Best LED Fresnel Equivalent to an Arri 300 watt Fresenel

[jcs]

Because they were missing important parts of the spectrum. Putting a gel(filter) in front of them to filter out another part of the spectrum doesn’t add back in what’s missing to begin with(and now you’re working with even less color[spectrum]). The green push is one of the biggest things I hated about early and cheap LED’s. Even today, some expensive ones still aren’t great. I have two Nila’s, which are arguably good quality lights, but they still have to have at least an 1/8 or 1/4 minus green, especially if working with other sources.

I have a lot of LED’s that I really like, now, and I have more money tied up in LED’s than I ever have in lighting before, but they still can’t make skin look as nice as good ‘ole tungsten. If nothing else matters except how the person ultimately looks on-camera, one of my couple hundred dollar Arri 750 openface tungsten lights in a 2’x3’ Chimera is better than one of my multi-thousand dollar Gemini’s in the 2’x3’ softbox.

Yeah after a while one digs deeper and finds that the better light sources have a continuous color spectrum (closer to a black-body emitter) vs. major spikes and dips:

This would have been very helpful back when I first started buying LED lights! https://indiecinemaacademy.com/complete-led-color-database-cri-tlci-cqs-tm30-15/

 

[puredrifting]

I don’t look at any of our gear as investments. You’re never going to be able to sell any of it down the road at anywhere close to what you paid for it, much less at a profit(Lord, if only I could sell my gear for what it’s insured for...). You’re buying tools today to help you do a job to help you make money. Yeah, it doesn’t sound as sexy and classy, but cameras and lights aren’t investments, they’re tools.

Definitely been my experience. With cameras and lights, by the time I sell them, I'm usually happy to get anything for them because I don't turn over gear quickly. I just gave away my pristine condition Mighty Mole package to a gaffer I work with because I couldn't even give it away on Facebook or Craigslist. I also threw away my busted housing Arri 1K open face. The yolk receiver actually busted out of the housing after 20 years and financially it wasn't even close to worth repairing. I doubt if any of my current LED lights will be worth anything inside 2-3 years. That's why I think it's a terrible investment to buy expensive LEDs like Arris unless you can bill them and amortize them in a year or less. Cameras seem as perishable now as computers, they seem to be close to worthless after as little as 6 months to a year. Insane. But thats the way the business is, especiaslly the past few years.

 

[Akos Baranya]

Well this would be the area where dedolight should shine and they do have fixtures that are supposed to be what you want, but they seem behind the curve on LED tech compared to say, aputure.

 

[Run&Gun]

Yeah after a while one digs deeper and finds that the better light sources have a continuous color spectrum (closer to a black-body emitter) vs. major spikes and dips:

This would have been very helpful back when I first started buying LED lights! https://indiecinemaacademy.com/complete-led-color-database-cri-tlci-cqs-tm30-15/

Yeah, it's not really anything we thought about until...

 

[cpreston]

I don’t look at any of our gear as investments. You’re never going to be able to sell any of it down the road at anywhere close to what you paid for it, much less at a profit(Lord, if only I could sell my gear for what it’s insured for...). You’re buying tools today to help you do a job to help you make money. Yeah, it doesn’t sound as sexy and classy, but cameras and lights aren’t investments, they’re tools.

Lights might not be investments, but the current used prices for tungsten and HMI are pretty great. As long as the lamps aren't completely outlawed, I would say they are a better investment than any LED panel. I mean, if you hustle you can probably pay off your Skypanel with rentals, but it also costs 20x as much as a used open face into a chimera.

 

[Eric Coughlin]

The Litepanels Caliber has a good barn door cut, but is daylight only (with circle gels that come with it) and probably equivalent to around a 150w Tungsten. But it does fit your price point. I have a couple of them and find them useful at times. I have a couple of the Fiilex 160s as well, and their barn door cut isn't as good, but they are bi-color. I have a couple Practilite 602s and their barn door cut is decent but they're above the price point you're looking for. Dedo has the best barn door cut but they aren't cheap.

I need to get some higher powered LED Fresnels. The Apurture 300d is one option. I've also considered the Moles Teners which go as high as a 1600w for $10k. I want to add the Hive 200C at some point as that should be brighter than the Practilite and RGB. It'd be cool if the Moles would go RGB as well. The Arri LED Fresnels I find too large and heavy for the amount of light they put out.

 

[Run&Gun]

Lights might not be investments, but the current used prices for tungsten and HMI are pretty great. As long as the lamps aren't completely outlawed, I would say they are a better investment than any LED panel. I mean, if you hustle you can probably pay off your Skypanel with rentals, but it also costs 20x as much as a used open face into a chimera.

Used gear prices are absolutely great. If you’re buying... ; )

Yeah, as long as we can still get lamps, my Arri and Lowel tungsten fixtures will still be around and kicking long after my current LED’s will have shuffled off to the great recycling bin in the sky.

Just had to get an itemized list of gear together the other week for my insurance company for the scheduled equipment coverage and my LED’s now exceed my tungsten fixtures in numbers and value.

 

[Run&Gun]

I just received my two 200-C’s with fresnel lenses last week. I haven’t had a chance to really put them through their paces, but I don’t think i’m getting the kind of barn door cut i’d get with an Arri 650 or 300 and it’s more fiddley to adjust, because you’re moving the actual fresnel lens attachment mounted to the outside of the light instead of the lamp/reflector assembly inside on a worm gear. It just feels like we take take two steps forward and two(or three) steps back with a lot of this new stuff. We gain all these cool features that make things very convenient and versatile, like bi-color, full range dimming, color mixing, etc., but then lose or have crippled some of the very basics of lighting control to shape and control the light.

I have some source four mini barrels/lenses on my 100-C’s and you definitely get a hard, controlled cut, but they’re not very big(or powerful). You can put full size source four barrels on on the 200-C’s with Hive’s new adapter, but it’s far from small and compact(or cheap). That being said, I do want to try a source four barrel on one and see how well it works.

 

[puredrifting]

It just feels like we take take two steps forward and two(or three) steps back with a lot of this new stuff. We gain all these cool features that make things very convenient and versatile, like bi-color, full range dimming, color mixing, etc., but then lose or have crippled some of the very basics of lighting control to shape and control the light.

This is a trend with lighting and cameras as we've all discussed. They're giving us the moon and stars with new toys/features, but missing out on the basics. My beef with LEDs, all of them, is their fragility. Lights get knocked over, it's par for the course. Almost any LED fixture is DONE if it gets knocked over to the floor whereas with our tungsten lights, they take a beating and keep on working for the most part. A light working reliably is more important than bi-color/RGB and effects, wouldn't you agree?

 

[Run&Gun]

This is a trend with lighting and cameras as we've all discussed. Theyre giving us the moon and stars with new toys/features, but missing out on the basics. My beef with LEDs, all of them, is their fragility. Lights get knocked over, it's par for the course. Almost any LED fixture is DONE if it gets knocked over to the floor whereas with our tungsten lights, they take a beating and keep on working for the most part. A light working reliably is more important than bi-color/RGB and effects, wouldn't you agree?

Yes. It doesn’t matter what a light can do, because if it’s broken, it can’t do anything. Usually the worst that happened if an Arri or Lowel tungsten fixture got knocked over, the lamp would break and you’d have to put a replacement in. I don’t think I’ve ever had any of my LED fixtures knocked to the ground, but I’m not sure how well some of them would fair... Maybe the manufacturers should start doing drop tests like is done with cell phones and laptops, because that’s essentially what we have now, computers on lightstands.

 

[Eric Coughlin]

The Mole LEDs are built pretty similar to their tungsten equivalents. I was surprised by the material on the Skypanel when I first encountered it in person as I'd expected it to be metal but it's some type of less durable plastic and metal combination or something. I guess the hardware for LEDs weighs more than for tungsten so manufacturers try to lower the weight by using lighter materials, as well as not needing metal because the light doesn't get hot enough to burn through the plastic.

 

[puredrifting]

The Mole LEDs are built pretty similar to their tungsten equivalents. I was surprised by the material on the Skypanel when I first encountered it in person as I'd expected it to be metal but it's some type of less durable plastic and metal combination or something. I guess the hardware for LEDs weighs more than for tungsten so manufacturers try to lower the weight by using lighter materials, as well as not needing metal because the light doesn't get hot enough to burn through the plastic.

The aforementioned Kamerar Brightcasts, the SMD panel itself is close to indestructible, mud, dirt and waterproof. Unfortunately the control unit itself, which the panel can be attached or detached from, is all plastic and seems fairly fragile, especially the potentiometers. I wish the manufacturers, as usual, instead of giving users a bunch of crap that they don't need (like all of the fireworks, tv screen, ambulance light modes on the new gen RGB lights - I mean those are party tricks that may come in handy for 2% of narrative gaffers, once in a blue moon), would give us better, more robust, bulletproof builds that could take a beating and come back for more. That's what 98% of us care about, will it work when left in a 250 degree car back seat in the Summer in Arizona? Will it still work when left out in the rain accidentally? And will it still work when a crew or talent doesn't see it above eye level on a stand, hits the stand it comes crashing down? I'm preaching to the choir here but the manufacturers will continue to give us doo dads that very few users want, need or care about. That's the way this industry works.

It's pretty much the same with cameras, the engineering/product concept teams have given us some cool stuff over the years, especially recently. But too often, they build in really, really annoying and dumb "features" (bugs) that make getting our work done much more difficult. Everytime you buy a new camera, it's not really a camera, it's a project to go through how everything works, figure out ways around the dumb things that were engineered in that are counter productive or worse. Case in point, the switched state modes on many new cameras, the camera defaults to a particular state instead of the state that was being used, making the user possibly completely screw up a project for a paying client, like switching from shooting XF-AVC to RAW on my C200. Either way, once you switch formats, the default frame rate always goes back to 59.94, even though you were shooting 23.98 or 29.97. This has hosed numerous C200 shooters, it's a bad design/bug. It's not just on the C200 either, I've seen this same bug now of several other cameras. Any engineer with any experience in shooting in the field in real production would know that we NEED our camera to hold frame rate when switching raster size/media format as the default state, not the opposite.

The battery compartment door on my new Fujifilm XT-3. Great camera but the door feels as if you breathed on it wrong, it would snap off. The battery door, on a battery powered camera, is quite essential to the continued operation and ability to shoot of the camera. I love all of the modes and toys of the XT-3 but this battery door is a botched or unsuccessful shoot waiting to happen.

 

[Eric Coughlin]

I personally find color effects more useful than a robust light. I don't throw around my lights and cause damage to them. The Astras are very plasticy but I've never done anything to damage them. If your lights are regularly falling off of light stands you've got bigger issues to worry about than if the light survived the fall. Invest in more sand bags. Not saying robustness isn't important, just that it's not super important to me. I don't rent my lights out to other people so it only needs to be robust enough to handle what I personally deal to it, which isn't that rough, generally speaking.

 

[Run&Gun]

The Mole LEDs are built pretty similar to their tungsten equivalents. I was surprised by the material on the Skypanel when I first encountered it in person as I'd expected it to be metal but it's some type of less durable plastic and metal combination or something. I guess the hardware for LEDs weighs more than for tungsten so manufacturers try to lower the weight by using lighter materials, as well as not needing metal because the light doesn't get hot enough to burn through the plastic.

Yes. Besides just the LED's themselves, you have to have the controllers, power converters, power supplies and heat sinks, because the electronics and even the LED's are producing heat. Now, they are way more efficient than tungsten(maybe 4x), so there is less heat produced per whatever unit of light measurement you want to use vs. tungsten, but there can still be a lot of heat produced. My Nila Boxers actually get the hard CC gels so hot, it's hard to touch them after just a little bit. Look at some of the bigger, more powerful fixtures. They have very large heatsinks. With tungsten, it was pretty much just some wires, reflector and a lamp inside a housing. Incredibly simple.

 

[puredrifting]

I personally find color effects more useful than a robust light. I don't throw around my lights and cause damage to them. The Astras are very plasticy but I've never done anything to damage them. If your lights are regularly falling off of light stands you've got bigger issues to worry about than if the light survived the fall. Invest in more sand bags. Not saying robustness isn't important, just that it's not super important to me. I don't rent my lights out to other people so it only needs to be robust enough to handle what I personally deal to it, which isn't that rough, generally speaking.

We all have different needs. As far as lights knocking over, it doesn't happen to me every shoot or anything like that, but it occasionally happens. I find myself shooting in crazy crowded locations often, a recording studio a few weeks ago. Besides four lights on stands in an 8x10' recording booth, we had numerous mic stands, mic booms, miles of cables and anywhere from one to five artists, streaming in and out. Two light stands were knocked over, one by my elbow when shooting gimbal moves, one by one of the singers as she turned to say goodbye to one of the other artists as she was exiting. It happens, regardless of sandbags. Shooting documentaries, I am often just thrust into existing situations, unlike narrative shooting when everything is in service of the production. Also, if you leave your Astras to a group of Gaffers, working off a truck, they often are broken as they are fairly fragile plastic, most lighting trucks in LA use a lot more of the Arris over the Astras, exactly for that reason, the Arris seem to have the perception of being more robust. I see more Astras iin DPs personal lighting kits as they are a lot of bang for the buck.

RGB special effects modes, I've yet to use any of them but you shoot more narrative than I do.