[Jon Frost]

The main advantage of Kino-Flo 4′ 4 Banks are that they are cool… not hot, hot, hot!

I have purchased a 2 x 4′ 4 Bank kit in a road case and a 2x 2′ 4 Bank kit in a road case with bulbs for daylight and tungsten. I also have a car kit as well.

If you are lighting green/blue screen work, Kino-flo makes bulbs for this work as well.

I also carry a variety of Lowel light fixtures and grip by Matthews/Lowel.

You can put together a nice kit for less than $10,000.00. B&H has the best pricing for Kino-Flo and you can find used or new Lowel light kits for less than 2K.

let me know how you make out, or e-mail with questions off forum

Jon Frost
frostgfx@gmail.com

[Jon Frost]

Certainly this thread wasn’t meant to devolve into words of caution:

The whole idea of this thread was to promote the sharing of ideas, methods, materials and experimentation. Every lighting job I have ever worked has been a collaboration between the camera department, gaffers/grips and others to fine tune what the DP is looking for. This involves the sharing of ideas, methods and materials.

Those who are just getting started can learn to appreciate the wisdom of those who came before them. With all the technology ( i.e. Kino-Flo and Cool Lights, RED Camera Systems, Arri Alexa, DLSRs, etc.) related to digital cinema, today’s students have huge opportunities to try out new ideas and rely on tried and true methods decades past.

Thanks for everyone input… Discourse is a wonderful thing!

[Jon Frost]

Rick:

Most of the projects I work on are the no/lo/deferred student projects where any and sometime all the budget is spent renting a RED camera system and maybe not even having 2 HDD backup of the footage…

Some projects are equipped by the school or college/university program, and the students have to come up with an equipment list and often don’t get everything on their list due to the number of students shooting at the same time.

I am primarily providing location audio and possibly media wrangling/DIT. Since I have a full HD production system that I rent, I can fit some small amount of G&E in my car. Often the students are so happy that they come up with some cash to cover the extra gear since it adds immensely to their production quality.

Jon

[Jon Frost]

I so glad this thread has taken off.

I often work with students and it seems that many are not thinking about using scrims and the like that might come in their kits. Most often Lowel 3 or 4 light kits, but without all the suggested accessories. Imagine shooting without scrims, gel frames, etc…. So this is why I suggest that light control devices are another solution. The students seem to know about scrim kits and the occasional 36″ silver/gold collapsable reflector.

I just wrapped on a student project shot below deck on the USS Salem in Quincy, MA. Picture 6-7′ ceilings and all sorts of stuff hanging lower than ceiling height. one Tota omni light or maybe two. No soft box, no hair light, no flags, one reflector… They did have some gel sheets… you get the idea.

On the second day of shooting I brought my 18″ x 24″ Flag Kit and some 20″ C-Stands with grip arms, and a Rifa 66 soft box w/ Lowel Pro light and some gel frames/gel.

What a difference having these few accessories made in shot lighting and shaping of the available lighting.

Thanks for all the insights… I hope the students out there are reading.

Namaste,

Jon Frost

[Jon Frost]

Scott:

Thanks for your input. There are so many ways to put together a basic lighting kit on a budget. I have been reading recent posts where the poster has a budget of say, $500.00… How would you spend that $500?

I’ve seen folks using Home Depot Worklights with 500 watt bulbs and similar fluorescent fixtures. There was an immediate problem since that light could not be controlled other than On/Off.

Most of the jobs I work on are no/lo/deferred jobs produced by students with little or no budget and no real idea of what is necessary to mount a production, feed and water the cast and crew, etc.

I often bring my flag kits and some C-stands to help them out, limited by the available space in my car.

A soft box of some sort would be a nice addition to a light fixture. Next to that, some foam core for flagging, which probably needs a way to mount and position (ala C-stand with a Lowel foam core mounting plate…)

C-47s are always on my list along with some gel/diff.

Welcome any input that helps out the newest graduates from the film schools with mounting their first ‘real world’ production.

Jon

[Jon Frost]

Hi there,

With the variety of projects I work on, many didn’t support using a cart… for instance my last project was below decks on a battleship and the man ways are only 28″ wide and the stairs were almost vertical. A cart is fine if you have the right sized vehicle to transport it, such as a minivan or a small rental van/truck.

When you are looking to transport lights, C-stands, stingers and the like, remember that you also need to weight each C-stand with an appropriate sand or shot bag. Pretty soon you are talking a few to several hundred pounds, so you want a vehicle that can carry all that weight without a problem.

Try to have PA or friend help out with the logistics of carrying everything and feed and water them well.

Good luck.

Jon Frost

[Jon Frost]

DualEyes works nicely on most of my files… Too bad it won’t save the
new synced files to a new folder rather than placing them back in the
folder they came from… duplicating most of the files…

Going on a RED EPIC Cluster tomorrow… waiting to see what the DIT
plans are… Glad I am bringing my MacPro with R3D Data Manager for
all those GBs of files.

Jon
– Show quoted text –

[Jon Frost]

Mike:

Thank for the insight… will look at DualEyes. It would have been nice to let buyers know that Pluraleyes is not yet ported for PPro 5.5.2 yet.

I think the issue was not Importing the Sync XML file after running Pluraleyes… No one is perfect.

Thanks again,

Jon

[Jon Frost]

Todd:

Thanks,

I found the proper link in the Help section after some false starts.

I have been pulling my hair out with my first project in PPro. I certainly wasn’t aware when I bought it as a jump from FCP7, that there were going to be myriad files added to my HDD. Also not pleased with the slow down in performance. I have 32GB DIMM and 28GB dedicated to PPro. I spent 18minutes conforming and creating Peak files for the 81 audio files from my SD 788T recorder.

Is there a better way to deal with these files in PPro?

Also notice again after many attempts, that PluralEyes doesn’t seem to be working with PPro CS 5.5.2. I have the current version of PluralEyes and I didn’t have any trouble in FCP7.

9 clips with associated audio files placed on the timeline in a new sequence. Select All and Export as FCP XML. Save the project. Exports as XML… with a strange report generated. Open PluralEyes and tell it to Open my XML file… Sequence1 with Level Audio, Try Real Hard and Multiprocessing enabled. Press Sync and it runs through the files. When I go back to my timeline, the first file isn’t even close to synced.

I know you’re going to tell me to contact Singular Software and I will in the morning… but I have to wonder if this is a bug…

At this point FCP7 outperforms PPro CS5.5.2 even with FCP7s need to transcode to ProRes 422LT!!!!!!!!!!

Hope you have some answers.

Jon Frost

[Jon Frost]

David:

Sounds like to have things well in hand. 1/4 quality is fine for editing on a slower MAC Pro. If you have the resources, you might want to bump up your DIMM to as much as you can afford and at the fastest rate DIMM for your specific machine. I just went from 12GB to 32GB for about $1K. Well worth the investment to be able to crunch video data!