If there’s one constant in this world, it might just be that technology is always changing. The second you feel as if you may finally have a handle on it all, it changes so much that you have to just about start at square one. The same goes for lighting. Lamp technology has changed so much in recent years that knowing which ones to include in a kit has become as difficult as solving world hunger. That’s why we’re going to look at some of the newest and best light fixtures for incandescent, fluorescent, and LED and give you some tips on which lights work best for every type of video production. Though we can never show you the exact lighting kit to buy for your needs, hopefully we can point you in the right direction.

Incandescent

Unfortunately, there is precious little to say that would make incandescent bulbs look good. They produce a lot of heat and guzzle power like a Hummer guzzles gas. These features don’t bode well for the incandescent’s future, but there is one redeeming quality: incandescent bulbs are still the brightest lamps money can buy. They are also some of the cheapest fixtures on the market today. If you need something that can compete with the strength of the sun or light the inside of an entire house, then incandescents and HMI’s are really the only way to make it happen.

Though I do my best to be good to the environment, I have to admit that I still use incandescent PARs like Smith Victor’s A80 or Lowel’s Omni and DP as the backlight in my three-point lighting setups. I just find it too hard to get the rim light strong enough while still keeping the fixture out of the shot using any other type of lighting fixture. Also, for background washes, I still use a Lowel Tota light with a 750W bulb or a Cool-Lux Hollywood Soft Light with a 1000W bulb. These fixtures combined with gels and cookies give me the light intensity and look I need for backgrounds in larger scenes. Lighting the same scene with fluorescents or LED lamps would require several fixtures, making it more difficult to get wide shots without stands in the frame and of course, making it more expensive too.

The other advantage of using incandescent-style bulbs is that I can dim the lights without ballasts by using a heavy-duty light dimmer available from any home improvement center. This makes light dimming affordable, but does change the color temperature of the light when dimmed. However, I am usually able to live with the results.

The most affordable incandescent lights on the market right now come from Lowel, Smith Victor, and Cool-Lux which sell great interview lighting kits for a good price. If you’re looking for lights that industry professionals use most often, both ARRI and Mole-Richardson offer some high-quality lighting kits as well. Depending on what you’ll be using these lights for, there should be a light amongst these manufacturers that fits your needs.

Fluorescent

On the other hand, fluorescent bulbs produce very little heat and draw less than a quarter of the power of similar incandescent lights. They are generally very soft lights and tend to look great as key lights for interviewing subjects. The biggest problem with this lamp type is that they can’t be dimmed by a simple variable resistor dimmer. Since fluorescents work by using bursts of electricity to fluoresce gas inside of a tube, cutting down on the amount of electricity to the fixture will either make the light blink or turn off altogether. This means that the only way to dim fluorescent lights is to use a ballast which makes the fixtures fairly large and cumbersome. That’s why these kinds of lights are typically used in studios rather than field work. We actually use fluorescent lights from Kino-Flo such as their 4-Bank and DivaLites to light our green screen and subject in our studio. That being said, companies like Kino-Flo have been hard at work putting together systems, like their Barfly, that are easier to use in the field. These kits usually have fluorescent lamps with ballasts built right into the unit along with hard cases to withstand the frequent abuse of using lights on the road. In fact, many major networks are now using fluorescent fixtures for their studios since it saves so much on cost and generally casts a pleasing soft light on their anchors.

Some of the best fluorescent light fixtures can be found at Kino-Flo and FloLight, who have been in the industry for a while. You can also check out Videomaker’s review on the Kino-Flo Barfly to see for yourself what these fixtures can do.

LED

Of all of the lighting technologies, the most promising is the LED. LEDs are an answer to many of the problems gaffers had with incandescent light fixtures. LEDs are small, lightweight, produce almost no heat, draw very little power, can be dimmed without changing color temperature, and can even go between color temperatures at the flick of a switch. With all of these features, it’s no wonder that LED fixtures seem to be the Holy Grail of video lighting.

The only real problem with LEDs are their limited light intensity. Even the strongest LED lamps fall woefully short of the amount of lumens an incandescent lamp can throw on a subject. That’s why LEDs are most often used as key and fill lights in interviews, and on-camera lights since the fixtures can be placed close to the subject in these situations. With the way technology advances in the world of LEDs, I can only imagine that it’s just a matter of time before these lamps begin to equal those of incandescents. In fact, some companies such as LitePanels with their Sola, and ARRI’s L-Series Fresnel concept are now making LED fixtures that are just as bright as similar incandescent fixtures.

Even so, LED light fixtures are hard to beat for field shooting. They are lightweight, can take a decent amount of abuse, and can run off of battery power for long periods of time due to their low power consumption. Lights like these have become very popular at trade shows and events where lighting is usually less than ideal and space is limited. This last year at CES, I saw dozens of people using LED fixtures like the LitePanel 1×1 with an external battery pack for quick interviews and product shots. Many energy conscious studios and buildings are using them too. The White House Press Briefing Room saw their energy consumption drop 95% after using LED fixtures. Even prime time television shows such as Fox’s 24 used LEDs to light parts of their set.

Though only a handful of companies once sold LEDs, most brand name manufacturers have jumped on the LED bandwagon. Kino-Flo’s website has a coming soon page for LED lighting kits, ARRI now sells LoCaster LED fixtures as well as hybrid LED kits, FloLight sells Microbeam LEDs in both a small and large form, Mole-Richardson has a MoleLED concept light that is soon to be released, and Lowel introduced their Blender which can switch between indoor and outdoor color temperatures. Videomaker has also had the privelege to review some of the more interesting LED lights over the past couple of years including the ARRI H-2 “Hybrid” kit, and the LitePanel 1×1 Bi-Color light, both of which are dimmable and can switch color temperatures. Though many of these lights can be more expensive than their incandescent counterparts, the flexibility and energy savings they give is almost always worth the cost.

My first job out of college was working as an editor for a local TV station. Well, technically, my first official job was a short stint working the make up counter at Walgreens, but that’s another story for another time. I didn’t work at the TV station very long either. I quickly learned that the employee-employer model wasn’t my cup of tea and struck out on my own after a few months. But the experience was enlightening. I got to see how the station made TV commercials. Granted, the spots were quite awful. Picture your typical schlock pitching used cars, law firms, and furniture stores, but they were commercials none-the-less. And I got to see first hand that making a commercial is not really that complicated. Of course, making a good commercial is extremely hard, but you gotta start somewhere.

So, in the spirit of demystification, I’d like to deconstruct my latest commercial spot for you. If you think you might have the stuff to produce commercial work but aren’t sure where to start, maybe this’ll help. Maybe not. I’m a filmmaker not a career counselor!

Have a look:

This particular spot can be broken down into 4 main elements.
1. The Copy – the words that are being said
2. Voice Over – the recording, or performance of the copy
3. Visuals – the stuff you see
4. Music and Sound – music bed and sound effects

If you’ve seen my portfolio you might correctly assume that I’ve worked with this client quite a bit. The message and branding have already been dialed in so I’m using those guidelines when developing the spot.

Now here are my secret weapons for each of these categories.

The Copy. I used to write all my own copy before I realized that there are much more talented people than I who actually LIKE writing scripts. After receiving the event details from the client, I wrote up some instructions and forwarded the details to my copy writer, Kallie. She’s worked with this client before and has the quirky Rolling Hills voice dialed in. By the way, Kallie is a pen-for-hire if you’re needing some deftly crafted prose or poetry for a project. You can find her on Twitter.

Voice Over. Once the script was approved by the client, I emailed it to Marketing Mania (mktmania.com). I’ve had the pleasure of working with this company for a few years now. They’ve done 95% of the VO work in my portfolio. Since we’d already cast a voice over artist for this client, the turn around was right quick. In less than 24 hours I had an MP3 of the final voice over. Use them. Tell Christina I sent you.

Visuals. No cameras were harmed, or even used, in the making of this commercial. This is all After Effects. Some artwork was provided by the client and the rest was created in software or sourced on iStockphoto. My goal was to create an interesting layout of content that illustrates the copy while leading the viewer’s eye through the spot in an engaging way. As you might imagine, this was the most laborious, time-consuming task of the process. The final visuals were assembled and timed in Final Cut Pro.

Music and Sound. Right now my favorite production music sites are Pump Audio, Non Stop Music, and Dewolfe Music. You buy only the song you need and pay based on use and distribution – pretty simple. Sound effects were all sourced through Sounddogs.com. Same search and purchase model.

Jesse Rosten is a filmmaker and photographer currently based out of Northern California. He’s a fan of creativity in all its forms.

For all the scientific discoveries we’ve made in the past few decades, it’s surprising how many mysteries there are still left to solve. What’s the smallest sub-atomic particle? What are the limits of the human brain? Are there parallel universes similar to ours and if so, how do we prove it? That’s why it’s no surprise that for video editors there is still so much debate over the seemingly age-old question of which editing software is best. A quick  look at the Videomaker forums shows just how much heated debate there still is and so, I’ve decided that even though having an opinion on this topic is akin to playing with fire, I would like to still give it the ol’ college try. That being said, I am admittedly no expert on either Sony Vegas, Avid, CyberLink PowerDirector, or Corel Video Studio Pro, and so I leave the merits of those programs to both the Videomaker forum participants and any comments written below. However, it’s only fair to say that for the past 7 years, I have been a Final Cut Pro editor. All the way back in my high school days in 2003, I was using the program to make promotional videos for both my school and church. That’s not to say that I haven’t had experience with Adobe Premiere though. Since making my way to Videomaker a year ago, I have edited more than 25 promotional and educational videos using Adobe Premiere so after a year with the program I feel like I have a good perspective on the good and the bad of both platforms.That being said (and I’m sure my lawyer will be fairly relieved), here are my thoughts on the merits of both Final Cut Studio 3 and Adobe CS5. Read the rest of this entry »

Halloween is just around the corner. For many it’s time to carve pumpkins, hang the fake cobwebs, and consume so many “fun-sized” candy bars it stops being fun. For us movie lovers it means dusting off the old horror movie collection, popping some popcorn and clicking “play”.

There is a heap of scary movies one can choose from in order to be spooked each season; from blood-sucking vampires, flesh-eating zombies and relentlessly haunting spirits to the mildly frightful, but mainly laughable characters of the genre. Since I usually prefer to maintain the ability to sleep at night, I typically choose the comedic route when trying to get into the spirit of Halloween. However, there are times when a good scare is quite thrilling. Here’s what’s in my queue for this Halloween (in no particular order)…

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

The Shining (1980)

Beetle Juice (1988)

Ghostbusters (1984)

30 Days of Night (2007)

Zombieland (2009)

Sleepy Hollow (1999)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Pet Semetary (1989)

28 Days Later (2002)

…I’m feeling pretty good about my line-up. However, I can’t help but feel I’m missing something; something that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe you can help…any suggestions?

Let’s be honest, the first thing most of us think about when buying a new computer is the processor speed. Granted, there may be a few lone wolves whose elevator stops just shy of the top that think about the color or artistic merits of the computer first, but undoubtedly most people think of processing speed. Historically, this has indeed been the best indication of improvement to one’s computing experience and deservedly so. I mean there’s no doubt that going from 1 Ghz of processing speed to 2 should technically give your computer speeds that are close to twice as fast (which of course never actually happens), so what’s the big idea behind the title above? Let me explain. First of all, I think we can all agree that Moore’s law (which states that the amount of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on a chip will double every two years) cannot mathematically go on forever, and secondly, that the biggest gains in editing speed is no longer coming from the CPU, but from a fast hard drive and a GPU.

It’s shocking to think that Moore’s law could one day go the way of the dinosaurs. Even more shocking still is to hear a number of experts declare that CPUs are quickly approaching a power “wall” where to make the CPU any faster would mean a melting of the very substance that the transistors rest on. It doesn’t take a genius to know that a melted chip isn’t going to allow you to finish your video edit in record time. That’s why it’s unfortunate that this problem has not gotten a satisfactory answer from the labs at AMD or Intel, meaning that the “wall” may be approaching faster than we think.

On the other side of things, when Adobe announced their newest suite of creative products, CS5, they made a big deal of the close integration and speed gains that both Adobe Premiere and Media Encoder could get with a graphics card running on CUDA technology. This is because both Adobe and NVIDIA finally realized that CPUs are not only slowing their pace of improvement, but also pale in comparison to the processing power of a GPU – especially when today’s GPUs can handle the job of encoding and rendering more efficiently. If that wasn’t proof of the diminishing power of the CPU, it also seems that new versions of operating systems need less processing power and more RAM than they used to. Just a few years ago, when most people were running Windows XP, the minimum requirements for their computers to run was a measly 300 Mhz of processing power and 128 MB of RAM. Interestingly enough, when Windows finally upgraded their OS to the relative stability of Windows 7, the minimum requirements for the CPU went up by 700 Mhz, whereas the RAM went up by almost 1.8 GB, effectively double what the requirements of the CPU are. Even so, the most telling fact of all can be found with Intel’s latest announcement of their Sandy Bridge chip. Shortly after the announcement, MIT’s Technology in Review blog called into question the actual improvements of Intel’s chips saying that they “had little to tout in terms of improved CPU performance.” Instead, it seems that Intel is focusing on improved graphics processing and communication which has very little to do with what the traditional processor does. Though this may be good news for graphic card companies, it most certainly must be bad news for processor manufacturers and computer companies. If chips don’t get significantly better for tasks such as video editing or high end rendering, there will be real concern for these manufacturers as their biggest accounts will slowly fade away. Honestly, who wouldn’t just keep upgrading RAM and hard drives rather than buying a whole new CPU every 2-4 years – especially in our economy?

Hope is not lost however. Thankfully, it does appear that Intel is intent on nipping this problem in the bud by announcing new technology such as memristors and quantum computing, all of which hold promise but still have yet to see the light of day. These discoveries have the potential to allow processing speeds of up to 1 Thz. However, given the current state of the processing industry, there is good reason to doubt that these technologies will be implemented soon enough to stave off the problem. Either way, though it is a shame that processing power may not hold the same importance as it once did, the one thing that won’t be missing the slowing progress of processors is our wallets.

Well, this was a long time coming. Apparently, Canon brought out a 4K 8 megapixel camera at their 2010 Expo for shooters all around the world to drool over. While the body may look like an oversized hair dryer, it’s what’s on the inside that will make Canon blow you away. The camera can shoot in 60p at a full 4K resolution, a 2/3rds inch CMOS sensor, and a fully functional flip-out HD LCD. Unfortunately, this is just a concept camera and Canon has said that they have no intention of bringing it to market so those of you who already started to count the remaining savings in your bank account, can safely deposit your money away. I can’t say for sure why Canon would ever dangle the 4K carrot in front of us without a solid release date, but they are definitely not the first to do so (read: RED cameras). All of the ranting aside, the camera is actually not meant for video capture (as if anyone really believes that) but instead is a “multipurpose image capture device.” This means that one is supposed to use the device like a camera that is constantly taking photos giving users a ton of potential pictures to choose from when it comes time to edit. Capturing photos this way sounds mildly innovative but one still can’t help but think that the camera would just do better as an incredibly high resolution camcorder. Nonetheless, this camera at least marks Canon as an intentional competitor in the emerging 4K camcorder market while at the same time proving that 4K is the next big revolution to hit video. I have no doubt that we’ll be seeing more of these kinds of cameras soon so keep a keen eye out on the market.