BRIDGEVILLE, Pa.—Brightlight recently supplied LED fixtures to WZVN, the ABC affiliate for the Ft. Myers-Naples, Fla., market, for the station’s new set.

WZVN’s updated lighting grid is daylight balanced and features a mix of Brightline L1.2 and L1.4 LED SeriesONE studio fixtures, BL.16 long-throw beam compact fixtures and Lupo DayLED fresnels, per Bob Hannon, senior production engineer for Waterman Broadcasting, which operates the station.

Some of the challenges for lighting the new set included the openness of the space, which was designed to accommodate different kinds of programming. The presence of two video arrays and three vertically hung video screens also presented a challenge.

“What’s nice about Brightlight fixtures is they have the brightness and flexibility to carve our lighting as needed to give the room some depth,” said Dan McKernick, who served as lighting designer for the project.

“Brightline has taken WZVN into the DMX world and also the LED world,” said Hannon. “They look fantastic. The lighting is very consistent; we’re not dealing with color temperature variations across the set. It’s a really nice setup.”

WZVN debuted their new studio and set on Nov. 18.

LEDs are the lights of the present and the future. Though we still utilize HMI, tungsten and other lighting technologies, LEDs keep gaining momentum and are on sets everywhere. They have evolved into beautiful key lights on all types of skin tones, all the while becoming more versatile and lightweight. Because of their compact size, some can be placed in very small places in order to illuminate from areas that were difficult to access before. 

HUDSON SPIDER

Soft light is extremely popular, but softening LEDs has been a challenge since a lot of space is needed. Slapping diffusion onto LEDs, up close to the source, isn’t effective. However, some units are offering more structural changes and accessories that allow light to become softened closer to the light fixture itself.

One prime example is the Hudson Spider. It has several arrays of LEDs that fold into themselves for a lightweight, easily transportable unit. Its soft box options are also easier to apply than most—instead of using firm metal rods, it slips on to each LED arm and then uses a zipper to shut. The Hudson Spider can be formed into different sizes depending on how extended its arms are, so you can create bigger light sources.

The thing that sets Hudson Spider apart when it comes to really achieving beautiful light quality is that the arrays are spread out. Each array is a single arm that extends from the center of the fixture, with space between each arm, so in an umbrella or other reflector build, the LED light is spread out and broken up more than a wall of LEDs would be. Because the arrays are so slim, actually placing into the parabolic backing gets them naturally further away from diffusion that comes with the kit and is placed at the front of the soft box, making these options more viable.

LITETILE

LiteTile from LiteGear has been another great tool for creating larger sources that can be softened. They come in different sizes including 2x8 square feet and 4x4 square feet. Attaching velcro frames for diffusion on their other products such as LiteMat does not do a decent job of softening because it’s so close to the light.

LiteTile skips over this and allows you to create your own space between unit and diffusion and other shaping tools, which ultimately makes for a better quality source. Because of their slim profile, LiteTile can be rigged with diffusion that matches it in size, hung from a grid or ceiling and fit into tight spaces. You can also obviously “tile them together” and create much larger panels of light, depending on the job.

Additionally, what is great about lights such as the Hudson Spider or LiteGear’s lights is that they’re bi-color. You can dial in anything on the Kelvin scale from 2,600K to 6,500K, depending on the specific unit. They also come equipped with a dimmer pack so you can control intensity easily and offer the option of running off of either battery power or house power.

These features have been around for a while but the thing that LED manufactures have been trying to perfect is this ability to shape and soften with the tools inside of the LED’s kit. They come with egg crates, umbrellas or backings and multiple flavors of diffusion.

Worth mentioning is LiteRibbon, which is defined by being a single, flexible strip of LEDs. However it is not a large array and even harder to soften. The smaller the group of LEDs, the more it makes sense to simply use for harder lighting accents. Even if super thick diffusion was to be laid on smaller sources, the quality is just not as soft and spread out. So something like a strip of LEDs is better utilized for glows of light under the lip of a bar, behind furniture, etc.

There are countless manufacturers of LED units for the television and film industries. It’s important to make sure that whatever lighting is purchased is a quality product—not just in the quality of the light emitted but its color, power and other options for altering the light. LiteGear and the Hudson Spider are just some of the quality brands available. The future for LED lighting is an exciting one as the technology continues to advance.

Julia Swain is a cinematographer whose work includes films such as “Lucky” and “Speed of Life” alongside dozens of commercials and music videos. She continues to shoot on a variety of formats, seeking to create compelling visuals for every story and brand. She can be reached through TV Technology.

BRIDGEVILLE, Pa.—When WXII, the Hearst Television-owned NBC affiliate for North Carolina’s Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point markets, opened its new TV studio in August, Brightline’s L1.2 and L1.4 LED SeriesOne models helped light it up.

With nearly 40 units installed, the L1.2 and L1.4 lights create the base lighting for the daylight balanced (5,600K) set. The L1.2s were used mostly as side fills, while the L1.4s were positioned at the front. In addition, Lupo DayLED fresnels were added to create crisp lighting for eight specific talent positions around the set.

Dan McKenrick, the lighting designer for the studio project, said an advantage for using LED lighting fixtures on a news set is the extensive dimming range without color temperature change, allowing for better control for a diversity of skin colors. He also found Brightline’s ability to add intensifiers to increase output and control screens to restrict the light path to be useful during the project.

Another element that McKenrick had to take into consideration when selecting and installing the Brightline lights was the fact that two configurations had to be devised—one for the current COVID-19 restrictions and another for when newscasts are able to get back to normal.

For more information, visit www.brightlines.com.  

BRIDGEVILLE, Pa.—When the lights turned on for the Black News Channel in February, it did so using Brightline LEDs.

An African-American news network, Black News Channel’s 2,000-square-foot main set features a lighting grid of around 70 lights. This includes Brightline’s L1.2 and L1.4 SeriesONE LED soft light fixture, as well as Flex-T LED lights. An additional 20 L1.2 and L1.4 fixtures were used in BNC’s green screen virtual studio. The lights are controlled with DMX programming.

“Brightline has great control options on their fixtures, so you can make sure you’re not spilling light on the RGB elements and spoiling the color,” said lighting designer Bill Holshevnikoff.

For more information, visit www.brightlines.com. 

SAN FRANCISCO—Bay Area basketball fans waited for decades to move up from the only-so-friendly confines of Oakland's 53-year-old Oracle Arena for the luxuries of a lavish new venue across the San Francisco Bay. So when Chase Center, the home of the National Baksetball Association's (NBA) Golden State Warriors, recently opened for the 2019-2020 season, no expense was spared, particularly in the video department.

This season's opening tip-off also mean the unveiling of the center's new 83x53-foot Samsung videoboard, and that's just the center cluster. With its additional screens, the entire concept includes 15 displays, including eight baseline boards underneath the cluster. All told, it encompasses 24.95 million pixels and 74.8 million LEDs.

The Warriors are billing the board as “the largest in the NBA, by LED space,” said Shawn Bennett, the Warrior's executive producer, event presentation, who feels like the board's immense size (which almost spans from one baseline to the other) brings the fan experience to a new level. Literally.

“It brings the fans, especially those seated in the upper bowl, closer to the action. They're never hurting for an angle,” Bennett said. “The new board offers the best video content in sports, because we have more room for regular statistics, as well as advanced stats or analytics,” including effective field percentage, turnover percentage, offensive rebounding and free throws.

Considering the team is based near Silicon Valley, it felt even more critical for the Warriors to make a statement with the install. “All of these new options,” he said, “help us tell the fans the story of the game.”

TOTAL INSTALL

The components of the technical setup at 18,000-seat Chase Center are “the best available in the industry,“ said Scott Heitman, the team's director, scoreboard operations. The camera setup includes six manned Sony HDC-4300s, two with Wave Central RF capabilities, “which are handy for the giant LED screen outside the arena,” known as “Thrive City;” as well as nine Panasonic AW-HE130 PTZ robocams.

How elaborate is the presentation? It also includes pyrotechnics behind the stanchions on the backboards, as well as from the bottom of the main board, which can be lowered almost to the floor for maintenance, and also go back into the ceiling in 16 minutes; two giant gantries enclose the ensemble, which makes rigging space more accessible.

Back at the control room, the Warriors partnered with Ross for the Acuity switcher and Xpressions for graphics. All of the technology that drives the LED displays is from Ross, including Carbonite Mosaic video scalers, Xpression Tessera servers and DashBoard control; the Warriors also partnered with Ross' graphics division, Rocket Surgery, to build the in-game graphics and develop a workflow, display the stats, parse incoming data, etc. In addition, Evertz DreamCatchers are used for replays.

The control room employs an SMPTE 2110 IP-based (as opposed to baseband) routing system that runs as a data network, “which allows flexibility to route signals to different sources,” said Heitman. “Routing is faster, as it has a High Dynamic Range backbone and we may adapt out main board to the system soon. That would make our board the first to employ HDR that I know of,” adding that it hasn't happened yet because the video department is tweaking the new system.

The control room was designed and installed by Wrightson Johnson Haddon Williams, of Dallas; and system integrator Diversified. Mike Meglathery, program manager for Diversified, said the Chase Center setup is as technically advanced as anything in the world in the sports market.

“The Warriors a-lá-carted the best equipment for each type of technology to build the state-of-the-art system,” Meglathery said, explaining that the SMPTE 2110 facility runs through commercial off-the-shelf Arista switches. “We can send individual audio and video streams this way. It's more of an open architecture system, which is the new industry standard.”

Although the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks (Fiserv Forum) and the NFL's Atlanta Falcons (Mercedes-Benz Stadium), were the first to foray into IP for their video boards, those were proprietary or hybrid systems, according to Meglathery.

“The Warriors have fully embraced the SMPTE 2110 interoperability standard,” he said. “The system is capable of simultaneously operating 15 individual displays in the seating bowl, with the streams of individual player stats, and that is beyond compare in the league.”

“The system at Chase Center is the best-in-class for everything. Absolutely,” Meglathery said. The team and the center went all in to create the best fan experience possible.”

CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS

Given the integration of analytics in all sports, many of the fans want that access to the numbers not only at home, but at the arena. “We want them to be able to go as deep as they want to into that part of the game,” said Bennett.

That means having to program the various streams of data into the presentation, and the Warriors use 4DReplay (for 360-degree video) as well as Second Spectrum, a Los Angeles-based third party, for augmented reality stats and alternate video, such as various sightlines. “We’re an early adopter,” said Bennett, adding that the Warriors process the feed from the NBA “and basically show, via graphics, what a coach is doing on a board or tablet so the fans can see it on the big board.”

There are also videoboards for players where they can tell what the player’s shooting percentage is from various spots on the court, for instance, that also indicates stats and movement; and another for the fans.

THE SHOW

Chase Center is the home to more than 64 digital displays, (including the aforementioned Thrive City). A 68x38-foot board faces 3rd Street, broadcasting the action during Warriors home and road games, the result of a deal with regional sports network NBC Sports Bay Area. It’s the centerpiece of the outdoor experience at Chase Center where the locals can enjoy the restaurants and goings-on outside the arena; during the day, the screen features educational content.

“We knew the arena would have to be high tech, so we’re blending in with the neighborhood here in Mission Bay,” Heitman said, while marveling at the demands and successes of today’s market.

“It used to be that the TV production was a step ahead of what was broadcast in-house,” he said, “but what we have at Chase Centre is what you would find emanating from the TV production trucks.”

BRIDGEVILLE, Pa.—The Open Signal: Portland Community Center in Portland, Ore., completed an upgrade to its 2,000-square-foot facility this past July that saw the installation of 30 Brightline L1.2 SeriesONE LED fixtures.

Open Signal is a PEG organization that produces programming for five cable channels reaching 400,000 homes in the Portland area. The facility produces about 20 shows a week between its two studios.

With its previous lighting setup creating fan noise that was impacting productions, per Open Signal’s media services manager Noah Dorsey, Open Signal tapped Brightline’s 5600K L1.2 lights, which are controlled through a DMX console. The soft-light capability of the fixtures provides versatility for producers. The lights also easily work with Studio A’s chromakey cyc.

“We love them,” said Dorsey. “They live up to the name ‘Brightline’—they’re super bright.”

Marc Story. It’s an accurate name for someone who makes a living telling stories on behalf of his company, Firstline Creative & Media and its many clients. Firstline is a full-service broadcast, media relations, video production, and creative services company based in Atlanta.

Over the last ten years, the company has carved out a niche creating content for medical and pharmaceutical companies all over the world. That often means traveling and productions where a “one-man band,” would be the norm.

To help tell his stories, Marc always packs the three light Practilite 602 LED Fresnel kit from Kinotehnik. “Many times these shoots are at a doctor’s office or a patient’s house,” says Marc. “It’s a confined area, and in a medical office setting, you don’t want a light that’s going to generate heat and set off the sprinkler system.”

The Practilite 602 LED Fresnel from Kinotehnik is a small, lightweight light source that offers variable color temperature from 3000 to 6000K and is color-true with a CRI of 96. The LEDs don’t generate heat. Each Practilite 602 weighs approximately two pounds. “One person can easily manage getting all of the equipment off a plane and into a rental car,” says Marc.

“I am a shooter and an editor at, and I’m always on the lookout for things that will upgrade the quality of our productions and keep us on the cutting edge of what we’re doing,” says Marc.

“There are a lot of LEDs on the market, but they were just these flat panel LEDs with a bunch of little LEDs in it but with no way to control where the light goes or how intense it is,” says Marc. Being able to shape the light was something Marc didn’t want to give up, and other Fresnel LEDs were too large and prohibitively expensive.

The search for an LED package led Marc to a trade show in Charlotte, North Carolina where the Practilite 602s were mounted on track lights. “I got to play with them a little bit and began thinking the 602s would be a really good investment for us to make,” says Marc.

The Practilite 602 has a 3.2" borosilicate Fresnel glass lens capable of an impressive spot-to-flood spec of 15-75 degrees for variable field coverage.

So getting to a shoot is now much easier and the lightweight cylindrical construction allows for a quick set-up easily managed by one person. The Practilite 602 is compatible with almost any other modifier a creative shooter might wish to add.

But where the Practilite 602s really shine for a one-man band or two-person crew is the ability to control the lights using a smartphone interface. Except for the spot-to-flood knob, the intensity and color temperature levels of up to six Practilites are smartphone-enabled. That kind of control is absolutely essential in a one-man band situation.

“Really the Bluetooth was just the cherry on top,” says Marc. “It wasn’t something I wasn’t even looking for and when I saw what it could do at the trade show, there was nothing out there that was doing something like that.” Now, it’s a function that Marc uses all the time.

The intensity of the 602s is also up to the task in the kind of personal interview shooting Marc does all the time. “Camera sensors have improved and they don’t require as much light as they used to and for the purposes of the interviews that we do, it works out great,” says Marc.

The Practilite 602 LED Fresnel from Kinotehnik is proving to be an important part of the stories Marc is illuminating for the patients and medical professionals served by Firstline Creative & Media.

Manios Digital is the exclusive US distributor of Kinotehnik Bluetooth-enabled LED lights.

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.

Sony was awarded top honors from the publishers of AV Technology magazine and Sound & Video Contractor magazine following the InfoComm 2019 show in Orlando last week. Sony’s AI-based Edge Analytics Appliance, the REA-C1000 took home a “Best of Show” honor from AV Technology, while the VPL-FHZ75 3LCD laser projector received a “Best of Show” win from Sound & Video Contractor magazine.

AV Technology magazine is a publication for audiovisual and information technology managers responsible for procuring and maintaining of AV and IT systems. Sound & Video Contractor is a technical resource for integrators, contractors, dealers, and consultants.

Sony’s REA-C1000 allows users to create video content in real time, without the need for specialized training, additional staff or equipment. The compact and lightweight REA-C1000, uses its advanced AI-based video analytics technology to analyze the input it receives from connected cameras and automatically extract the object in focus to combine it with other images in real time. This unique technology uses motion/face detection and color/shape recognition, enabling the REA-C1000 to be the powerful brain of any connected camera and AV setup. The technology allows various organizations to cost-effectively create professional, engaging content.

The new VPL-FHZ75 (6500lm) and VPL-FHZ70 (5500lm) cater to the increased market demand for high brightness projection in midsize environments such as universities, corporations, churches, museums and entertainment installations. Offering WUXGA resolution, both use a newly developed 0.76-inch LCD panel with an incorporated optical compensator to deliver bright and vibrant images with stunning contrast, providing true blacks and accurate-to-life color reproduction. Both models come with an ‘intelligent setting’ feature that simplifies the installation process by automatically selecting the best configuration based on the projectors’ environment.

The VPL-FHZ75 and VPL-GTZ240 4K SXRD laser projector also won a Best of Show award from Projector Central. Projector Central is a review and information site for projectors, screens and related equipment.

For more information about all of Sony’s latest professional technologies, please go to pro.sony.

Edison, NJ – November 19, 2018 – The new Polaroid RGB LED camera and camcorder light offers photographers and videographers a professional, portable LED light system with powerful output for 99.00 USD. With a wide array of settings to create different moods, atmospheres, color backgrounds and special lighting effects, the easy-to-use light allows photographers to control and fine-tune the light source focus to capture the perfect shot every time. The free companion app allows users to fully control all aspects of the light, including color, brightness and saturation, for a fast and efficient workflow.

Experiment with Numerous Lighting Options
Equipped with 320 professional-grade LED lamps, the Polaroid RGB LED camera and camcorder light provides 99 levels of cool white, warm white and RGB light to create the right ambience for your photo or video shoot. For further customization, you can adjust hue and saturation, brightness level and the exact color temperature you want to achieve in the 3200K-5600K range. With so many lighting options from just one device, the Polaroid RGB LED camera and camcorder light makes experimenting like a pro easy.

Maximum Control Gives Way to Endless Lighting Combinations
Created with a flexible and versatile design, the Polaroid RGB LED camera and camcorder light can be used unmounted, mounted to your camera or tripod, or stacked with additional lights. With endless lighting adjustments, controlling the appropriate levels is effortless with the option to select your preferences manually or from your smart device via Bluetooth with the free downloadable app. With the Polaroid RGB LED camera and camcorder light, you can change the whole look of your shoot directly from your phone!

What's Included:

• Polaroid RGB LED camera and camcorder light
• Battery
• Battery charger/adapter
• Swivel head mounting adapter
• Diffusing filter
• Carrying case
• Downloadable app

Technical Specifications:

• LEDs: 144 3200K LEDs, 144 5600K LEDs, 32 RGB LEDs
• Color temperature: 3200K-5600K
• Average lifespan: 50,000 hours
• Lumens: 2304 lm
• CRI: 95+
• Output power: 20W
• Dimensions: 9.96” x 3.4” x 2.36” (25.3 x 8.7 x 6cm)
• Weight: 13.6 oz. (387g) without battery

Photographers and videographers can purchase the Polaroid RGB LED camera and camcorder light from Amazon for 99.99 USD.

Request a Media Review Kit
Members of the media are invited to review the Polaroid RGB LED camera and camcorder light. To request a media review kit, please contact Samantha Bryton at samantha@zazilmediagroup.com.

The Polaroid Brand
Polaroid is one of the world’s most trusted, respected and recognizable brands, with a rich 80-year history built primarily on Polaroid instant cameras and film. The company’s complete range of products was designed to deliver the fun, instant gratification and creative freedom for which the brand has long stood. Today, the Polaroid Classic Border Logo, rooted in the instant photo sharing that Polaroid pioneered, is the mark of genuine Polaroid branded products. For more information, visit Polaroid.com.

Polaroid, Polaroid & Pixel, Polaroid Color Spectrum and Polaroid Classic Border Logo are trademarks of PLR IP Holdings, LLC, used under license.

Press Contact for Polaroid Photo Accessories
Samantha Bryton
Zazil Media Group
(e) samantha@zazilmediagroup.com
(c) +1.617.817.6559

####

HOLLYWOOD—A news set is where the foundation is laid for all the stories reported to the public and serves as the stage for those reporting them. Because news reporters are the very people we hear from and connect with while consuming the headlines, it is important that they are presented in a flattering way.

News reporting in a studio is all about even, soft light—or least it has been traditionally. Part of the sophistication in lighting is the specific shape but despite the goal of news being about delivering dramatic stories, it doesn’t light that way for talking heads. Instead, the quality of light on people reporting in the studio is soft and the ratio is pretty even. We aren’t talking 1:1 here—you definitely want some shape and falloff—but we aren’t lighting for drama in the newsroom itself. The attention is on the material.

THE SOFT TOUCH

Every unit is up on a grid if you are in the studio for news. Each unit should be programmable from the ground as well, to allow easy control for things such as dimming, color balancing and striking. Sets are usually made up of LEDs but some still have fluorescent units lining their grids. Either way, you want to be using softboxes or soft panels. These are units that already have diffusion on them.

Depending on how much punch you have, you may be able to add a softbox on top of that to double-break the light for a really nice quality on the face. A great example that gives you punch and softness is the ARRI Skypanel. These or a variety of units from Litepanels, Rotolight, Fluotec and more, serve as great tools for broadcast. With these, you can avoid having to build a whole other rig comprised of separate shaping and softening tools in front of the light.

For a single reporter or a desk of two, ideally you have a single, soft key light that catches the eyes. If they face each other, you want to implement a technique referred to as “crosskeying.” This means that two key lights are up across from each talent and not only key one person but can also simultaneously backlight the other.

Extending from around the key light in both directions, are fill lights. Here is where you dial in how even or dramatic you want the face of the talent. Fill light will determine how much contrast and shadow detail you have.

You can also utilize several soft top lights that will bring up the ambience and serve as fill. In fact, it’s very popular and elegant to have large soft units directly above and it’s a great place to start. Having bigger sources will also help avoid specific reflections in glass tables and other set pieces. Instead, you can create large soft reflections that create nice highlights and hide sources.

Again, you don’t want to draw any attention to the lighting. As long as the talent looks great—and remember, perfectly even light is ugly—then you’re in a good place. Take away some fill light so they have some depth to them and throw in a backlight from up and behind to separate them from the background.

Lastly, you can also have background lights between the talent and background to light the backdrop behind the talent. This is optional and gives you control when it comes to bringing up exposure on particular set pieces. This is the place to implement a subtle use of color too. If you have some kind of LED wall or screen behind the talent, then that serves as its own set light and shouldn’t need any extra punch.

DETAILS MATTER

Having things like screens or practical LEDs incorporated into the set design can really add to the look of the studio. The studio should be thought of as the “home base” of a network and the details matter. When you have lights and screens in the set itself, it naturally adds highlights to the image. In a space where talent is lit very softly, this does wonders. However, it is important to ensure these don’t draw the viewers’ eyes and feel only slightly more intense than any key or backlight. You want to keep the attention on the talent at all times.

News broadcast has, with many other forms of television, evolved to a higher level of sophistication in terms of look. With soft, strategically placed units, this is easily achieved. It used to be a world of hard, super even light, which we connect to older times in television. Now we have the ability to go very soft while still shaping and controlling our shadows and highlights. Not only that, but we’re able to do so with fewer tools because of how quickly our lighting technology has advanced over time.

Julia Swain is a cinematographer based in California.

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.

IVER HEATH, England — British LED lighting maker Rotolight has introduced its new NEO 2 Explorer lighting kit, a lightweight three-light package that provides High-Speed Sync (HSS) flash and continuous on-camera LED lighting to video professionals, photographers and filmmakers shooting on location.

NEO 2 provides continuous light, with 500% flash output at 1/8000th of a second, making it possible to shoot with wider apertures, while creating clearer separation between subjects and backgrounds. With no recycle time, the NEO 2 is also suited to use with variable framerate cameras.

[Read: Rotolight Launches Anova Pro 2 LED Light]

“The NEO 2 … can be used as both a modelling light and flash, [with no] need for an external flash,” said Jason Lanier, Rotolight’s master of light. “If you have those moments that you just cannot afford to miss …[the NEO 2] fires every single time and there is genuinely no recycle time, no light loss, no power loss … [There] is no other light in the world that can do that.”

Weighing roughly 15 pounds, Rotolight claims that NEO 2 is one of the lightest weight kits ever designed. Its light stands, color FX filters, and power supplies pack away into a soft, water-resistant case with a padded strap. The kit also includes a CineSFX suite enabling effects like fades, fire, lightning, TV, gunshot, and paparazzi, and an optional Elinchrom HSS transmitter that lets users adjust the color temperature, and trigger the flash, among other functions, from up to 650 feet/200 meters away.

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As most of us are experiencing new lighting technology, physical gels are slowly becoming obsolete with new LEDs. They’re obviously essential when balancing sources on location and other HMIs or tungsten Fresnels in your package. However, now we have LED units with RGB-emitting capabilities where we can dial in any color we want and the light will produce it. You can also dim some units without changing color temperature, which you could not do on a lot of older units where you would start to get a warmer color when dimming down.

The recent movie “Never Stop” was filmed using LEDs.

I recently filmed “Never Stop” during which we lit everything with LEDs. I could only use what we had access to, so I had a mix of Kino Flo Selects and a variety of lights from the theater scene that typically aren’t used in cinema. These included Chauvet COLORado Battens, Martin Mac Auras and ETC Source Four Lustr 2 units, all of which included DMX and RGB capabilities.

These ended up serving me well as I had to create a post-apocalyptic world with vibrant parties and underground bars, and I had to do it quickly. Without delay my gaffer could dim every unit and change the colors and frequencies as we went, which made for fast auditions through different looks.

COLOR FLEXIBILITY
What is great about the flexibility in the color of LED lights with RGB is the fact that you can easily match practicals in the space. For this film, I could meter color and then dial in the exact hue on whatever light I was using, with really nice color rendering.

ETC Source Four LED Series

Sometimes you don’t have control over practicals and can’t replace bulbs or fixtures so being able to match the available light in the space so easily is a plus. You don’t always catch green and magenta coming out in your units either, so having control over that axis is very important and so easy now.

In the unique bar location for “Never Stop,” we had almost urban vapor-colored practicals. I have plenty of urban vapor gel, as it’s my favorite, but it wasn’t quite matching. Being able to be precise with the RGB modes on the LEDs made it easy to get everything looking like it was coming from the same sources in the space.

I would have to say my favorite light I had was the ETC Source Four LED. The original Source Four tungsten Fresnels are wonderful—I could light a whole scene with them and I’m sure I have in the past. Now I had the directionality and efficiency of a traditional Source Four with the added ability to make it whichever color I wanted with the click of a button.

Another great thing is that with the narrow beam, I didn’t have to flag any walls off or shape them with anything except for their internal blades. The Source Four LEDs were also rigged very high up on beams of a loft space, so having to go up to audition a gel would have taken time. Because these have DMX, a digital communication network that allowed us to talk to the units through software on our laptop, we were able to change color, intensity and frequency from the ground.

It’s interesting gaining a handful of units that aren’t what you’re used to, but new LEDs are opening up a whole new game in terms of possibilities and efficiency. You’re able to audition more options in a shorter amount of time, and understanding DMX communication and setup is becoming crucial.

Chauvet COLORado Batten

Even with the Kino Selects, which we just controlled from the back of the units, we were able to dial in things quickly. With apps such as Gel Swatch Library, you can look up more than 1,000 of your favorites from manufacturers like Lee and Rosco and then plug in RGB percentages on your LED.

If you have something like a Select, you do so on the back; and if you have LEDs all set up with DMX, you can do so through whatever program you are using on a laptop.

As I always suggest, the best way to decide which units you like and which are the most accurate when it comes to color temperature and tint is to test them yourself and talk with other cinematographers and gaffers about what they have used. We have countless options when it comes to light and color. Getting out there and playing with the wonderful tools we have will do nothing but enable you to better prepare yourself for the next project.

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 via Twitter: @JuliaSwain or through TV Technology.

NEW YORK—Rick Siegel is a New York-based DP with a long career in shooting TV interviews, among his numerous other projects. Despite the fact that we have more choices in cameras in all price ranges than ever before, Rich asserts that “what has remained constant is engaging story telling through my hands on creation of handsome portraiture.”

With this evolution of smaller and faster cameras has come an evolution of field lighting kits as well. So I set out to find shooters and producers interested in talking about the kits that they carry these days.

So much of today’s remote lighting is driven by advances in LED technology which not just produce units with higher CRI but also more uniform response across the spectrum.RUN AND GUN
Rick remembers the days of ISO 100 color negative film with 16mm zoom lens at about f/2.0 moving then to the far less sensitive and far less dynamic range Plumbicon tube cameras. It would not be atypical to carry multiple tungsten fixtures from 200W all the way to 2K.

Today, typical cameras can be rated from ISO 800 and up, with LOG gammas and even RAW (author’s note—few people would actually shoot interviews in RAW; I did it once as more of a “proof of concept” than anything else).

Rick uses what he calls his portable “Cab Kit,” which allows him to mix LED, flo and tungsten, with two Litepanels Astra Bi-Color, one Lowell Rifa 500W, one Arri 125W Fresnel and a couple of 18-inch paper lanterns using standard household bulbs.

“The stands and stingers are the largest component of my lighting kit,” he said, adding that “my only issue mixing LED, florescent, plasma, HMI and/or tungsten lighting units is that they tend to have some differences between each bulb type, especially in the green/pink vectors. Therefore my goal is to keep the interviewee’s key and fill light in the same bulb family.”

BUDGET DRIVEN
Matthew Blute, a cinematographer for Open Road Pictures in Los Angeles, was recently DP for the CNN documentary series “Declassified,” an interview-driven show that included recreations, source material and stock footage, focusing on recently declassified U.S. government cases. Each episode contained three to five interviews, each of which resulted in six hours of raw footage.

Matthew’s experience typifies today’s shooting situations which are as much budget-driven as content-driven. It consisted of a crew of two—Matt plus one G/E person hired on each location. They would show up in a hotel room or conference room—or wherever else intelligence agencies might find themselves—with no prior knowledge of room size, logistics, windows or power situation. Shooting was “conversation across the table” style with a Canon C300 shot about six feet from subject with “a wideish lens.” Producers were striving for a “mysterious late afternoon feeling,” he said. “We tried to have a window or daylight source in the frame if possible.” For this ambitious project, Matt went to LiteGear, a new Los Angeles-based LED manufacturer. They used three of their units—LiteMat 2 for edge/kicker/hair light, LightMat 1 for eyelight/above-camera fill as well as a prototype unit 4x4 LightMap (eight 9x19-inch panels hung in a 4x4 breakdown frame). Diffusion was from a magic cloth 4x4 rag from Rag Place in North Hollywood, Calif., in front of an eggcrate. “This gave us a big 4x4 source which was ‘wrappy,’ quick to set up but controlled for 200W and 5-inches thick,” he said. At a distance of eight feet, this enabled shooting the C300 f/8 at ISO 800.

Just for good measure, they carried a Dedo kit for background splashes and highlights. The result? “After shooting thousands of hours of interviews, this was the first time I wasn’t nervous about the size of the space or the power,” Blute said. “It was a real bonus.”

Jeff Halperin owner of ZenVideo, a Phoenix-based high-end production house specializing in 4K (and HD) acquisition, uses LiteMats from LiteGear on-set.TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES
A consistent pattern emerges from shooters and producers: Tighter budgets, smaller crews and less predictability of scenarios is not necessarily a liability. These so-called “constraints” can turn into new creative opportunities. Nobody says “fix it in post” or “let ‘em get a colorist to relight the scene,” anymore. Rather, old school values still remain even in this digital age. Light it properly to create the desired look, choose the tools that fall within not just the budget but physical size for the smaller crew, and creatively rig that lighting.

So much of today’s remote lighting is driven by advances in LED technology which not just produce units with higher CRI but also more uniform response across the spectrum: You don’t necessarily need that magenta gel when shooting today’s LEDs.

But still, the world has not shifted entirely to LED’s.

Like most DPs, Jeff Halperin, owner of ZenVideo in Phoenix, has streamlined his kit over the years. His larger productions might use a rental house or gaffer, but for ENG environments, his choice is LiteGear’s LiteMat 1 which he can power via eternal battery or even AAs. In this scenario, weight is the deciding factor.

But for interviews, he still prefers his Kino-Flo Diva-Lite 200’s and 400’s.

Control of lighting is an important issue, of course. He is awaiting accessories for his LiteMat 4 to enable a much tighter grid, perhaps as tight as 60 degrees, to focus on subject and keep light off the background. He also makes another point about his LiteMats—“they are so thin you can hang them with tape or Velcro and hide them against walls and ceilings,” he said.

These few discussions of approach as well as hardware specifics reinforced much of what I sought to discover when embarking on the quest for today’s location interview, ENG and production lighting packages.

Cameras are indeed faster with far greater dynamic range. We are less concerned about blasting light than shaping light. Larger and well-funded remote production still exists. Mega-produced news and information programming still have the ability to carry and rig what we have come to think of more “traditional” lighting.

But the advent of improved technologies and budget-conscious producers allows leveraging the technology with the creative lighting design of the DP or gaffer.

The bottom line here is not to fear the new realities of economics and technology but rather embrace these changes, to find the right products from acquisition to lighting to light control, and to compelling stories.

Ned Soltz is an industry veteran who shoots, edits, produces and writes about products and industry trends. He also writes for NewBay Media sister publication Digital Video magazine.