[Erik Anschicks]

Your first solution is probably the easiest and best if traveling light. You could also try the opposite, using white bounce laid on the grass instead of black, or some combination of the two. I’ve used an 8x or 12x of Ultrabounce in these cases, which is SLIGHTLY off-white and gives a more subtle/soft and even bounce effect than regular white would, with pretty good success. It might help you get a little more lift in the face in addition to reducing the green.

[Erik Anschicks]

Not totally sure since they look to have a homemade corplast box built around them, but my guess is they are probably something like a litemat or one of the longer flex light units from Westcott or Aladdin. All of them weigh next to nothing, relatively speaking, so you can get one practically anywhere you need to with minimal rigging efforts.

I’m not sure Stahl is “softer” in the sense that her key is a softer light, but rather it looks a bit more frontal and lower, judging by Trump’s slight nose shadow and her lack of one. It also appears that there’s more fill for her as well. In the top picture there’s a unit boomed in with a blue gel on it which looks to be pointed right at the left side of her face, and she does seem to have the slightest touch of a blue cast on that side in the pic of her CU shot. So my best guess is that it’s a lighting method rather than camera setup.

[Erik Anschicks]

[Bob Cole] ” What are the best alternatives to the old tungsten “broads” in the LED (daylight-balanced) world? “

Gotta say, I really don’t know of any that even approximate the same thing, at least nowhere close in terms of output and compact footprint. The only thing I ever really used actual nook lights for were things like uplighting or architectural-style effects in backgrounds and such. There are LEDs that can do that, but they’re more designed for theatrical and live event type work.

I recently shot on a competition show for the Golf Channel that utilized a ton of them in the backgrounds for some of the sets. It worked well, but it’s not really a like-for-like replacement for field motion-picture work. They also aren’t really specifically made to simulate color-accurate (and natural) 55K daylight, though I’m sure that’s a pre-set look in them.

There are smaller things like literibbons and such that are very small strips which can be made into a fixture similar to a nook, but they don’t have nearly the output an old 1K broad would pump out. I just don’t think LED is there in a size-to-output ratio. If I’m wrong, please tell me, I’d love to see what I’m missing!

[Bob Cole] “What has replaced those lights on the rental trucks? Is there going to be anything that approaches their compactness and output, or do we have to wait for the next thing after LED?”

Same thing, I don’t really think anything in the LED world has replaced them in a like-for-like sense. Honestly, even like 10 years ago, few people were requesting those types on rental jobs, maybe once in a while. For general purposes, people just seemed to gravitate towards putting an open-face Mole or Arri fixture in a Chimera. So the market probably isn’t there for them, at least not one that would make financial sense to try and develop. For broad LED lighting, there are lots of good daylight options, like the Area 48 or Cineo fixtures, the flex-type instruments from Westcott or Aladdin, or the litemat, Quasar, or kino LED options that act closer to a Kinoflo fixture. Any of them will pump out a bunch of broad, color-accurate daylight, though they’re not nearly as small as a nook.

[Erik Anschicks]

I haven’t found one either, at least one suitable for production. It sounds like you’re talking about a retrofit into existing tungsten fixtures, something akin to what Visionsmith does?

If so, my guess is that it would be very hard to make one that slots into a double-ended system that would even come remotely close to matching the raw output from a 1K tungsten double-ended source. There’s not much in the way of ventilation in those units and a heat sink module would be pretty impractical and probably not worth the effort. I would also imagine there isn’t a particularly high demand for this from DPs and gaffers either. I haven’t seen a nook or Tota in any kits or rental trucks in forever, and even the Mickey or Mighty Moles I see are usually just holdovers from tungsten rental packages that haven’t updated or changed in years.

[Erik Anschicks]

You’re welcome, glad to be of help. The biggest thing to realize about the Hive is that it is, as they themselves refer to it, an “HMI 2.0” instrument. It isn’t dimmable, you have to use scrims or nets, and it has a ballast, unlike the Visionsmiths that just plug and play. They CAN be battery-powered, but only with a specific ballast and a BUNCH of bricks. For me, these were non-issues as I’d been used to the workflow of HMIs. Apologies if this was already clear to you from your research, but a surprising amount of people I’ve encountered haven’t realized it so I thought it important to mention.

As with any big purchase, I’d look into trying to get a fixture sent to you for a demo before purchasing it. Talk to Hive, they may be willing to send you one to demo or just rent one and have it shipped to you. Wouldn’t be super cheap I know, but better to have had hands-on experience with something before dropping that kind of cash and be disappointed.

Todd is right on the money with his words about the Astras. They can be awkward to case with their odd size but once you solve that issue there’s a lot to like about them. I myself don’t actually own any, I invested in BBS Area 48 LEDs before these came along, but if I had to do it all over again I’d probably go with Astras, mostly for cost reasons.

[Erik Anschicks]

Unfortunately, Visionsmith doesn’t currently make any Relamp bulbs for the Mole lights you have. I spoke with one of their reps once about a Tweenie relamp and he said the challenge with that instrument is there is much less usable space inside a Tweenie than there is an Arri 650 (which they DO make them for). Ergo, it would be very difficult to put an LED Relamp module inside that would be powerful enough to approximate the output from the tungsten bulb.

The Hives are indeed awesome, but you might well get a similar output if you got a couple old Mole 2Ks and got the 2K Relamps for those as well and it would indeed be cheaper. However, the Hives do have a couple advantages over that solution, namely the ability to put a number of different modifiers in various configurations on them like custom soft boxes, beauty dishes, and my favorite, a Source 4 barrel on them to create a Jo-Leko type instrument. Being essentially an open-face instrument, the source light pumped into it is stronger and more efficient than putting a fresnel in a soft box. They are also most likely still a bit brighter. I haven’t metered one of the 2K Relamps but I do own one of the 1K ones and the Hive still beats it out in FCs by over a stop at similar beam angles.

But if those factors aren’t super important, Relamp might be the way to go. Just watch out for the dimming, they claim you can dim no problem but I have seen flicker issues past a certain point with certain dimmers.

I was in the same boat as you, I was never happy with LED panels until Cineo and Area 48 units came along, and the Astra litepanels are similarly excellent. Very bright, very portable, good color, MUCH more efficient than a Mole in a soft box. I also believe having SOME bi-color solution is important, it saves a great deal of time in places where you might not be able to have total control over the lighting conditions. They are also much lighter, hence easier to travel with and to fly in the air and rig at different angles, which for me matters a lot.

[Erik Anschicks]

Personally, I only use a meter in a couple of circumstances, but in those circumstances, the meter is critical. They are:

1. To give instructions to my crew on what stop to set additional lighting to once I’ve determined the stop I’m shooting at. It’s much faster to say “I’m shooting at a 2.8/4, so light this area two stops under that and this area 1.5 stops over that”, instead of playing around with each individual light at the monitor (“Eh, too bright. Nope, too dark. OK A/B it, no, split the diff….”).

2. To have accurate measures of light intensity to re-create the setup on another day. Someitmes I’m doing the exact same setup for the same shoot/client in multiple locations on different days or maybe it’s a particular “look” that I use for certain common situations for different shoots. Either way, you will make the next time you use certain setups go MUCH more smoothly if you keep an accurate record of the intensity of all the lights.

I will agree with Rick in that the Sekonic 308 is quite good, as is the Sekonic L-508.

[Erik Anschicks]

I own and LOVE those Dedos, but they’re not NEARLY powerful enough to be a do-all workhorse fixture. To me they are mostly supplemental background, accent, or edge/backlight fixtures, and they absolutely excel at that. I’ve keyed with them on rare occasions where I just needed a kiss of light on a face in an otherwise dark scene, but really any small instrument can do that. Putting them through a soft box like on the BH page or through any reasonably thick diffusion just isn’t going to be bright enough for anything but the most controlled, low-light scenes. They just don’t put out the lumens to be very useful as main lights on talent in a variety of circumstances.

You can do a lot of damage with a 15K budget for lighting though, not including any modifiers or grip stuff. I would (and did) get a mixture of hard and softish lights, in varying strengths, in mostly daylight configurations. One or two big lights isn’t going to be particularly versatile, nor is a bunch of small ones, that’s why I suggest a mixture throughout the range of what can be plugged into a single 15 amp circuit. You could do something along the lines of:

3x Litepanel Astra Bi-Color (2K tungsten softlight equivalent) – $4000.00
2x Hive Wasp Plasma Par kits (575w HMI equivalent) – $6560.00 OR 1 Hive 1000 Wasp (>1800w HMI equivalent)
2x Visionsmith 1K LED Relamp, <1K Tungsten fresnel equivalent ($1300) for 2x Mole Baby Tungsten fixtures (used – app $2-300) – $1900.00
2x Dedolight DLED4.1 lights with ballast and barn doors (125w HMI equivalent) – $2200.00
Total – $14,660

That’s a super versatile, portable kit with plenty of punch, it is (approximately) the lumens equivalent to over 13-15.5K of tungsten light that could ALL be plugged into a single 20 amp circuit, or all into a 15 amp circuit minutes the Hive 1000. Or you could add a couple more soft units and drop a hard one or two, drop a light and get stands for all of them, totally up to you. The exact fixture combination can vary wildly and is not the main point. The main idea is to think about the combinations of light quality and intensity and what is going to be the most use to you in the most situations.

[Erik Anschicks]

Your post title is about lighting interviews, so given that and your questions about diffusion qualities, I’d imagine you’re talking about using these fresnels to light the people themselves? Or do you mean lighting the backgrounds/other items in the frame?

Fresnel lenses don’t really “diffuse” light in the same way that actual diffusion does. They really just provide directionality, shape, and controllability to the raw lumens coming from the lamp itself. To directly answer your question, using a fresnel raw with no diffusion on people for an interview is not going to be a whole lot better than an open-face unit. Might be just the SLIGHTEST bit softer, maybe, but it’s going to be pretty hard lighting either way.

Unless it’s the only option you have, putting a fresnel through diffusion largely defeats its purpose, which is to provide you with a controllable, harder source that doesn’t spill where you don’t want it to. The tapered, focused beam of light is largely nullified by all but the lightest of diffusions, and it just isn’t the most efficient use of the unit.

This is why you don’t often see fresnels going through a softbox, it’s much more efficient to just use an open-face unit with diffusion. All the fresnel is really going to do at that point is eat up light unnecessarily as all its benefits are largely negated. It’s a better option to shoot an open-face light through thicker diffusion to light people for interviews, provided, of course, that softening the light on the person is the goal.

IMO fresnels are best suited to light backgrounds or set elements, where you can “paint” with light without diffusion scattering the light everywhere. On the occasion where I want to take a BIT of the edge off the light but still want to retain the overall beam shape and directionality, I’ll use a very subtle, very light bit of diffusion like Hampshire Frost or something akin.

[Erik Anschicks]

The DIY solution is to go to Home Depot and buy a few rolls of replacement screen door mesh. You can usually get an 8′ long by 36″-48″ wide roll right off the shelf. There’s usually varying densities of thickness, which serve the same purpose as a single and double net. I’ve found the thickest one usually knocks down about 2 stops of light, the lighter ones about a stop or so. Get a few different densities to mix and match. I’ve used them on windows for years as they’re DIRT cheap compared to ND gel, or the “real” grip-truck equivalent called Roscoscrim, thus making the decision to cut to perfect window size much easier since they’re relatively pretty painless to replace.

The added benefit is that they can often play in shot more easily than ND gel methods because many commercial and residential buildings these days have similar sun screens/shades installed and could certainly count as “motivated”, if such a thing matters to you.

I’d caution not to cut the light TOO much outside. You don’t want it at the same (or nearly so) levels as the inside or it will look fake. Usually 2-3 stops overexposed out the windows works better, or however much you can get away with before the white levels start to clip.

As far as how to actually light it, that’s really up to you and your fill light limitations. You said you have HMIs, but which ones? Any specific staging requirements for the talent? Provided the scene isn’t too long, I’ve always found it best to not fight the natural orientations of the room. Use the window light as key and fill where necessary as much as you can or want.