PROVIDENCE, R.I.—The Boston Media Center (BMC) is the definition of “bleeding-edge technology” for all that is broadcast news and sports. It includes affiliate locations for NBC and Telemundo, and serves as broadcast facilities for New England Cable Network (NECN) and Comcast Sports.

We recently hired Spectum401, a Rhode Island-based lighting design firm, to design and install lighting for NBC, Telemundo and NECN, as well as several specialized sets in the facility. Spectrum401 had previously worked with BMC to convert their original studio location to the NBC Boston station. We wanted the design for the new center to be flexible and adaptable with the ever-changing style of each brand as well as take advantage of the versatility of full-color lighting products as a key technology.

LIGHTING THE WAY

The BMC wanted to be able to move around their studios with ease to create new shots on the fly, and in addition to using full color fixtures, we needed a great soft light that would help fill the space and be flattering to the talent. There were many options on the market for fixtures, and after testing numerous options we found that Cineo’s LightBlade technology had a very versatile fixture lineup that could work in each application.

All three studios have their individual identity, but they are all based on the same similar lighting design concept. The talent’s face is wrapped with soft lights while firm back and side light fills in their figure. To do this, we specifically used the full Cineo LightBlade family to wrap the talent while using the ETC ColorSource family to add the firm back and side lighting.

The decision to use the LightBlade products as the source that would wrap the talent was an easy one to make because of the variable CCT with +/-plus green and the full range of an RGBW fixture. This allowed us to be flexible, subtly altering the lighting depending on the individual skin tones of each talent. Fixtures such as the LB800 gave high output from a great distance, enabling us to use less fixtures in a smaller footprint. We supplemented the rig with Cineo Standard 410 to fill in the rest of the lighting plot. The quality consistency of the various fixtures made it easy to mix and match.

CRAFTING UNIQUE LOOKS

Using Cineo fixtures for most of the lighting design while supplementing with the ETC ColorSource family made the entire rig extremely flexible; having it composed of full color spectrum fixtures allowed us to give each studio its own unique identity.

We were able to create an everyday base look in each studio. Then, without having to hang or refocus additional fixtures, we were able to create moody and edgy light for Breaking News, Special Election Coverage and Special Report broadcasts. This also allowed the rest of the BCM programing to use these studios while maintaining each program’s own unique appearance.

By using high-quality and fully versatile fixtures in our design, we were able to adapt to all the client’s needs.

JM Montecalvo is the CEO/president of Spectrum401 Inc., a bi-coastal lighting design firm specializing in themed entertainment and broadcasting. He can be contacted at jm@spectrum401.com.

For more information, contact Cineo Lighting at 818-777-1814 or visit www.cineolighting.com.

WASHINGTON—Like almost every other part of our industry, suppliers of professional lighting have seen the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on manufacturing to customer support. And with industry trade shows cancelled for the foreseeable future, vendors are having to improvise the way they market, support and sell to their customers. 

BB&S

Tobi Sali with BB&S Lighting said that his company moved operations to employees’ homes and worked hard to maintain a consistent and reliable point of contact and support for their customers.

“I kept my office open two or three days a week. I was always available 24/7 on the phone and on the website,” he said. “And we were handling orders. Our warehouse in Las Vegas stayed open the whole time.”

Since BB&S products are manufactured in Denmark, Sali said they took extra precautions when taking deliveries.

“When we got a shipment in from Copenhagen, we would isolate it for four or five days before it ever got opened,” he said. “We added an additional week of it sitting there sprayed with alcohol to make sure that we didn’t have any problems.”

For the NAB Show, BB&S was going to debut its Compact Beamlight BiColor (CBL), a lighting unit that offers a range of 2,700–5,700 degrees K and 98 TLCI. The company has also upgraded its Area 96, adding a fan and upping the output, according to Sali.

“It’s about 10–15% more output than an ARRI 360 Sky Panel at less money,” he said.

CINEO

Cineo had planned on launching the ReFlex, a production-oriented 15A, 125,000 lumen LED-based hard light, according to Rich Pierceall, vice president of LED operations for the NBCUniversal-owned company.

“All productions have gone on hiatus so we’ve delayed the launch and instead we’ve been doing a series of beta tests to customers to basically try to get a more refined product,” he said. “So, that’s how we’ve been spending the time in terms of that product that we were going to release at the NAB Show. And so we’re anticipating releasing that product probably by the end of July when production comes back.”

Although production may be on the way back, many installation projects have been put off for now, he added.

“We found that most capital relighting projects have been postponed,” he said. “So, we anticipate fewer projects that were scheduled to be green-lit, even in the second half of 2020, to be pushed into 2021.”

With trade shows cancelled for the foreseeable future, Pierceall said he personally thinks the dynamic of the events will be changed.

“This is an interesting test period, how can we effectively market products without relying on trade shows, which is something that lighting people really rely on to bring out new products and to show people how things work,” he said.

In terms of future product development, Pierceall says R&D continues to be an important focus for the company.

“We’ve spent a considerable amount of time looking at things like VR, which is going to be a bigger thing in production than we’ve ever seen before,” he said. “And we’re looking at how can we do more with less in terms of smaller crew sizes and automation and control.”

ARRI

Business has been steady for ARRI despite current events, according to Jason Inouye, technical sales representative for the company.

When the lockdown started, “a lot of marketing executives reached out, telling me they needed to get cameras for marketing TV shows, commercials, but couldn’t have anyone in front of talent because of social distancing,” he said. “So we developed this remote solution where we can bring in our ALEXA mini LF camera system, or any of our ALEXA AMIRA camera systems, and be allowed to use cellular network bonding to send a stream out from the camera and it could be recorded offsite somewhere. A remote start would trigger the camera as well from anywhere in the world.

“Then people wanted to remotely control the lighting. And so you can use our camera through this box as an access point to actually put your SkyPanels through there as well, and then control the lighting system via IP,” he added.

Integrating IP control capabilities to its cameras and lighting equipment has been standard for ARRI for a while now, according to Patrick Schulze, lighting systems application engineer.

What products are now most in demand for home studios? According to Schulze, it’s ARRI’s SkyPanel series. “The S30 and the S60 would be the most popular version for home studios and remote locations where you don’t want to have somebody in the space,” he said. “If it’s in the talent’s home, it could be something that could just be set up and all controlled remotely through IP.”

KINO FLO

Kino Flo, which has a large presence in both film and television has had an “up and down” spring, according to Scott Stueckle, sales manager for the Los Angeles-based lighting provider.

“More people are lighting themselves as they have migrated back to their homes or to office spaces that are depleted of crew people or lighting people,” he said. “We’re still doing a number of two- and three-light kits for those markets. We’re also doing a lot of work with CNN, QVC, HSN, all those types of companies, broadcast news, small web studios. We’re still doing a fair amount of those in two ways, fulfilling old orders that were in the system, but also quoting a lot.”

Stueckle says they’ve seen increased interest in the company’s diva light series.

“The diva light 21 is an LED version of our older, more established legacy diva light fluorescent systems. And it’s being used quite a bit for studio, location and interviews,” he said.

After the NAB Show was cancelled, Stueckle said it gave the company the opportunity to review its new products rather than launching them outright.

“We were going to introduce a new ribbon light line of products; they’re the only five-color ribbon lights in the market,” he said. “They’re designed with the same firmware and LED emitter technology that we have in our other fixtures, so it allows you full compatibility. You don’t have any drop off in colors or any drop off in white light quality when you’re using our ribbons and they all have individual control.

“We also have a new individual controller for our tubes that allows you to run up to eight tubes individually in different kinds of pixelation sequences and so forth,” Strueckle added. “But I’m not showing that until people come out and start doing business again. So in the process, we’re refining those, improving those, adding features, just trying to time it for when business comes back into play. We’ll go ahead and probably have a new version, compared to the one we would have shown at NAB—we’ll probably have a more evolved version and that will probably show starting July or August.”

As TV and film production begins to resume, Stueckle said the process will be similar to what is being seen in public health efforts as well.

“When the stay-at-home orders and essential business orders were passed down, it was like a light switch essentially went from ‘everything on’ to ‘everything off,” he said. “Coming back into it, from what I can see here in Hollywood, it’s like they’re ‘dialing it up’ a little bit and then they ‘dial it back.’

“It’s going to be a slow incline, I think, as we return to the set.”

SEATTLE—When LED lighting fixtures exploded on the cine, video and television scene, one of the first things that early adopters discovered was that all LED lights weren’t created equal, especially in the area of color rendering.

Complicating the problem was that you couldn’t measure color rendering by eyeballing it.

“When you look at visible light, it has all the colors of the rainbow, all the way from infrared to ultraviolet,” said Jose Maria Noriega C.A.S., president of professional lighting provider Fluo-Tec. “Of course the eye will try to compensate for color aberrations.”

A film or digital camera is nowhere nearly that forgiving when displayed on a high quality, well calibrated monitor. “The best lighting equipment will provide colors as accurately as the eye sees it,” Noriega said.

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET

The Color Rendering Index (CRI) rode to an early rescue by measuring a light fixture’s rendering of eight colors. The CRI results measurement ranged from zero to 100%, 100 being a perfect score.

“The problem with that is those eight colors are all light pastel shades,” said Pete Challenger, who manages U.S. business development for Italian-based lighting vendor Lupo. “So you can have a light that’s rated 98 CRI that makes people look like corpses.”

More sophisticated color measuring systems have been developed. One is an expanded CRI that includes 15 colors, including saturated colors. The Television Lighting Consistency Index (TLCI) uses a software program to calculate a score. And a Spectral Similarity Index (SSI) system is being developed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

But Challenger is feeling pushback from customers. “[They’re] coming around to what we’ve been preaching for years: the only real way you can assess a light is to point the camera at the kinds of thing you point cameras at, lit by that light, and see what it looks like on that camera.”

Al DeMayo, co-founder and CEO of Litegear, pointed out that as professional lighting people learn more about color science, “they’re starting to ask for things that not only help them do their jobs easier, but also make them better at their own job.

“In the past, with incandescent fixtures, you had tungsten-balanced film and that’s a perfect white balance,” DeMayo added. “But today, with digital cameras and programmable LED fixtures, that white balance is a moving target.”

He noted that one anomaly in bicolor lighting fixtures is that while their color rendering might be near perfect at the daylight and tungsten white light extremes, “it’s a little magenta in the middle.” To counter that, Litegear and others have added saturated red, green, blue and sometimes other LEDs to balance out a magenta or green shift.

MACHINE LEARNING

BB&S Lighting’s founder and owner/co-founder Peter Plesner noted that color shifting is even more complicated when a bi-color LED lighting fixture is dimmed while the color temperature is in the middle of its color temperature range.

“We have a lot of algorithms we’ve developed to correct that. It’s been kind of like machine learning,” he said. “This technology is something we’ll be using in all of our color lighting products in the future.”

All customers are concerned about color accuracy, according to Byron Brown, product manager for Litepanels.

“But depending on the customer, they’re going about it in several different ways,” he said. “Those at the less sophisticated end of the spectrum, are looking at indicators like CRI. Or maybe some of them have progressed into a TLCI kind of measure, and as long as your number is high, then they’re OK.”

Many of Litepanels high-end customers start there, but then they do their own measurements, Brown added. “And these are either with a meter, or in many cases they’re actually measuring with a camera,” he said.

Brown said that where his company used to have to do a lot of custom work on LEDs, now many LED makers have adopted those kinds of technologies as a matter of doing business.

Kino-Flo has developed its newest firmware to allow “all of our soft lights to match the color spectrum on the cameras being used in the studio,” said Scott Stueckle, sales and public relations manager. The company has done a series of tests in studios where the use Kino-Flo’s lookup tables (LUTS) to match to the camera’s spectral curve.

“If you wanted to take a Kino Flo fixture and match it to some kind of a light source in a shopping mall or something like that that’s a little different, you can do that. You can take a meter reading and get the XY coordinates, and match our light to that ambient light.”

MISSION-CRITICAL

Color accuracy in terms of white light is absolutely mission critical, according to Rich Pierceall, CEO of Cineo.

“One of the things that digital lighting provides for us is the ability to customize the spectrum,” he said.

Pierceall pointed out the look the production crew is after may not be a numerical color temperature match. “What we have focused more on is the red end of the spectrum, primarily because people are red, and we want to make sure that when a camera captures an individual, that person looks healthy,” he said. “That generally means giving them a heavier representation in the deep reds.”

Last month Cineo was acquired by NBCUniversal. The Cineo brand, its products and staff all remain intact, according to a company spokesperson.

UNIT-TO-UNIT CONSISTENCY

All of ARRI’s color science is based off of calibration, according to Mike Wagner, senior product manager for the company.

“Every single fixture that leaves our factory, is calibrated,” Wagner said. “That process allows us to identify the exact wavelengths and LEDs and everything within that particular fixture. We can store that information on the fixture.

“Then we’re doing our color science math on that fixture with that information, and that allows us to get very, very accurate results,” Wagner added. “So we’re now using a kind of lookup table, we’re using the data from the LEDs within that fixture, and that gives us really high grade unit to unit consistency. That also allows us to hit very accurate color points because we know what the LEDs are doing and how to control them. That’s really the key to what we’re doing.”

Though none of the lighting fixture manufacturers make their own LEDs, “it really starts at the chip level” when it comes to color rendering, said Craig Asato, product manager at Zylight. Lighting makers “will pay a little more for tighter binning on the production lots. Chip manufacturers have different binning levels,” and for the best color rendering you want the best of the best LEDs.

Tighter binning “means we’ll pay the cost goes up, because the yield from the chip manufacturer’s standpoint goes down,” Asato added.

In the future, look for even better ways of evaluating the color rendering in LED fixtures.

SEATTLE—Light emitting diodes (LEDs) were invented in the early 1960s, and have been used in television and video lighting for about the past dozen years. Advances in LEDs have prompted the technology to go in a variety of new and interesting directions.

“What we’re seeing is definitely a move to RGBW [red, green, blue and white] LED lighting that allows for a fully tuneable fixture,” said Mike Wagner, senior product manager with the lighting division of ARRI.

ARRI has been making nothing but RGBW LED fixtures since they introduced their first LED light, the L7 in 2011. That and subsequent ARRI lights like the Skypanel not only are able to match ambient light temperature, “but also are able to set the magenta point or select vivid colors that will allow more versatility in the studio, whether that be different types of setups during their day, or one-time-only special events,” Wagner said.

Another trend Wagner sees is firmware updates for light fixtures. “These aren’t just updates that fix bugs or something like that,” he said. “We are adding new functionality to our lights. That has been our commitment to our customers.”

ARRI’s latest firmware provides the ability to create professional level lighting effects without the need of a lighting console, and adds different kinds of communications control as well.

DYNAMIC LIGHTING EFFECTS

Rich Pierceall, CEO of Cineo thinks the trend building color into LED fixtures is not going to go away. His company has built a number of fixtures that include both tuneable white light and saturated colors, including the Standard 410, just released at the recent Cine Gear Expo.

Pierceall thinks the next wave is dynamic lighting effects. “What’s now happening is that a lot of larger fixtures are made capable of being carved up into small fixtures,” he said. “In other words, I can actually get light movement across the face of the lighting fixture.”

Cineo has developed the LightBlade fixtures in partnership with NBCUniversal. The larger LightBlade fixtures utilize Cineo Zone Control technology, which provide for 10 zones within the fixture being independently controlled. This gives users the ability to change color and intensity between LightBlades simultaneously.

Another area to watch is lighting control. “People are going to be branching away from traditional DMX universes and getting into far more elegant, far more advanced control systems,” Pierceall said.

LIGHTING DESIGN

Not everybody is climbing aboard with RGBW light fixtures yet.

“I’m not too sure that trend is right,” said Ing. Jose Maria Noriega, chief marketing officer for Fluotec. “And as with every trend, sometimes it stays and sometimes it goes away.”

Noriega doesn’t think talent should be colorized. “You colorize the set, or you colorize the background, the stage,” he said.

And while he says it might be convenient having saturated color capability in every fixture, “I don’t know if all TV stations would be willing to just follow that trend, especially the cost, if they are going to use this feature 2 percent of the time they’re going to use it for pure white light. Can you imagine 30 years ago that you would look back on the television industry and say ‘Hey, let’s have some lights that cost $17,000?’”

There is one trend in professional lighting for broadcast that Noriega is noticing.

“Lighting designers for cinema are now getting into lighting design for television,” he said. “These people are asking for pure white light, they are asking for reliability, they are asking for power, and they are also asking for a good price.”

LESS POWER

Litepanels’ Gemini 2x1 soft panel fixtures provide RGBW capability in the fixture, and the company sees more of that in the future. In addition, LEDs are getting more power-efficient, according to Byron Brown, product manager for Litepanels.

“Our LED technology today is roughly 30 to 50 percent more efficient than it was even three or four years ago,” he said. “The technology advancement of LEDs gets us even more efficiencies and better brightness per Watt in the LED world, let alone compared to tungsten and other sources.”

Because the company’s first 1x1 LED panel lights were introduced 10 years ago, a direct efficiency comparison can be made to its current Astra 6X, which is 6x brighter than the original 1x1. Complicating the math in this comparison is the fact that the Astra 6X uses 50 percent more, so the efficiency itself is about double.

Brown also notes that although the Astra 6X fixture is 6x times brighter than the original 1x1, it sells for about half what original 1x1 did.

[Read: Despite The Hype, LEDs Haven’t Revolutionized Broadcasting]

“So it’s 6x brighter for even less money than we were selling the 1x version 10 years ago,” he said.

Brown credits a number of factors for the lower cost: “All manufacturers have needed to find better ways to manufacture the product more efficiently. I think the volumes have also gone up, not just in terms of components, but also manufacturing processes. The number of units we sell today is substantially higher than the original 1x1 panels as well, so I think volume, efficiencies, component costs, all of those have contributed to the lower prices. And obviously competition has played a part.”

MORE FEATURES

Similarly, Scott Stueckle, sales manager at Kino Flo Lighting Systems sees the industry pressing to offer more features in their lighting fixtures for less money.

Kino Flo is a pioneer in fluorescent television and motion picture lighting equipment. They’ve transitioned their fluorescent fixtures such as the Diva and Celeb into LED lights, retaining the features that made them popular.

“Kino Flo is still focused on the white space, shooting in the color space that cameras can see, the full color spectrum, trying to keep our color on the black body curve,” Stueckle said.

And just as the company worked with fluorescent tube makers to optimize color rendering for their original light products, they’ve done the same thing with its LEDs, working with LED suppliers on both the design and manufacturing process, so that the LEDs perform exactly as the company specifies. “And we have proprietary technology to actually apply a spectrometer that reads a camera’s color sensitivity,” Stueckle added.

Stueckle says the combination of software and hardware has changed the development of professional lighting technology.

“In the old days we just used to make lights,” he said. “We’re now basically designing and programming computers that have lights on them. And I think you’re seeing more of that, and more people are getting involved with that, and things are getting better and better and prices are dropping more over the next few years.”

Professional lighting manufacturers are betting their companies on their ability to chase the right trend.

LOS ANGELES—“America’s Got Talent,” the acclaimed nationwide talent show that has become a mainstay on NBC, is set to premier its 12th season this year. Cineo Lighting has been with us since the beginning, helping ensure judges, hosts and performers always look their best for the camera.

Featuring unique performers from across the country, the series is a true celebration of creativity and talent, offering a colorful array of singers, dancers, comedians, contortionists, impressionists, jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists and other hopefuls. These acts rely not only on their abilities, but also on the aesthetics of their acts. For this, I need a lighting solution that I know will give me the color temperature I want right out of the box. I can’t have any degradation of field or uneven color output, otherwise I’ll lose precious time adjusting each light during setup. Also, if the lighting isn’t properly adjusted, the post-production team will have to spend time touching up the brightness and evenness of the shot for the viewers at home.

PUTTING THE LIGHT’S TALENT TO USE
To achieve this, we feature 25 Cineo HS and several HSX fixtures, supplemented by 10 Maverick fixtures with battery attachments, and Cineo Matchstix kits and Matchboxes, which light all the ancillary action not on the stage, including the holding room, interview positions and the Judges Gold Room.

Darran Webb uses Cineo lights for all areas of production for “America’s Got Talent.” We’ve used the Cineo HS since it debuted back in 2012, during what I call the “wild west” of LED lights. The 3200–5600K HS has the even field I expect from Cineo. Cineo’s Remote Phosphor Technology (RPT), eliminates the color-accuracy limitations that can be an issue in LED fixtures over time. From the holding room, to the talent on stage, to the judges, the HS lights have a hand in lighting several aspects of “America’s Got Talent.”

I use Matchstix as a low fill fixture to enhance the lighting effect of the judge’s interviews. The Mavericks with Matchboxes are used for smaller areas due to the irs small dimensions.

TIME-SAVER
Compared to other lighting options, I’d pick Cineo every time. The products are designed for what we want to accomplish with our lighting. Not only can Cineo lights handle the rigors of our intense travel schedule, but the features make my job easier when time is of the essence.

For example, the HSX features an output control that automatically increases lighting output one full stop (from 20 percent, to 40 percent, to 60 percent, etc.), with a userfriendly interface that allows our team to read the exact light measurement. This helps keep the camera and light totally coordinated and saves us a lot of time not only on the set, but in post-production as well.

The amount of time we have saved in setup and post-production due to the color-accuracy and dependability of Cineo products is second-to-none. They are an integral part of how “America’s Got Talent” is lit and filmed.

Darran Webb is a realty television lighting designer. He has been working with “America’s Got Talent” in 2006. He can be contacted atdarranwebb@mac.com.

For more information, please visitwww.cineolighting.comor call 310-425-3425.

LAS VEGAS—At the 2017 NAB Show, Cineo Lighting will spotlight its MavX color-tunable, mid-power soft light, the latest addition to its Cineo Maverick product line. Designed for small studio and portable applications, the MavX features the optimized output required for film, video and still photography.

For studio applications, MavX delivers up to 8,000 lumens from a lightweight, compact package, making it ideal for lighting broad areas where the grid height is challenging. It also provides the color rendering and output benefits of Remote Phosphor Technology (RPT), with dynamic color tuning from 2700K to 6500K and accurate presets at 3200K, 4300K and 5600K.

With passive thermal management for soundless operation, it delivers a volume of light equal to a traditional 1K soft source with no color shift or flicker at any output level. It also supports Cineo’s photo-accurate dimming, which matches the dimming curve to camera stops. Local control is simple and intuitive, with inherent five-pin wired and wireless DMX controls.

When used as a portable, battery-powered soft source, Cineo’s SmartPower technology provides consistent light output during battery operation, regardless of the charge state of the battery. MavX also protects a battery fleet by providing adjustment to the fixture’s current draw to match the batteries’ output capability.

The 2017 NAB Show takes place in Las Vegas, April 24-27. Cineowill be in boothC9945. For more information, visit www.nabshow.com.

SEATTLE—Speed—the faster a news photographer can get shooting, then get on to the next location, the more productive he or she can be. As the sign over Charles Osgood’s radio reporting desk reads: “Quantity is Job One.”

LIGHTING
The lights a news photog carries are a good place to start. Adding attachments to a piece of equipment can be a real time waster, which is why Zylight built an articulating arm into its LED Newz on-camera lighting fixture (see review). When not in use, the arm folds up to the light fixture’s housing and when it’s showtime, the arm quickly attaches to the camera and allows movement of the light into the desired position.

The Newz fixture provides variable color temperature adjustment from daylight to tungsten, along with smooth dimming. It sports a water-resistant IP54 rating for shooting in extreme conditions like hurricanes and blizzards.

Whether in the studio or out in the field, today’s cameras offer high resolution and sharpness that can reveal every flaw and blemish on a reporter or interviewee’s face. The solution is a wide, soft source, like Kino Flo’s Diva 415, a four-bank fluorescent fixture that can be interchangeably lamped for daylight or tungsten.

Diva lights provide on-board ballast dimming and feature builtin barn doors along with a reflector, louvers, Flozier diffuser, lamp case and fixture carrying case. Kits combining Diva 415s and the smaller 201s provide all the fixtures needed for a full-fledged interview setup.

The color rendering properties of metal-halide gas discharge lamps, HMIs, MSRs, etc., are well known. But since many of these lamps require time for cooling before being restruck, the off-again/on-again nature of news shooting made their use for “run-and-gun” shooting problematic.

Videssence Little VID KIT K5600’s Joker 200 News provides an ultra-fast restrike lamp starter that assures quiet and immediate lamp ignition and re-ignition, so the fixture requires virtually no setup time. It can be used without optics to become a Bug-Lite, while it can also evenly fill a Lightbank or Lantern, making it the perfect light for interviews. The company’s Joker News kit operates in 110V and 240V environments as well as from a pair of 14.4V camera batteries or a 30V battery.

Three-point lighting is a staple of modeling a face, and Videssence’ Little VID KITS are designed to deliver just that in a rolling canvas trolley case. The kits are available in daylight or tungsten, with 50W focusing or non-focusing LED Fresnel fixtures.

Each Little VID fixture is powered off 120-230V AC power, with battery power an option. The kits include stands, barn doors and gel frames or gel holders. Each fixture has a 12-foot cord to remote power supply that allows easy programming for dimming or DMX control.

Cineo Maverick The 12 x 12-inch 1x1 LED panel lights have defined soft source lighting for over a decade. Cineo’s Maverick fixture applies its remote phosphor design to that same form factor to take the best of both advantages, with a 160-degree even spread of light and full, on-fixture dimming control. The phosphor panels can quickly be interchanged to change color temperature from 3200 to 5600 or 6500K.

With the rigors of field use in mind, the lightweight Maverick features DC power and waterproof construction and delivers a volume of light equal to a traditional 1K soft source, with a wide array of accessories, power supply and mounting options.

Podcasters and traveling correspondents often deliver their on-camera work from a desktop with a laptop webcam. BBS Lighting took the challenge of image quality from a minimal workspace when it designed its two-light Pipeline Remote Phosphor LED Reporter Kit.

The foot-long cylindrical fixtures come with desktop stands and full range dimming to provide modeled light to match illumination on the correspondent whether in a dimly lit room all the way to filling in sunlight-generated shadows. Using battery power at a paltry 10W per fixture, there’s no need to string power cables.

POWER SUPPLIES
There’s an old news photographer joke that has him looking for a “currant” bush to plug into when his batteries run down. But drained batteries are no joke in the field, and that keeps fueling battery development.

With many newsrooms migrating to one-man-band VJ operations, headcount may be reduced, but the actual number of field-ready camera systems—and their attendant rechargeable batteries—can increase. The more batteries a station has, the more charging wherewithal they need.

PAG found a way to maximize the amount of charging that can be done in the footprint of a single charger by developing its PAGlink system. The four-position PL16+ allows up to four PAGlink batteries to be piggybacked on each of four charging positions to simultaneously charge up to 16 batteries simultaneously. Intelligence built into the system figures out the best and most efficient way of charging each battery pack.

A news shooter carrying a large-enough capacity battery pack to power multiple devices is one thing, but getting at that power can be another.

This led IDX to put a pair of D-taps on its Duo 95 and Duo 150 battery packs, which can power other devices that need a 12V source. And because there are other peripherals like cellphones and tablets that can need a charge during the workday, they’ve even added a USB port to the battery packs.

With all the ways of going live from news stories, it’s important that the photogs be ultra portable and able to move fast and get to the scene first.

Frezzi FLB-100 Frezzi came out with its FLB (Frezzi Lithium Battery) 100 series with enough power and life to provide power to not only the camera but also on-camera light and bonded cellular transmitter, cutting down on the bulk and weight that several batteries would add. The companion charger is the four-position FLC-4.

Anton/Bauer developed its Gold Mount battery pack attachment system that became so synonymous with the company it’s commonly called the A/B mount. But to make the company’s battery technology available to those with the alternative Sony L-Series battery mounts, Anton/Bauer rolled out its L-Series 7.2V battery packs.

The L-Series battery packs come in 4400mAh (30Wh) and 6600mAh (47Wh) models, and sport single and double position chargers. The chargers also include a USB port for charging peripheral devices such as cellphones and tablets.

CAMERA SUPPORT
Tripods were always important when a news crew had a reporter and a photographer, but with a one-man-band the sticks are even more necessary to hold the camera while the video journalist does a liveshot or interview.

Libec RS-250D tripod Shooting run-and-gun style may seem a far cry from using a camera rigged cinestyle, with matte boxes, flags, filter holders and focus assist tools, where the weight and balance changes sometimes shot to shot. But news shooters have their own variety of optional extras, including big or small batteries, on camera lights, wireless mic receivers and video transmitters.

When Miller designed its Compass 23 tripod system, it aimed for a lightweight but robust support for the camera package that can handle a counterbalance range of 8–30 pounds. It also provides a 120mm sliding camera plate with 60mm of travel to reset the camera balance as accessories are added or taken off.

The Compass 23 offers three selectable positions of high-performance pan and tilt drag, plus a zero position.

Most camera crews use a tripod at eye level for interviews and standups. But for shooting steady B-roll material it’s handy to be able to go high and low.

Sachtler FSB8 tripod with Touch & Go plate and SpeedLock system Shotoku addressed this need with its spreader-less TT-66/L/S tripods, featuring extreme low angle shooting or the flexibility to add stability where a floor or midlevel spreader might not be practical. The tripods employ a simple twist lock grip to allow quick, easy and individual adjustment of each leg length.

The speed with which a news shooter can move from setup to setup is dictated by how quickly the camera can be mounted and dismounted, and the tripod deployed and broken down for carrying.

Sachtler’s FSB8 tripod with Touch & Go plate and SpeedLock system addressed just this in a lightweight package. For cameras weighing less than 20 pounds, the three section TT 75/2 CF telescopic tripod quickly erects to a steady camera platform, then collapses to a portable 17 inches.

Most days a news shooter doesn’t have time to use a slider, but Libec designed their tripod heads so if there is a need for a slider, skater, etc., they can quickly mount the fluid head and get shooting.

The RS-250D (for smaller cameras) and the RS-450D (for mid-sized cameras) feature a 75mm ball for quick leveling on a tripod. But the bottom of the ball is cut flat or quick bolting to slider, skater, jib arm or other camera support device.