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.

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.