Advice? Essential Light Kit Indoor/Outdoor with $4000

S

Sheldon Charron

Well-known member
Hey everyone. I have been playing with some low cost LED lighting, a small litepanels micro, etc.

After using an Arri 3 light kit the other day, then being on set of a slightly higher budget music video where they used a big HMI and lights with battery packs, I have decided to take the plunge and invest in good lighting.

This summer I'll be shooting a feature and am prepared to invest up to $4000 to start in lighting for it. I'll rent the rest for now, and to offset the cost of these lights, I may even rent my own lighting out to others, as there is a real shortage in rental equipment locally. I originally thought that LED were the way to go, but I'm thinking now that it's just to costly at this time and that I could get more value for the dollar with tungsten for now.

So....If you had $4000 to spend, what would you get? LED or Tungsten? New or used? Thanks guys.
 
Sheldon,

I posted this comment in a thread a few clicks down, but it may help you also:

Much of the rage is about soft lighting like Kino's and the coming of better LEDs. But for a budget, and versatility, it is hard to ignore a good tungsten fresnel kit with some softboxes. It gives you focused hard lights, soft lighting, kickers, etc all from one set of lights. For $3000 you can get a reasonable kit of Arris which will last forever. All of the major retailers have Arri kits. There are other brands as well like Mole-Richardson and others. Here is a typical Arri kit which is very versatile, except you might want to add another softbox and speedring.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...ungsten_4.html

The biggest downsides to tungsten is it needs more power and is hot.

If you know you need soft light, then flos might be the way to go, but you can't make hard light out of soft.

Shooting outside is pretty tough with anything in your price range. Flos (with daylite bulbs) don't have much throw, and you will need to gel tungstens to correct for WB, which reduces your output by 1/2. You might need to rent something big for those occasions. You might also try a scrim jim with reflective cover and use the sun, but you need complete control of set and timing for this to work.

Grant
 
Thanks for all the info. I was on a set where they were using a huge mirror during the day and on the reverse it was silver foil. I have photography reflectors similar to the silver foil, but not as intense as the mirror. I am more thinking about lighting up night scenes outside, or for interiors (including fill where daylight is coming in through windows, etc.).

I'm shooting a feature this summer and while I can get a pretty good deal on a three light Arri kit to rent, I'll likely spend about half what it would cost to buy one, and I thought I could rent it out to recoup some of my investment.
 
I would probably try to find a cheap 1200 par and a 4x4 kino or two. You could probably get that all for around 2 grand...

Then with the rest, buy grip stuff. Maybe a 6x or an 8x set with a silk and ultra bounce. Some combo stands and C-stands, also some 4x4 frames of different diffusions. Then also some cardellini's and other sort of clamps. If you shop right, you should still have a little bit of money left over to get some more fun gadgets.

Just whatever you do, don't get tungsten lights...I really think if you have the cash for flourescents and HMI's, there's no reason to get anything else. Especially with all these cmos cameras being so into daylight balanced light, instead of tungsten.
 
Rental houses, guys with gear selling it on craigslist....Just...wherever you can. Sure there are a few things you have to do to get things a bit cheaper, like getting magnetic ballasts instead of electronic, or getting kinos with old style backing plates or old style ballasts, just do what makes things work.

I had a friend a while ago who was selling an arri 1200 fresnel with magnetic ballast for 900 bucks.

Saw this kino on ebay a little while ago.......610 bucks
http://cgi.ebay.com/Kino-Flow-4-4-b...tem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2a080dab9e

6x6 frame - 280...you don't need the fancy one with corners, a 6x6 is small enough that just one pin is fine.
http://www.filmtools.com/6x6rotufrmse.html
ultra bounce - 130
http://www.filmtools.com/6x6maulcat31.html
1/4 silk - 105
http://www.filmtools.com/6x61whsims30.html

I don't want to search and find links for the rest, but I think you can understand how it'll all work.

All of what I posted on here was around 2100 dollars, that leaves you plenty of money to buy clamps, a combo stand for the 1200, a frame or two and diffusion, and some other things I'm probably forgetting.

It does matter where you live, but you can find these things for cheap. Just have to be willing to wait a little while to get it all together.
 
Amen to much of the above.

Maybe somebody should start a thread where we put suggested packages of lighting AND grip for $.5K, $1K, $2K, $3K, $4K, $5K. Its for sure that if you have fixtures but don't have a decent set of stands, clamps, flags, nets, open frames, reflectors, expendables, etc., etc., you're still out of business.

I have a really capable package -- a 12' trailer packed with tungsten heads, Kinos, HMIs, lots of grip, all pro movie gear in excellent shape -- and over half of it was purchased used over a number of years. It takes some hustle and some time.
 
hah! what luck, i just logged on to make the exact same thread. i have roughly 5000 bucks to spend on lighting for a Canon 7D for TV commercials and music videos mostly. i will probably be doing shorts and maybe even a feature as well. my other problem is that i have to take the lights from here across to a 220-240V country.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/173608-REG/Arri_571891_Softbank_IV_Tungsten_5.html

that's what i found so far, with regards to some of your suggestions.

as i understand it though, daylight balanced light fixtures would work better with the daylight balanced sensor.

i've been doing a lot of research into high CRI osram lights such as fluorescent tubes for my daylight source (osram dulux 954 55w 5400k daylight balanced) and maybe even grabbing a hold of an old fresnel fixture and building my own HMI's with a low-UV bulb. my head's pounding with having to learn wiring and stuff fast enough to make sense out of all of this before i have to leave the US and head back home. it's more the stress of having to rely mostly on google and a few really wordy articles popping up from the search, instead of having a structured way to walk myself through it. it's hard to learn how to put something together just by reading about it, i should say.

heck, i'd try to build the rest as well if i could get my hands on the fixtures themselves back home. then it'd just be a matter of wiring and getting the right bulb and ballast. i can't even take a look at them because they'd be too expensive to rent, almost two to three times what it costs to rent stuff here. the obvious plus side is that once i DO have fixtures i can rent them out and get my money back pretty darn quick.

what do you figure?

EDIT: oh another question, i dont know if this is right, but i read somewhere that there was an advantage to using a transformer to go from 220v to 110v and using 110v fixtures?
 
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