posts installed on the back, and they’ve had flickerless ballasts and Kino tubes installed. I even made up a fake brand name (“CineGlo”) and put a logo on them… just in case clients see them. But still, at their heart, they are just 15-buck shop lights. And they do what they need to do just fine.

And back to Bill’s painting analogy…. it’s not the brush that makes a great painter… it’s knowing what to do with it.

But having a good paint brush does help 🙂

T2

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