There are so many reasons why the use of larger lighting sources is preferred a lot of the time on set. The ability to cut, soften and shape a larger source tends to be much easier than a smaller one. Output is not lost as quickly as from a smaller source and these bigger lights can be used to cover a large surface area and create ambience. I have written on the versatility of smaller sources before, but technology is advancing so quickly that new options have since become available and the ways to use them have expanded.

COMPLETELY WIRELESS

Popular small lights that have held up include ARRI’s smaller fresnels and the Dedolight. Small tungsten units such as these for uplights or as extensions of practicals that already exist in the frame are so useful. ARRI has a variety of lower wattages to choose from, which adds versatility in being able to shape and soften them more. A newer unit of similar size is the Astera AX5 and, like Dedolight’s, great for things in the frame other than talent. I find the most useful function they serve is adding a splash of highlight in the frame. 

For example, on a recent commercial, we were in a barn and had barrels and other foreground elements that were falling into shadow. So adding a little shape to them with an AX5 was a great way to make them more interesting in the frame. Now we have the ability with a smaller unit like the AX5 to be completely wireless. Not only are they battery-powered, but they’re completely controllable wirelessly in terms of color, intensity, etc. This ultimately saves time within a setup.

Other small units are panels such as Aputure’s MC-4, which can act as a replacement for a bulb in some instances. In a different commercial, this light served as a great interior refrigerator light where I needed a light gag of changing frequency. Like the AX5, the battery-powered MC-4 can be controlled via an app. We had a refrigerator out in the middle of a crop circle and needed a flicker effect inside during the morning. Not only were we able to set the flicker frequency, color and intensity over the app, it was also bright enough to read on camera during ambient daylight. 

The app even had a flicker-effect preset so we could immediately choose that effect and then alter the characteristics of it to our liking. Aputure has many panels like this that are magnetic too. You are saving time not having to run power or going to the unit to change a setting, and now rigging can be made simpler, too, depending on the surface. 

‘SMALL UNITS’ FOR LIGHTING HUMANS

When lighting human subjects in the frame, lights such as those mentioned earlier would not come into play for me. But there are still “small” units that I would lean toward. Again, using a large source is great but it becomes a bit of a “grip jungle”—so many stands and flags and diffusion have to surround a large source in order to focus it on a subject. Sometimes it is appropriate to downsize your key, and in my experience it’s usually when you don’t have much space. 

If you have your subject close to walls or other elements in space that light would spill onto, key with something smaller. As much as you may want to bring the subject out from walls, you might not win the argument to do so. Something like a Litemat 2L or Leko is great when you want a focused key. Quality is something to take into consideration—the moment you soften, you spread the light everywhere.

A popular lighting approach right now is one that is minimal. Smaller units play into more specificity. When we think minimal, it’s just a couple large sources doing all the work for a space. The use of smaller lights lends itself to adding interest in the frame and creating separation. 

It can also help heighten the design that is in front of the camera. Practicals are just one way to achieve this, but adding highlights with other film lights just outside the frame can add even more dimensionality to the image. Small cinema lights are becoming more versatile than ever before, with battery life becoming longer and longer and the abilities on the apps becoming increasingly more adaptable and fast. 

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 Tech.

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.—Lighting system manufacturer Brightline has provided updates to the L1.2 and L1.4 models of its LED SeriesONE studio light fixtures. These upgraded fixtures now feature variable color temperature and improved color rendering, as well as optional wireless remote device management (RDM) control.

The RDM control for the updated models provides bidirectional RF signal distribution between the transmitter and lighting console, eliminating the need for DMX cables. With wireless DMX/RDM, users have the ability to set color temperature through a lighting console, with one channel controlling color and a second channel controlling dimming.

Brightline has also added an integrated control wheel and digital on-board readout that enables users to select color temperatures from 3,200-5,600K (tungsten to daylight). In addition, the available color rendering for the fixtures is 98 CRI, according to Kathy Katz, Brightline managing partner.

Brightline plans to begin shipping the updated L1.2 and L1.4 models in late August.

For more information, visit www.brightlines.com.  

HANOVER, N.H.—The creation of a new studio for educational content at Dartmouth College required a new set of lights, so to take on that task the school’s Media Production Group went with Cineo Lighting. Specifically, the school went with three HS2 Wave and six Maverick fixtures to fill out the 35x26-foot space.

The HS2 is a high-powered fixture that Dartmouth is using to create a daylight balanced lighting package. The lights can also be controlled wireless via DMX, enabling users to remote control them through an iPad app.

The Maverick mid-powered fixtures are used for chroma keying as it comes with chroma green phosphor panels to light a 14x10-foot green curtain.

Both lighting fixtures come with Remote Phosphor Technology.

SEATTLE—Lighting out on location usually means augmenting and filling in the ambient light. Studio lighting, by contrast, usually means starting from scratch, and presents an array of challenges. Designers and manufacturers of lighting equipment work to overcome those challenges with innovative new equipment every year.

ARRI Skypanel

AVOIDING OBSOLESCENCE
For all the artistic needs that studio lighting must fulfill, John Gresch, vice president of lighting for ARRI, cautions that most studios are connected to a business. “What’s not changed is that everybody’s looking for return on their investment… the challenge is buying something that isn’t going to be obsolete too soon,” he said, adding that the company provides firmware updates to its lights “to bring new features and to bring longevity to the fixture that was invested in.”

Another ROI factor Gresch pointed to is flexibility, so fixtures continue to handle a lot of use even as lighting needs change. “[The kind of] flexibility that we offer is the ability to change many of the parameters of the light by the LED light engine, whether that be changing the correlated color temperature, or changing the actual gel color internally, whether that be the ability to program effects, so that the light can do many things.”

To add to the versatility of its Skypanel soft lights and L-series Fresnels, ARRI has just unveiled wireless control for those fixtures.

SAVING A LEGACY
Studios with existing tungsten lighting fixtures face the challenge of when to replace them with LED equipment. Sure, LEDs are going to reduce power to illuminate the fixtures and for air conditioning, but those Fresnels cost a pretty penny in their day and they continue to work fine day in and day out.

VisionSmith has allowed studios to have their cake and eat it too by designing its ReLamp product, LED replacements for incandescent bulbs in existing Fresnel fixtures. They fit into the halogen bulb’s socket, and precisely align with the fixtures optics. “You can just buy the Re-Lamp from us and put it in the regular halogen Fresnel, right where the halogen bulb goes,” said VisionSmith President Pete Smith. “You don’t even need to change your hang and focus, you’re literally just relamping.”

This brings those legacy Fresnel fixtures the advantages of LED lighting, such as low-power use, minimal heat and dimming without color shifts. VisionSmith provides ReLamps in 3200K and 5300K, according to Smith. “Everybody seemed to like the 5300K better than 5600K, even if the rest of their lights were 5600K.”

Litepanels Gemini 2x1 Soft Panel

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING SET
Broadcast studios are not only getting smaller in the size of their footprint, but they’re having to do a lot more with the space, according to Alan Ipakchian product marketing manager for Litepanels. For example, “there’s maybe two persons at a desk, and to camera right there’s a small living room set where there’s two couches facing each other,” Ipakchian said. “And then they also have to accommodate live performances, with rock and roll lighting.”

For these combination sets, Litepanels has introduced Gemini, a panel light. which provides a tunable full spectrum of light from tungsten to daylight along with red, green and blue LEDs, “so you can do those wall washes of color that the scene or environment asks for,” Ipakchian said. “They have the ability to adjust those Geminis, at any moment’s notice, quickly and easily through the DMX board, manually or wirelessly. Basically it allows our users to be more versatile because they’re being asked to be more versatile with the space they’re lighting.”

Cineo S410 full-gamut light

ADDING COLOR
Rich Pierceall, CEO for Cineo Lighting notes that more lighting customers are asking for saturated color capability in a white light fixture. The challenge his company faced was how to make this increased color capability user friendly.

“We want to make sure that it’s easy for our customers to be able to understand how adding saturated color to a base light is an intuitive process,” he said. “So we developed a user interface that we’ve deployed across several product lines now in our LED white lighting/saturated color lighting products.”

He described the use of saturated color as additive. “If you think about it, it’s almost like a layer cake,” he said. “At the base you set your white light CCT and level, 32K, 43K, 56K. And if you want to deviate from that, adding magenta or green or pink or purple, or any other saturated color, you’re allowed to do that without changing any of the aspects of the white light.”

Photon Beard Highlight LED

REMOTE PHOSPHOR
Sometimes the customer asks for lighting tools that technology isn’t ready to deliver yet. “For several years we’ve had customers ask us for an LED-powered directional softlight, essentially a replacement for the studio fluorescents that had become the workhorse for studio lighting for the last 20 years,” said Pete Challinger, vice president of U.S. Operations for Photon Beard Ltd. “We held off entering the space with an LED product for some time until we felt we could bring something truly improved to the market in all respects.”

That product is Highlight LED, a direct replacement for the company’s Highlight Studio Fluorescent product line. Challinger noted that the two biggest challenges that needed to be addressed were color and light distribution, adding that many LED fixtures are lacking in deep reds, and almost all have a tendency to drift over time.

“The recent trend to variable color fixtures only makes things worse,” he said. “Although variable color lights can be valuable for effects applications, so far all of them fail at producing a good full spectrum white. The key to solving this was using high quality remote phosphor technology. This allows much better control over the color produced and virtually eliminates aging.”

Zylight Pro-Zoom

DIFFERING NEEDS

Joe Arnao, president of Zylight, pointed to a wide variation of lighting needs from customers. “There’s not one solution for one particular customer,” he said. “Each situation is different. Someone like a corporate customer may have a space issue. They might be putting a studio into a small space, a low ceiling space, where a broadcast customer may be the exact opposite situation.

“They may want to do studio audience, large environment studio space, with a lot of color, animation and that kind of stuff,” he continued. “So those are both studio spaces, but are completely different in their scope.”

Zylight already had eight fixtures it designed and manufactured, and then added to those through distribution agreements with other light manufacturers.

“Our approach has been not only to manufacture products that were being requested from our customers, but we’re also a distribution and solutions company in that we handle a lot of brands exclusively in North and South America,” Arnao said. “Someone like a corporate customer may have a space issue; they might be putting a studio into a small space, a low ceiling space, where a broadcast customer may be in the exact opposite situation. Several years ago we were running up against not having exactly the solution that the customer needed. Now we’re in a much different place as a company in that we’re able to really offer many solutions to many types of customers.”

SAVING ENERGY AND MONEY
Scott Stueckle, sales manager at Kino Flo, looked back 25 to 30 years ago when fluorescent lighting fixtures began to replace tungsten equipment. “People liked the soft light and the full spectrum light, and they were saving money with lower energy costs,” he said. More recently, the revolution of LED lighting fixtures has brought additional savings with LED bulb lives of 30,000 to 50,000 hours.

“If the lamps can stay in the fixtures, the LED fixtures can remain color stable, and the lamp remains color stable through the life of the LED,” Stueckle said. Additionally, LEDs brought the ability to dim without a color shift, something that was problematic with fluorescent lamps.

With 20 or so different form factors to its LED offerings, Kino Flo has products “that can fit as a tool, the right tool for the right studio.”

A SAFER ALTERNATIVE
Fluotec CMO Jose Maria Noriega added another attribute of LED lighting technology to the list of advantages customers wanted: Their sustainability and environmentally friendly attributes, especially in contrast with the hazardous chemicals in fluorescent tubes, which can be costly and time-consuming to dispose.

“Fluotec overcame a variety of challenges using world-class design and manufacturing with a high technology approach for our studio and production lighting fixtures,” Noriega said. The ability to tune their fixtures from 2600K to 6500K provides additional versatility, “allowing for greater creativity without the need to use filters or gels.

“LED technology is the only technology available in the broadcast industry that actually saves money compared to the previous technologies used in the industry,” he added.

LIKE BEING THERE
Peter Plesner, managing director of BB&S Lighting, said he’s finding a trend where studios want integration between lighting and the sets. “A lot of these TV programs want you to feel like you’re at home, even though you’re in the TV studio.”

One way of doing that is to “put a lot of 4 x 4-foot soft boxes all over the ceiling, with Pipeline fixtures inside,” Plesner said. BB&S’ Pipeline fixtures have a 1-inch cylindrical form factor in a variety of lengths and use remote phosphor technology, separating the illumination supplying LEDs from the color generating phosphor, to provide precise color rendering, according to Plesner. “The whole Pipeline range is producing crisp very clean white light,” he said.

If you are going to invest in equipment as a cinematographer or lighting technician, lights are a good way to go. They will consistently serve you on a shoot, last for a long time and uphold their value. I want to step away from the larger, expensive units you always find on set for a moment and talk about the small but powerful things you can have in your bag. There are a lot of useful, affordable units you can accumulate, or even build, to utilize on set.

Strings of Christmas lights in a desert shoot create the illusion of a city in the distance.BULBS

There is no reason why there shouldn’t be bulbs in any ditty bag. Having a variety of bare bulbs is invaluable. We are still shooting movies with a lot of incandescent light in them, so having incandescents is pretty necessary.

I am always replacing the bulbs in the lamps the production designer provides with my own, knowing the wattage needed if we are utilizing something as a practical and seeing it in the shot. Another obvious reason to carry bulbs is to rig up a Chinaball, which makes for a beautiful, soft key light.

LED strips come in a variety of colors and can be controlled by a remote or mobile device. Incandescent bulbs are extremely inexpensive. Purchasing clamp light fixtures is also inexpensive and a good way to acquire the “guts” or socket for a lightbulb. In addition to the socket, you get a parabolic housing that can be clamped onto countless surfaces.

Another popular bulb is the Philips Hue, which comes in white or color. What is unique about the Hue is that you can change the color of the bulb, which can go between 16 million colors, with your mobile device. You can also sync them to music and dim them. You cannot go wrong with these, though they are a bit more expensive than a regular household incandescent.

STRIPS

The original strip was the classic string of Christmas lights. These will always be great to have. They are beautiful in the background of a restaurant scene or even bundled up into a cluster for a key light. Warm or white Christmas lights can also be slowly pulled across the back window in a poor man’s process to effectively simulate the shifting of a horizon line of city lights.

I have even taken multiple strings in a night exterior desert shoot and laid them 500 feet out into the sand to create the illusion of a city way out in the distance and add some depth to the world. You can also take a string of these or firefly lights like you would find in home decor, and create a ring light.

Clamp light fixture More popular now, and more affordable than ever, are LED strips. These tend to be much more controllable than people think. Like Christmas lights, they come in a variety of colors and can be controlled via a remote or mobile device.

LED strips are available in a hard fixture, resembling a fluorescent, or soft LED “rope” for more flexibility. They also attach easily to surfaces, so placing them under cabinetry or shelves in a bar scene is done with ease. With colored strips, neon signs outside of a window can be simulated. Just like Christmas lights, they can even be bundled up to create a soft source that is more specific.

MOBILE LEDs

Small, mobile LED panels have become very affordable and popular. Now with more accurate CRI ratings, they are great tools to have. I carry two Amaran M9 lights with me, which are powered by 5V USB, so they never require batteries, but there are a variety of small LEDs that you can get that are compatible with other batteries such as LP-6 and/or even have a p-tap input onboard.

Ring light fixture These units always have onboard dimmers and can be wrapped in diffusion like grid or silk to become a soft, spread out source. They are easily placed in a set with Velcro or a clamp. Instead of having a complicated car lighting kit you have to wire, mobile LED lights make for great extensions of a car dashboard, and an easy, go-to fill light.

LED panels can also be built. This is a little more expensive to do, but it is possible to create a custom panel with your choice of LED brands, colors, quantities and qualities.

CONCLUSION

If you know how to light, you will find very effective ways to implement the simplest of sources. When space and budget are limited, it is helpful to bring your own lighting tools to the table, but even on the big sets, we are constantly playing with the small, versatile lights in our own kits. There are hundreds of uses for every light and that includes everything from an ARRI Skypanel to a flashlight. With this in mind, you can accomplish anything.

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 through TV Technology.

LOS ANGELES—Aladdin will be shinning its lights on the upcoming Republican and Democratic National Conventions, as the company will provide more than 80 of its Bi-Flex LED lights to national cable news networks, including Bloomberg Television.

The Aladdin lights will be used primarily as fill lights in an off-site temporary studio and as key lights for small interview setups in the venues. Bloomberg’s full setup of lights includes six 200 W Bi-Flex4, six 100 W Bi-Flex2, and 10 50 W Bi-Flex 1 units. Jim Hirsch, COO of High Output, Inc., will serve as lighting director for Bloomberg.

The Bi-Flex lights use AC or battery power, offer adjustable color temperature from daylight to tungsten, and allow a variety of mounting options. Zylight is the North American distributor of Aladdin products. 

CHICO, CALIF.—Photon Bear’s Highlight Fluorescent lights have been around for more than 20 years, according to the company, but now the company has introduced the Highlight LED range of lights that duplicates many of the same attributes with LED features.

The new Highlight LED lights consist of four models that range from 90W to 360W. The lights use remote phosphor technology for accurate and consistent light quality with high CRI and TLCI ratings. Phosphor strops can be snapped in and out to change from Tungsten to Daylight. The lights also feature passive cooling technology and modular design techniques.

Photon Beard said that it will start shipping the new lights in June.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—BBS Lighting has announced that it is combining its Remote Phosphor LED lighting technology with Bank systems to create Bank LED Remote Phosphor lights. BBS has added its Remote Phosphor technology into the Pipeline 4-Bank 3-foot and 4-foot systems.

With the new technology, 4-Banks is now able to deliver 95+ Television Lighting Consistency Index. Remote Phosphor Pipes feature a phosphor layer positioned away from LEDs to provide a higher TLCI over its use, according to BBS. The lights are also now rated at 50,000 hours.

The 3- or 4-foot long, 1-inch diameter LED Pipes used in the 4-Banks provide light emissions over 1000 lumens per foot. The light is powered off a 48V power supply and a built-in four-channel control that offers eight or 16 bit DMX and manual dimming, as well as strobe capability. The lights also features a 1/10-inch remote phosphor covering.

The Pipeline 4-Banks are available in 3200-degree K, 4300-degree K, and 5600-degree K color temperatures. A bi-color model is also available in 3200-degree K and 5600-degree K.

SEATTLE—There was a time when you used the word “lots” a lot when talking about television studio lighting. You needed lots of fixtures, with lots of power to illuminate them, and lots of air-conditioning to remove all the heat generated. And all of that cost lots of money.

BB&S Area 48 Studio provides smooth dimming even in the last 5 percent.

Fluorescent tube and then LED technology changed that, although it took years from the debut of the earliest of each of those products before the major kinks got worked out, and refining is still going on.

The first generations of LED fixtures and many sold today coat the color-generating phosphor directly onto the LED bulbs, which subjects the phosphors to heat. It’s also difficult to evenly apply that phosphor coating to an object that small. Along came remote phosphor technology, where the phosphors are coated onto a panel in front of the LEDs, keeping the phosphors away from damaging heat and more easily coated on the larger surface.

SAME AS IT EVER WAS
According to Chuck Edwards, chief technology officer for Cineo Lighting in El Granada, Calif., his company was one of the first to bring remote phosphor technology to market, with its HS fixture. “Studios love it because you can set up a lighting system and know that, five years from now, in that rig the color is not going to budget, it doesn’t change brightness with age, it doesn’t change color with age, it stays right on the color you had on the first day.”

The HS led to other remote phosphor fixtures, like the company’s Maverick, a smaller studio light that can run off a battery and off AC. Maverick uses the exact same phosphor panel as the HS.

ARRI has recently completed its line of LED Fresnels with the L10 model, sporting a 10-inch lens and a 400W power draw that duplicates the light output of a 2K tungsten Fresnel. It joins ARRI’s smaller L7 and L5 LED Fresnels.

“The technology we’ve put into the L10 allows us to change color temperature from 2,800K to 10,000K, let it create green/magenta control and be able to select vivid colors,” said ARRI senior product manager for lighting Mike Wagner.

He pointed out that the same tunable light engine technology is built into their SkyPanel, a powerful soft light.

You normally think of a PARlensed light fixture as anything but a soft light source, but AAdynTech has found that by spreading the fixture’s beam to its widest—by using a 55 degree lens—on its LED PAR fixture and attaching a Chimera diffusor, they get a powerful soft light. “Because we don’t generate anywhere near that of an HMI PAR, Chimera is able to make a lighter product to mount on our lights,” said Walter Lefler, co-founder and partner of the Paramus, N.J.-based company.

Lefler noted an advantage about using PARs for softlights is that the next day, when you need a powerful, directional source, you can mount AAdynTech’s 30-, 15-or 5-degree lenses on the fixture and fill that bill.

Brightline has long made fluorescent tube fixtures for studio lighting. As LED lighting has become more popular, they’ve developed remote phosphor fixtures that duplicate the performance of the fluorescent fixtures, with remote phosphors advantages. “All the accessories from our fluorescent fixtures are interchangeable, such as the yoke, palm handles, intensifier screens,” said Kathy Katz, a partner in Brightline. “All they need to do is buy a new head, and they can keep and reuse all of the accessories.”

She said the Bridgeville, Pa.-based company has not obsoleted its line of fluorescent fixtures. “Some of our customers still prefer fluorescents, and are still purchasing them,” she said.

SMOOTH DIMMING
One advantage often touted by LED light makers is their smooth dimming. But in most cases they don’t actually dim smoothly through the past 5 percent to zero. That may not be a problem when the dimming to dark is not going to be done on-camera, “but many news studios have dark fade-ins and fade-outs, and those studios need dimming in that range to be very smooth,” said Peter Plesner, president of BBS Lighting.

That need led the Copenhagen-based company to develop a variant to its Area 48 soft light, the Area 48 L5 softlight, which performs smooth dimming all the way down to zero.

With more studios being built into spaces without the high ceilings of traditional purpose-built studios, BBS is also finding facilities deploying its Pipeline modular, 1-inch cylindrical form-factor remote phosphor fixtures, which can be deployed on roll-arounds or attached to the ceiling itself.

While it often seems like lighting makers go for more and more powerful fixtures, Litepanels noticed that some of its customers needed only half or even just a quarter of the maximum output of the company’s Astra fixtures. “Some studios are not actually using the full output of our Astras in their studios, so we’ve developed less bright versions of the Astra,” said Alan Ipakchian, product marketing manager for Litepanels in Chatsworth, Calif.

Though the new E series and EP series fixtures use the same number of the same LEDs as the full-fleged Astra, the lower heat generation allows them to leave an active cooling fan out of the design. Ipakchian said that allowed them to pass the savings on to the customer.

ACCENT GENERATORS

Sinclair Broadcasting recently installed Brightline LED SeriesONE and Micro-Ts at its American Sports Network studio. Elipsoidals are the accent generators of studio lighting, and present some challenges for LED technology because they require a point source of light, where a number of ganged LEDs are required to produce enough illumination for a studio setting. Fluotec utilizes its Nebula chamber, a dichroic reflective tube and diffusor, to combine the light from individual LEDs into the needed point source of light.

“Nebula also provides a much more even field of light, and it attenuates the common blue spike in the color spectrum that LEDs produce,” said Jerry Colmenero, in charge of business development at Fluotec. “The spectrum of light you get is much more akin to natural tungsten filament or whatever color temperature you’re after.”

Fluotec has also developed Halodim, a technology that allows DMX dimming to be done with a single channel of DMX. “We have an extra processor and software that ramps up the bit rate so you can utilize a single 8 bit channel,” said Colmenero.

Videssence is a pioneer in bringing fluorescent lighting fixtures into the TV studio and today offers both fluorescent and LED fixtures. A Fresnel fixture line features the VIDNEL Series VN080 adjustable beam Fresnel fixture, available in either daylight or tungsten color balance. The 80W light provides a manual slide bar to adjust the beam and lock it into place, and a touchpad on the side allows easy programming for DMX control and dimming.

Zylight re-imagined the Fresnel fixture form-factor with its F8 Fresnel fixtures, which accordian down to a small size for ease of use and transport in the field. But its small size also has advantages in the studio, where it takes up less space in the grid.

Additional arguments for deploying the F8 in the studio is its silent operation as well as wireless or DMX control.

Ryan Smith, president of K5600 in North Hollywood, Calif., said that while the company’s lighting fixtures are not often used in a traditional television studio, they are being adapted in hybrid still photography studios, where the crews are increasingly called on to add motion video to the traditional still model shots that are its stock-in-trade.

“They love using our fixtures in that studio setup because not only does it mimic the color temperature of flash that they’re accustomed to,” he said. “But they can also use a lot of the photographic accessories they’re used to, umbrellas, magnum reflectors, Mola dishes, and other accessories in their standard kit.”

LOS ANGELES—Over the last year Brent Foster, a director and cinematographer for Foster Visuals in Wallaceburg, Ontario, launched the ‘While I’m Here │The Legacy Project,’ profiling unique and selfless individuals. Since its launch, Foster has traveled the country to capture three individual stories, and for each he brought along the Zylight F8-100 LED Fresnels.

Zylight in use on set of a 'Legacy Project' shoot

Foster is able to use the lights on location thanks to it being water resistant and it being able to run on a 14.4V camera battery. Other advantages of the lights include consistent color quality and control with the barn doors, 8-inch glass lens, and spot and flood controls, according to Foster. The ability to collapse the ‘Flat Fresnel’ to four inches thick and Zylight’s custom travel kit makes it easily portable.

The Zylight F8-100 is available in both tungsten and daylight and draws 90W. It also features an LED engine with quantum dot technology, a high Color Rendering Index and high Television Lighting Consistency Index. DMX operation and ZyLink wireless technology allow multiple Zylights to link to simultaneous remote control.

To learn more about the ‘While I’m Here’ project, visit www.whileimheretheproject.com. 

CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS—Mexican-based lighting manufacturer Fluotec has unveiled two new LED Fresnel fixtures for TV/filmmaking applications, the AuraLux Plus and VegaLux Plus.

The AuraLux Plus is a 5.5-inch LED Fresnel that uses 146W. It features a manual zoom—12-47degrees—and has Halodim technology to provide stable output across the complete intensity range with a Color Rendering Index of 90+. The fixture weighs 11.3 pounds and comes with an eight-way barn door, c-clamp, filter holder and power cord.

VegaLux Plus

The VegaLux Plus is a 7-inch Fresnel with a motorized zoom lens—13-47 degrees—that can be set remotely using DMX control. The light uses 185W and has DMX or local dimming control of the output. The Halodim firmware allows for smooth dimming with no color shifts. The unit’s Nebula diffusion chamber offers pure white output at CRI of 90+. The fixture weighs 14 pounds and features the same kit as the AuraLux Plus. Both fixtures are available in daylight and tungsten-balance color temperature versions.

Jerry Colmenero is in charge of the U.S. division of Fluotec and can be reached at 361-288-1775.