[John Sharaf]

Terry’s done this a million times, and so have I. That’s why I’m a little surprised that he did not recommend 80ire for white. That’s the standard I have know and used for years, and has often been confirmed to me when I work on or visit other of these types of big time shoots; it’s always 80ire.

The old time reason is that when video receivers were over modulated (either by video or audio) they would clamp it down. In video this meant that the foreground scene was pushed down too and became darker.

Nowadays we have mostly (non-CRT) displays that are essentially “over bright” in the whites. For all intent and purpose when the image is white, the display becomes a light). Your 80ire video is going to look like 100 on the screeen.

Of course a future of HDR displays threatens our current calculation. These displays are only able to have an extended dynamic range by making the brights even brighter. We can only hope the designers and engineers involved consider this common construct of white limbo as they fiddle further with our well intentioned imagery.

Bottom line; set the white where it looks best on your intended delivery system.

Cheers

JS

[John Sharaf]

For still work, strobes are always the best choice; much more light in case you want deep focus and very short flash duration for freezing the moment.

I’ve never liked Divas vs. traditional KF’s which I consider a more stable color over time, and as they heat up over the day.
Of course the Diva’s do dim which is sometimes the deal breaker, but of course there other ways to waste a KF.

I’ve recently discovered Quasar Science LED tubes which retrofit into the conventional KF units with these advantages:

1. Selectable Daylight or Tungsten (or even varied steps) with built in switch
2. Dimmable with squeezers without changing color
3. Long life (20K+hours)
4. 50% more output, such that a FourBank now has Six Tubes, and a TwoBank has Three Tubes

If you ever have the opportunity to use these tubes, you will eventually retrofit any conventional KF’s you have. I even did my 18″ Singles and WOW what a light that is!

JS

[John Sharaf]

I’m keeping my temporary power distro system in my studio, in case I ever need a light bigger than 20A (household)
Selling all my HMI’s, yes. Including 4K’s and 1800’s 800’s which I’ve replaced with WASP 1K and BEE 275w Plasmas (very efficient).
Relamped Babies and Juniors (with VisionSmith LED’s) and Kinos with Quasar LED Strips are bright and dimmable; use them for studio lighting and location, along with Cineo MatchSticks, Matchbox, Mavericks, LS, HS and XS (checkout these manufacturer’s websites).
These decisions represent the rapidly changing lighting technology that’s available these days.
Sorry if I was unclear.

[John Sharaf]

I’m having deja vu, or maybe this is continuation of a previous thread, but the LED solutions are simple, but they’re hard to find in the forest!

Hard light: Finally not a problem anymore! VisionSmith Relamps current and legacy Fresnels (up to 2K) at very high efficiency (250w = 2000w), low or no heat, daylight or tungsten, dimming without color change, and lasts 20K hours. Same with conventional 1K, 650, 300 Fresnels. I bought a MR 407 today on ebay to make into one of these.

Softlight: Double the output of your Kino Flos by replacing the tubes with Linear Strips from Quasar Science. You eliminate the ballast, the dedicated cable and gain output, choice of daylight/tung by a switch setting, dimmability (sounding familiar?), oh and lasts a lifetime

In-Between: My first LED love – Cineo TrueColor HS, which was the result of a lot of money spent in research and design when the industry was young, and has evolved into a line of products which grows logarithmically; from the tiny 3″ MatchStick to the Mombo light class QUANTUM (75000 lumens at 1200w) of profession, mission critical, modern lighting kit.

As I said before; I’m selling all the heavy feeder cable, distro (except what I use in my studio), HMI’s but retooling the small tungsten kit and Kinos.

Your mileage will vary as the saying sos

Cheers,

JS

[John Sharaf]

Hi Rick, Terry and Mike,

As an early adopter of Panasonic V35 (and now LT) Cameras, I’ve now had more than two years experience with using Native 5000 ISO. I often dial it down to make it even more quiet (although noise level at 800 AND 5000 is practically the same – 1 dB different!) and/or to move the middle gray to manipulate the exposure.

Because there is often no need for “headroom” in dark scenes, you can lower the ISO and extend the exposure into the shadow; so instead of 7 stops above and 7 below you might have 6 above and 8 below! There are many times this is useful. It’s counter-intuitive, because when people lower the ISO outside, say from 800 to 160, you’re losing 2+ stops of highlights (much better to use ND’s).

As a result I have changed the way I light. I’ll expose for the ambient background and control the foreground lighting often by reducing or blocking it. Dimmable and color accurate LED’s are the first choice; I prefer the CINEO line of softlights, these come in single 1×1 type, 2×1 and 2×2, so there essentially a baby, junior and senior size (and volume).

Just recently I have received the first of my VisionSmith LED Replacements. These are ingenious and I predict will overrun the business.

I have mine (you choose either daylight or tungsten) inside my MR Baby Junior heads and not only are they brighter than a tungsten 2K, can be daylight, have great color reproduction and skin tone, are dimmable, but only use less than two amps (250W). You can now run 10 “juniors” off of one household 20A circuit!

Also you can buy these “old school” heads cheep. I’ll bet both Todd and Rick have some lying around. The VisionSmiths are also available now for full sized 1K, 650’s and 300’s @ 150w, 75w and 50 watt, and they’re coming with a 75w small enough to fit in the MR Baby Baby soon.

As a result, I’ve sold four of my eight Joker 800’s and are selling the rest of them now!

As far as a big light, I’m replacing my ARRI M18’s, which are probably the best light of the last 5 years, with HIVE Plasma Technology. They have a 1000w WASP Light that’s brighter than a 10K and under $10K complete. It’s great as a high backlight over an action area or up-close in a Medium Chimera or into a thick 4′,6′ or 8′ panel like Muslin.

Chew on that!

Cheers,

JS

[John Sharaf]

Of course. That’s what it should say.
All I think is that at such a low cost for the complete light, the fluorescent globes are at such a low quality that they flicker enough to be seen with the shorter motion picture exposure, but is not so apparent to the eye/brain.
I’m afraid you’re getting what you paid for!

Cheers,

JS

[John Sharaf]

OK Sherlock, lots of clues here!
Seems like you’re in the UK, shooting 25FPS, and you bought these lights thinking in GBP thinking they’d work in the UK, but looks like you might have gotten “US” model. Any markings on the box?
Perhaps the Flo-Globes are 60htz not 50htz, just buy replacement globes locally and you’re on the air.

JS

[John Sharaf]

I don’t see any flickering
I suspect it’s your monitor
Did you shoot at 24P?
Many monitors flicker at this rate
You’ll need to monitor at 30FPS (to include the repeated 3:2 pulldown) to view properly.
It’s either a setting in the monitor or the editing platform

JMHO

JS

[John Sharaf]

Hi Bruce,

No really hard and fast rule. Conventional wisdom from the “video” era was to put Eurasian skin tone at 70 IRE (or %), but the newer cameras that have extended the nominal Dynamic Range from the typical 8 stops in Video to as much as 14+ stops in Cinegamma modes (by virtue of logarithmic not straight line gamma curves and higher recording bit depth) also give you more “latitude” about where you put the skin tone.

Essentially there are now more tones in the same space (100%) so by lowering the skin tone exposure, there is more room for tonalities that approach the white clip.You’ll often find that what was 100% white before is now at 80-90% now, and some detail is held above that that would previously have been clipped.

The other important consideration in reading skin tone exposure on the waveform, and it’s great that you have learned how to do this, is to create a more consistent product by “matching” the exposure shot to shot and scene to scene. This also makes your post production color correction faster and more efficient.

Hope this helps,

JS

[John Sharaf]

Sometimes this is Auto Knee! Check your setting.

JS