The sun has set on incandescent, and the last of the fluorescent tubes are being snatched off the shelves as they too fade to black. HMI still plays a role in the larger fixtures, but their days are likewise numbered. As for LEDs, it’s been an uneven and sometimes clumsy ascension, but there’s no doubt that they’re the current king of light.

The industry stubbed a few toes while fumbling through the gloom of LED’s infancy, but we’re now getting the lighting tools that work the way we do. 

Trendsetting
When ARRI’s original SkyPanel S60 first came out in 2015, it set a trend: With its RGBW light engine and built-in effects, it heralded new possibilities for what a light could do. Like most early iterations of any new technology, it wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. It even met the economic utility of staying serviceable long enough for the rental houses to amortize their investment. Well done! But that was eight years ago. What’s next?

LED components are still improving at rates reminiscent of the early days of computer chips. Other manufacturers have taken advantage of those advances, making the original SkyPanels look dated today. ARRI was apparently just biding their time working on their updated fixture. Sharing little more than the root name—the SkyPanel X is completely new.

ARRI’s new panel follows the practical 2x1 form factor. Rather than offer stair-step increases in fixture size—as they did in the past—they’ve taken a module approach. Different yoke configurations handle one, two or three heads. This approach simplifies everything from manufacturing on down. 

To paraphrase Darwin, it’s not the brightest light that succeeds in the wild; it’s the most adaptable. ARRI has created an adaptable light by incorporating the best qualities we’ve seen in several of the best lights, rolling them into a single package. With this measured evolutionary step, they’ve raised the bar again.

The new SkyPanel X won’t be for everyone, but it will likely become a “must have” item at rental houses and large studios. These lights offer some exceptional features.

ARRI is abandoning their RGBW light engine for the broader color gamut of RGBACL (Red, Green, Blue, Amber, Cyan and Lime). This brings their SkyPanel X light engine into line with their Orbiter monolight. This change fits well with the larger landscape of products that ARRI is known for—their cameras. This is where things literally come together.

Unique Advantage
LEDs are discontinuous spectrum emitters, unlike incandescent and natural daylight. Camera sensors are, likewise, discontinuous spectrum sensors. By manufacturing both the lights and the cameras, ARRI now controls both the paint and the canvas. The spectral frequencies of the light can now be tuned to match the cameras. This gives ARRI a unique advantage. And they’re making use of that.

With the greater range provided by their RGBACL light engine, SkyPanel X uses software to match the color gamut of various Arri cameras. Although the current software is programmed for ARRI cameras, they could match the LUTs (Look Up Tables) of any camera.

Another advantage of an RGBACL LED package is the ability to accurately adjust for a wide range of CCT (Correlated Color Temperature) while staying closely within the perfect Planckian locus of accuracy. Bicolor, RGBW and RGBWW fixtures are limited in this ability with their smaller color gamut and fewer possible metamer combinations. SkyPanel X should be able to cover a CCT range of 1,500K–20,000K, which is huge. 

SkyPanel X now boasts an integrated power supply, IP 66 (Ingress Protection) rating, the enormous color gamut of RGBACL LEDs, wireless control (LumenRadio CRMX2), and modular scalability with their multiple-head yokes. Old accessories can even be used with an optional adapter, along with new ones, including an unusual, lensed adaptor they call the HyPer Optic.

To some extent, SkyPanel X is both a soft and hard source light.

The HyPer Optic puts a lens in front of every LED chip, collimating the multiple beams into a single round shaft of light. It’s a nice trick that increases the utility of the fixture, but don’t expect it to take the place of a Fresnel. Although it’s effective for pumping light through a window or into a bounce at a distance, you’re less likely to use the HyPer Optic directly on someone in the same room for anything “natural.”

Many of today’s LED fixtures draw so little power that you can almost ignore load calculations. SkyPanel X is not one of them. While the RGBACL light engine provides a broad color gamut, that flexibility comes with a trade-off in efficiency. A single SkyPanel X pulls up to 800W, which is double the original version’s draw.

ARRI boasts that the triple-headed version is as bright as a 2400W HMI. Well, it also pulls 2400W. Based on early data, it still has an acceptable 65 LPW (Lumens per Watt), which is OK in a fixture with the color agility of a six-chip light engine. But if you only require “white” light for use in a conventional studio, there are other fixtures that will be a better fit for cost and energy efficiency. 

Still, I’m impressed with this fixture while acknowledging that nearly all its features are already out there. What the SkyPanel X notably does is combine them into a singular modular light with excellent build quality and high usability. This fixture has undoubtedly set a new bar for other manufacturers to hurdle. As with the original SkyPanel, we not only get a great new tool, but this new version will also encourage the competition to adapt and become even better.  

Bruce Aleksander invites comments and topic suggestions from those interested in lighting at TVLightingguy@hotmail.com.

BERLIN—German broadcaster WeltN24 has commissioned two state-of-the-art TV news studios for its station WELT, each with lighting under IP control, at its Axel Springer Campus, ARRI System Group announced.

The studios are equipped with Ethernet/IP-capable lighting fixtures throughout, enabling end-to-end IP communication and efficient workflows that are integrated into the broadcast infrastructure. The ARRI System Group consulted on, planned and installed the studio lighting and control systems on behalf of system integrator Qvest Media and the mo2 design planning office, it said.

The studios, each nearly 2,000 square feet and 18-feet high, were designed to enable closer networking and collaboration with digital and print. The glass front of Studio 1 offers visibility and being transparent fosters interaction, the company said.

The lighting design required motorized, movable LED video panels on three sides and required a minimum range of movement for the presenters without changing lighting positions. Testing determined 100 ARRI SkyPanel series (S60-C, S30-C) soft lights and moving lights with Fresnel characteristics from Robe Lighting would meet the challenge, ARRI said.

LED bars affixed to the top of motorized video panels to direct appropriate backlight onto presenters supplement the lighting in Studio 1, it added.

In Studio 2, the lighting design called for ARRI’s SkyPanels with different apertures (S120-C, S60-C, S30-C), especially important to meeting green screen requirements. Specifically, the lights achieved optimal light distribution per ARRI System Group templates of photometric simulations, the company said.

One important consideration was the quality level of the lights to ensure the fixtures would meet what’s needed over the long run in a HD/UHD environment. Criteria included the level of color rendering index, options for color temperature adjustments, calibration standards used for the LEDs and service life, it said. 

The IP-based lighting control is a break with the past. “Lighting networks that have been traditionally controlled exclusively via DMX are experiencing more and more limitations in practice,” said Paul Flemming, head of projects at the ARRI System Group. “Therefore, increasing our customers’ requirements for efficient workflows can be met by specifying or designing end-to-end IP systems only.”

“DMX, as a traditional network protocol, limits the use of an intelligent monitoring for the lighting system. Using RDM as a return channel may destabilize the network, plus there are limitations defined in the standard in regard to the data rate and the maximum number of channels per one DMX universe,” he said. “With a lighting control infrastructure based solely on Ethernet/IP, as with WELT, we were able to achieve a system-wide increase in lighting system flexibility and reliability, which is hugely important, especially in 24/7 operations.”

More information is available on the company’s website. 

ATLANTA—The Creative Media Industries Institute at Georgia State University’s College of Arts provides both an opportunity to generate revenue as well as a way to teach students first-hand how to operate as engineers and artists in media and entertainment. Among our facilities are a production studio, digital post-production with audio capture and digital sound edit suites. We’re also pushing into technologies and exposing our students to work in virtual reality, with a demo lab and “VR Cave.”

We recently built the 4D Views Studio, a volumetric capture space to teach students how to create augmented reality elements for the commercial market. This is also the first 4D Views Studio in the United States. I am working with 20 new student engineers in the first state-certified volumetric curriculum in the country.

‘A TRUE STUDIO EXPERIENCE’

The studio, which is about 30x50 feet, is outfitted with a 32-camera 4D Views system. The cameras are grouped in pods of four, and each pod has three individual LED lights surrounded by light boxes. These independent lights have to be married with the lighting grid, and Professor of Practice Herb Kossover and I decided ARRI SkyPanels were the ideal fit for the system. ARRI lights are relatively easy to use, and we’ve been able to complete the core component of instruction in a single three-hour class. All our engineers have quickly adapted to the ARRI SkyPanels with professionalism and ease.

We have nine SkyPanel S60-Cs installed on the grid, with a couple tripod-mounted for floor-based lighting scenarios. Another reason we decided to go with the ARRI SkyPanels was quality. ARRI is the industry standard; it’s what most studios prefer and, in my experience, you’ll find them more often than not on location. We want to give the students a true studio experience, so we bring in the hardware we believe will give them that.

UNDER THE LIGHTS

Since opening, we’ve produced several commercial projects in the 4D View Studio for Santander Bank and Arcturus. The most recent project was really exciting: working with the NFL and United Way on a Super Bowl project to create a volumetric digital character for an interactive virtual reality piece at Atlanta’s Centennial Park. We captured NFL legend Jerry Rice for a piece called “Character Playbook,” which has the digital Jerry teaching middle schoolers about how to “make the right call” on topics like bullying.

In capturing him, it was crucial that the specific color temperature of the ARRI lights tied into the color temperature of the LEDs coming off the pods. The two systems had to work together to ascertain Jerry’s very distinct and recognizable look. Light and reflection were also important; we had to control the amount of reflection coming off his head and face and maintain a high level of control. The ARRI lights were a perfect solution.

We’ve found that flexibility of the ARRI SkyPanels helps on our multi-use stage. We can roll up the volumetric system, move it off, change the entire stage configuration, and the ARRI lights just work. Having that flexibility is paramount for us. I’m also confident that the lights will be robust. In the year we’ve had them, they’ve been pretty much maintenance-free.

James Martin is professor of practice in the Creative Media Industries Institute at Georgia State. He has been working in animation services since 1999 and has worked on animation and graphics for film and TV projects. He can be contacted atjmartin148@gsu.edu.

For more information, visitarri.comor call 845-353-1400.

Kent, United Kingdom (March 25, 2019) – Hawk-woods, developer of power solutions for the broadcast, film and pro-video industries, is pleased to announce the new 48V-RP power station, a unique power solution which allows users to power ARRI Skypanels and other 48 volt (V) LED lighting when mains power is not available. Hawk-woods new 48V-RP is one of the first power solutions which enables users to run high voltage LEDs at 100% light output via a DC input.

“The new 48V-RP power station is an incredible breakthrough that provides ultimate flexibility to content creators. This is one of the first portable power solution that can run high voltage LEDs at 100%. Standard manufacturers 22-36V DC inputs simply cannot do what the new 48V-RP can,” explains Jason Stewart from Hawk-woods.

The 4-way 48V-RP power station uses Hawk-woods Reel Power batteries, 26V batteries designed to power high power draw cameras and regularly used by ARRI Rentals for modern ARRI film cameras.

Why 26V batteries? The choice to use 26V Reel Power batteries over 14.4V batteries was made to increase reliability and prolong the batteries life cycle. 14.4V batteries use a higher current than a 26V battery at twice the voltage (half the current a 14.4V produces). This means that electronics run cooler at 48V, and batteries are under less stress, therefore, prolonging the life cycle of the batteries cells.

While the Reel Power batteries range in capacity from 100wh – 350wh, Hawk-woods recommends the new 48V-RP be used with the RP-200H, RP-250N or the largest RP-350N to provide a maximum of 1400wh to the LED! For example, using the new 48V-RP combined with four Hawk-woods RP-350N’s, a user could power the ARRI SKYPANEL S120-C at 100% light output (430wh) for up to 3 Hours 15 minutes of continuous runtime. Runtime would increase should the user run the light at 50% output.

The 48V-RP is exceptionally versatile and can also power 24v lighting.

Examples of runtime using 100% LED light output powering ARRI SKYPANEL S120-C (430Wh):

4x RP-200H (800WH) = 1 Hour 50 Mins

4x RP-250N (1000WH) = 2 Hour 20 Mins

4x RP-350N (1400WH) = 3 Hour 15 Mins

48V-RP Specifications:

Input = Requires 4x Reel Power Batteries

DC Output 1 = 48V regulated

DC Output 2 = 22v-29v Nominal

For more information on the 48V-RP and Hawk-woods new products, please visit Hawk-Woods at the Manios Digital booth at NAB 2019 (Booth C9020, Central Hall).

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Understanding color temperature is not a daunting task. What can be intimidating is being on location and needing to deal with a range of different temperatures at once. The camera can only be set to a single Kelvin reading at a time as its white balance, so how do we deal with different colored lights?

To review, and despite our quickly evolving lighting technology, we still speak in two main color temperatures—tungsten (3200°K) and daylight (5500°K). The lower the number on the Kelvin scale, the warmer; and the higher the number, the cooler. Obviously when shooting on film, which a lot of us do, we are choosing between these two color temperatures in terms of our film stock. With digital, which the examples in this article reflect, we have the ease of dialing in our white balance to whatever reading we choose. However, you still only have that one base number set on the camera, so you have to build around that white balance.

The first and most common example that comes to mind when needing to make some very specific color choices is night. Whether it is night exterior or night interior, the cinematographer is faced with juggling a spectrum of colors.

MOONLIGHT, YES OR NO

Typically, the first decision you have to make with night exteriors is whether or not there is going to be moonlight. If there is moonlight, what color is it? There are varying opinions on what moonlight should look like in order to emulate realistic moonlight, but it has appeared differently in quality, color and intensity since the beginning of cinema, so it’s up to the cinematographer. 

There doesn’t even have to be moonlight. When it comes to mixing color temperatures, you want to base the camera’s white balance on the ambient light in the space. If that ambient light is moonlight and your moonlight is bluer, then balancing closer to daylight is wise. If you’re inside for a night interior and your ambience is tungsten lamps with a little moonlight spilling in a window, then balancing closer to tungsten is the way to go. This minimizes the amount of units you have to tweak to avoid any over-saturation with particular colors.

I find myself, as many do, shooting night scenes in the mid 4000s to further balance between warmer and cooler sources. This saves from having to convert or correct any of the units too much with gels. The green-magenta axis is not helped, however, so that is something that will need constant attention and correction, especially if you’re on location using sources that are built into the space. 

With newer LED lights, you can easily dial in color temperature and tint to find the sweet spot when faced with balancing many color temperatures. If you have something like HMIs coming in through a window however, you will need to rely on gels to correct. Alternatively, you could set the base color around those units that are not as easy to correct. Then you could go around to the other lights you are using such as LEDs and simply dial in the color output.

STREETLIGHTS AND NEON SIGNS

Another example is using bold colors in a scene to represent a streetlight, neon sign, etc. It is always important to choose a base color temperature in any situation. Depending on your base, whether tungsten, daylight or somewhere in-between, different colors can appear slightly different. You will want to preview whatever LUT you are using on monitor and/or use a color meter to really dial in these bolder colors that are far away from your base color temperature. 

In the film “Windfall,” we had many units like ARRI Skypanels so we could choose specific colors. In a dinner scene that was set in an apartment in 1970s San Francisco, we threw purple in as a background light to add some separation and had a Jemball with a tungsten bulb over the table as our base, with the camera set to 3200°K. Throughout the project, I set mainly tungsten on the camera and used that as my base when lighting scenes. As a result, cooler sources like blue and purple really read boldly and contrasted beautifully with warmer units.

The point of this is that mixing color temperatures in a scene should not feel intimidating, rather, it should be seen as an opportunity to create depth, visual interest and visual tension. Differences in color can break up a space, separate subjects from the background and create tone. Having a singular color in a space can flatten it out. These are all choices, but it is important to keep in mind all the possibilities and techniques that mixing colors brings with it. It can make every image much more dynamic. With evolving lighting technology that is becoming more and more sophisticated and color accurate, we can more easily choose and balance color. It has become a very easy, accurate process that can really enhance the narrative.

Julia Swain is a cinematographer based in California, whose narrative films include “Killing Animals,” “Jilted” and “Cassidy Red.” She continues to shoot on a variety of formats, seeking to create compelling visuals for every story and brand. She can be contacted throughTV Technology.

Top picture: Tungsten ambience on a night interior for the film “Down to Nothing”

When LEDs began to take over from old-style light bulbs in homes and businesses, the film industry looked on in awe. The mathematics were impossible to ignore: at a conservative estimation, these new light sources produced four or five times as much light as the traditional technology for the same power? And despite some early uncertainty over color rendering, it’s now reasonably easy to obtain lights that fulfill that early promise to at least some degree.

Over roughly the same period of time, we’ve also seen camera sensitivity increase greatly. Film never really got much faster than ISO 500 — there was some 800 but it was grainy, perhaps so grainy that people preferred to push-process the 500 and end up in much the same place. Now, with Panasonic's Varicam 35 at the high end and the Sony A7 series still cameras for everyone else, it’s possible to shoot at very high ISOs with reasonable noise performance. In an emergency, usable pictures can be shot at several thousand ISO, give or take the fact that “usable” is a matter of opinion.

DON’T ROCK THE BOAT

That heady combination of more efficient lights and faster cameras should have revolutionized camerawork, and yes, it’s hard to object to the fact that things like sit-down interviews can now be done on battery power. Even so, crews on high-end productions still reach for 18 kW HMIs to light night exteriors in the same way they have for decades. Why do they do that? Well, nobody wants to be responsible for rocking the boat when the camera and light budget is such a small financial part of big productions. The fear of problems with new tech easily outweighs the desire for savings, and that’s slow to change.

[Read: Lighting For Open Locations]

But technical conservatism can’t explain everything. Is it possible that people still use big traditional lights because there is genuinely no LED that will do the job of an 18 kW HMI? The Mole Tener LED, a 1600 W device, is probably the highest-powered LED around, and as the name suggests, it’s intended to replace a 10 kW tungsten halogen device. For that to work, the LED would need to be more than six times as efficient as the tungsten halogen light, which is plausible, because LEDs exceed the efficiency of tungsten halogen hugely. But how do they compare to HMI?

It’s a contentious comparison partly because salesmanship is involved, but also because LED and HMI exist in wildly different power levels and housing styles. Mole's Tener is a real monster, and not very typical; LEDs in 2018 are usually rated at a few hundred watts. Common devices include Arri’s 400 W Skypanel S60 series, the 300 W Aputure COB-300D, or the Fiilex Q1000, at 340 W. HMIs cross over with this range to some extent, but while 200 W HMIs exist, the smallest common unit is 575 W and they go all the way up to 24,000 W. HMI begins where LED ends, and it’s a different world entirely.

The ways in which we direct and focus light also makes a difference. An HMI bulb emits light in more or less all directions, while an LED emitter can be built to work in a wide variety of ways. Both devices may need reflectors and lenses which can be more or less effective at pushing light in a useful direction, and the losses involved in doing that vary with different technologies. The traditional Fresnel is very controllable, for instance, but sacrifices a lot of efficiency — an HMI globe in a Fresnel is blasting most of its output into the inside of the housing, not onto the scene. LED Fresnels often use a reflector designed to capture more of the emitter’s output and fire it through the lens. They may be more optically efficient but can produce less well-defined shadows.

APPLES AND ORANGES

So the relationship between power input, light output, and the behavior of a light make things complicated. Comparing technologies is therefore an inexact science, though there are some basic numbers that are useful so long as they’re interpreted with those complexities in mind. HMI, for instance, emits something like 100 or 105 lumens of light per watt energy consumed, and it isn’t a particularly up-to-date or recent technology, having been developed in the 1960s. LEDs have achieved twice that in the lab, but any LED with good color rendering will probably be down around 120 lumens per watt — maybe 20 percent better than HMI or fluorescent.

So, LED lights are actually barely more efficient than HMI and aren’t available in nearly such high power levels. They’re generally nowhere near replacing the biggest HMIs, even if we take into account that two- or three-stop increase in camera sensitivity. If we assume that cameras are two stops faster than perhaps a decade ago (for equivalent noise performance) and the average LED is 200 W, that only works out to the equivalent of an 800 W light. That still isn’t enough to backlight a big night exterior on a city street. Has all this been a waste of time, then?

Certainly not. It’s made life a lot easier for what we might call “productions on the boundaries.” A small production which might have just about stretched to a 6 kW HMI, a generator and an ISO 500 camera can now shoot at ISO 1250 and get similar results from an LED that can be run from the wall. Avoiding the generator and the crew it saves a huge amount of money. Similarly, productions which might have spent time running in mains cables to light a simple interview can probably do it entirely on battery power now, saving mainly time, and, therefore money as well. Huge productions still need generators; medium-sized ones might not quite be able to go entirely off-grid and work with batteries, but there are productions on the edges of those definitions which will find their lives becoming easier. That’s progress.

It’s just not a revolution. If LED lighting has a killer application, it’s probably the creation of large scale soft lights, where a product such as Aladdin’s Fabric Light can be rigged directly into a diffusion frame. It’s far faster to set up than the traditional Fresnel and diffusion fabric, but it’s also far more powerful because it’s much more efficient than firing light through a filter, which can result in as much bouncing back as passes through. Small, battery-powered lights are hugely useful. In these situations, LED works beautifully. Otherwise, it’ll be a while before power levels creep up enough to change the exposure equation for everyone. It’ll happen, but it will take time, and that’s probably no bad thing in a field where experience is hard-won.

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