Suggestions for Buying Indoor Lights...

tripleAAA

tripleAAA

Active member
My boss just bought a house and it's being turned into a studio/set. Each room has its own theme and we plan to shoot both pictures and videos of models there. He uses strobes and flashes for the pictures. He has put me incharge of figuring out what lights to buy for video. The house doesn't have overhead lighting in most of the rooms, and the main source of light is natural sunlight coming through the very large windows. The room sizes vary from 8x10 to 20x20. I shoot on two cameras, sony's HDR-HC1, and sony's VX2000, both with wide angle lenses. I have no idea what lights to buy, but here's what I do know:

1. I want to be able to have even, soft light, basically bringing the overall light levels up in the room.
2. I want to white balance to sunlight so the indoor light matches the outdoor light.
3. I want the colors in the video to look very vivid and saturated.
4. I need to be able to move the lights from room to room and set them up in under 10 minutes if possible. Mobility is key.

Price is not really an issue, we just want a good setup. Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated.

triple
 
KINOFLOS!! (location flourescents) They're great for this sort of thing, get the 5600 (daylight) globes, a couple of 4'4Banks should be a good start. If you can afford it a 1200 par hmi to shoot through the windows and a joker 400 hmi with chimera for inside will be invaluable. A little pricy though.
 
Ok, I think I know where you're going with this...

Having done something similar, I would look at one of two options:

Lower Cost: Two large Rifa softboxes, at least 500s. The are very quick to setup and take down, they're light to move and they throw the kind of light you're going to want. You won't be able to match them to sunlight though so you'd have to gel the windows.

Higher Cost: Kinoflows with daylight balanced tubes. This would be my preferred option. You can get daylight balanced bulbs so you wont have to gel the windows and more importantly, your models wont have their mascara melting two minutes into the action. They will much prefer it. Plus you can use these lights to augment the strobes (although they wont be much of a match - but they can add a bit of fill depending on how he's shooting).

Either way you should either buy extra lights or extra light stands. Make all your setups and just move the lights with the action...

Good luck.

Matt
 
If you need to buy a whole lot of lights (or discover that you are, indeed, on a budget) then I would check out MattinStLouis' flos. See the thread

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=27095

I've seen Matt's prototypes, and they're pretty impressive. You could run over those things with an F-250 and not dent them.

I wouldn't go with all flos, though. For accents/highlights/hairlights I would get some fresnels (probably a few 150's, several 300's, and a few 650's) that could be gelled to match daylight and make things a little more interesting. But the daylight matched flos will definitely bring the baseline level of light up for you.
 
Good call Joe regarding Matt's lights.

Regarding the accent lighting, eh, I don't think that's going to be a factor for what triple A has in mind....

But I could be wrong!

Matt
 
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