Balanced Halogen Bulbs

[ToVuNikaMua]

I am assembling my first light kit and am going the resourceful way and using regular halogen flood lights along with sealed beam halogens. I choose to stick with the same type of light to keep the color temperature roughly the same just to save myself some hassle as a new user of the DVX100B. After reading through the sticky lighting guide links, one thing that stuck in my mind was the balanced bulbs by tota? lota? my question is as follows: If im using the Dvx with manual white balance how significant a difference will balanced bulbs make? and if it is worth it where I might be able to find balanced flood lights and sealed beam bulbs. Thank you in advance.

 

[Huy Vu]

I have those lights and in my experience if you manual white balance it then the light will come out balanced, and that's fine if you just use them exclusively. But when you start mixing them with other light sources you're going to run into problems since the white balance setting will not give you a uniform tone. I tried looking for balanced bulb in my local hardware stores but I had no luck. Tomorrow I plan to go buy some blue CTB gel to put in front of the lights. I'll tell you the results once I got them.

 

[ToVuNikaMua]

I read that the halogen color temperature scale runs from about 2800k to 3200k, and in some thread here someone mentioned that the Cameras white balance wont get too confused if you stick with temperatures within a few hundred K's. Tungsten is about 2800k and I was also wondering if mixing the two would be compatible without gels. I do however have quite a few differnt gels (10 or so differnt kinds) would it be optimal to try and choose a color from those to match the lights if it all possible.

 

[Huy Vu]

I believe that the color temp for those lights is around 2900 K. The gel should bring it to around 3200 K. I don't have a DVX so I'm not sure how well it handles manual WB. However I believe that you'll see an obvious, if light, tint. This might create the look you want but if you're trying to shoot it flat with uniform color tone then I would try to match the color temp as much as possible. Definitely mess around with the gels.