[Bill Evelyn]

Mark,

I answer your follow-up with some trepidation as my understanding of electrical current is limited. I’m guessing power will be 3-phase to follow heat/air commercial requirements already in place, but that a separate box converting to single-phase is possible to provide power for video equipment. Is this what you mean?

Thanks for your help.

[Bill Evelyn]

Rick, I like the way you think! For a studio setting, your box would work in terms of portabillity but I’m concerned about what audio reflexion I might get off the foamcore. This is something I can build for this project, giving me time to test it out.

The flex-fil option also sounds good and I’ll take a peek at that as well.

Thank you both, — Bill

Bill

[Bill Evelyn]

Hello, Ty

Lots of good advice here, but I’d like to add one more thing that works well. Invest in some neutral density gel, which is a smoky-colored gel available in different degrees of light-stopping “thicknesses.” This gel will knock out the intensity of your light without changing the color temperature. It’s cheap, light to carry, and available lots of places. You can cut to size to fit each light’s gel frame or simply clamp a sheet to the barn doors. Worth its weight in gold.

Bill

[Bill Evelyn]

Let me take a stab at some of your questions. You’ve got $1500 to work with, so the kit you read about in another thread is a good place to start. Whether you key with tungsten or daylight is up to you, but you should turn off overhead lights in offices when you can and always white balance manually. If you are balanced for daylight, any tungsten lamps will look “warmer,” which can be a good thing if that’s what you’re after. Also, if you are balanced for tungsten, then daylight instruments or exterior light will look blue. You can use gels (check out the Rosco website) to change color temperature, but adding gels will also cost you intensity (i.e., brightness) of the light. If you have a good color monitor, calibrated correctly, use it. Take your iris off “automatic” when lighting or shooting. Auto iris is great but interviews are controlled settings so use the manual setting.

The more you shoot interviews…or anything for that matter…the more comfortable you become in your abilities and equipment. Don’t plan to “fix” anything in post.

If you don’t have much experience in interview lighting, and need a quick lesson, spring for the DVD “How to Set Up, Light and Shoot Great Looking Interviews” (Doug Jensen, Vortex Media). There may be others, but I’ve seen this one and it addresses your situation.

Good luck!

Bill

[Bill Evelyn]

For most of our work, we use companies who sell you the rights to use their music, usually a catalog of discs in many genres of music. But for one program we did, I found some very old music and had some local musicians play their own arrangement of that sheet music; we recorded it here and it worked very well for that particular project. Benefits of living in a college town!

Bill

[Bill Evelyn]

Dan,

I purchased two of those HF dimmers you suggested and they are perfect for my application. Thanks for the tip. I continue to be indebted to everyone on this site who has helped me in many ways with equipment and technique questions.

— Bill

Bill

[Bill Evelyn]

Sometimes alternate collections from musicians contain such banter. The Beatles collections in recent years (double CD sets include the brown BBC collection and the three white Capitol sets) come to mind and are full of such chat. Alternate takes of popular studio versions are also fun to listen to. There are also live albums that contain some fun exchanges. 25 years ago much of the Beatles material now found on “official” recordings were sold exclusively as bootleg copies. The draw to these awful recordings was this “never before” heard chat before or after a popular recording. I use the Beatles as as example, but I’m certain there is plenty of “pre-song chat” out there.

Bill

[Bill Evelyn]

Arty, I have been using Lowel lights for over 20 years, and for my application they are great. I am almost always a “one man” operation, so lightweight instruments are important to me. Also, if they break, I’m the guy who broke ’em…you won’t find them in many rental houses because they won’t stand up to much abuse. And next to many other instruments, they’re cheaper to buy and I’ve never paid for a repair. All of the above makes a pretty good deal for my work.

I use the DP (500w), the Riffa light box (750w), the Pro Lights (250w) and the Lowel fresnel (650w) most often.

I do have K5600 and Mole products, and they are wonderful. But they are also heavy and expensive.

How you use your equipment should be an important factor in what instruments you need.