Caution with Aputure 600d and F10 Fresnel

Run&Gun

Run&Gun

Veteran
Just a word of warning: The F10 fresnel is way too heavy for the yoke on the 600d. We were setting up for a live show this morning and all of a sudden mine tilted straight down. First thought is someone just didn’t tighten the yoke brake enough. Nope. Walk over and where the disc brake/yoke attaches into the body of the light, it had snapped/sheared off(brake still tight and “locked”). Started looking and it is severely under engineered to support that kind of front-heavy, imbalanced load. Really little screws and attachment points on the body. And I bet I’ve only used the fresnel on it for shoots maybe 5-10 times since I got it last year.
 
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This is good to know! Did you have the barn doors attached at the the time? I got a set of those today and noticed how heavy the doors are too.
 
Haha we've seen plenty of SMM camera rigs. I'm now imagining what a SMM-designed film light would look like!
 
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The barn doors were actually on at the time, because we needed to use some diffusion. Talking to one of my friends on the shoot afterwards, I said I’d love to be able to go to a machine shop and have someone build me a custom yoke that could support it, but a “one off” project like that would cost me as much or more than the entire fixture. Too bad SMM isn’t here in the states, he could probably whip something up for ~$100 that could support a small car.
 
Making a yoke from laser cut ali would be im the low humdreds pm me but im away from desk fir a week i could design it and local cnc cutter could make it!
 
As I understand it the weak point is not in the yoke itself but in how it attaches to the body of the light, correct?

Not to thread-jack, but I've recently been through this at Prolycht. Our engineers wanted to make the upcoming Orion 675 FS yoke utilize dual tilt locks on either side of the head. I was adamantly against this, one because it is a pain in the butt for people to use on set and two because I knew that people would simply loosen one side and just clamp down on the other, thereby defeating the purpose of two locks. So we went back to the drawing board and they kept beefing up the design of the lock mechanism and then stress-testing. I'm told they broke a bunch until they arrived at something that would be plenty strong and still easy to use for years to come. These things take work but it is work that needs to be done.
 
Run&Gun said:
The barn doors were actually on at the time, because we needed to use some diffusion. Talking to one of my friends on the shoot afterwards, I said I’d love to be able to go to a machine shop and have someone build me a custom yoke that could support it, but a “one off” project like that would cost me as much or more than the entire fixture. Too bad SMM isn’t here in the states, he could probably whip something up for ~$100 that could support a small car.
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As long as you were using their own accessories on the unit in a reasonable manner, this is something that Aputure needs to make right. You absolutely shouldn't need to go get a custom yoke so that you can attached the fresnel and barn doors that are advertised as being accessories designed for that fixture. I own the fixture and the fresnel, but not the barn doors, so I haven't hung that much weight off of it yet.

In any case, thanks for the heads up about this.
 
Mitch: Yes, the yoke and brake (it held strong) are fine. What appears to have broken is where it all attaches to the fixture body itself(attachment points probably too small and metal not strong enough). Glad to hear that you pushed for a practical and strong design. Is September still looking good for the release/shipment date for the 675?

Ozmo: I haven’t had a chance to contact them about this yet(traveled back home after the shoot, packed and flew out for another shoot the next day and am still on the road), but I will definitely make sure they know exactly what happened.

SMM: I agree. If the fixture could slide on the yoke to adjust the balance point/center of gravity, like on the Hive C series for example, we probably would not be talking about this.
 
Run&Gun said:
SMM: I agree. If the fixture could slide on the yoke to adjust the balance point/center of gravity, like on the Hive C series for example, we probably would not be talking about this.
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lol what about like balancing a gimbal where we have control over all axes?

I guess it's a slight battle between ability to adjust on the yoke and being able to allow modifiers a decent tilt range.

Rather than a one size fits all yoke, what about yokes that are nicely paired with a particular modifier or set of modifiers? For example if using XYZ and you need a full tilt range then use yoke A...

This concept already exists but not in the mainstream/recent LED phase. City Theatrical created their own yoke for the HUGE 5 degree S4 lens because the stock yoke was great for other lenses but not the monster - https://www.citytheatrical.com/docs/default-source/pdfs/1503-user-manual-eu.pdf
 
the (older) lights that are made from a large diameter custom aluminium extrusion, do usually allow the yoke to slide fore and aft to attempt to balance the modifier.

the modern chinese fixtures and thier lap dog reviewers assume wrongly that The Force will balance the lights.

With bigger modifiers Ive alway hung the fixture from it, but fresnels are a special case as, unlike large softboxes, a high degree of allignment is required for correct function.
 
Run&Gun said:
Mitch: Yes, the yoke and brake (it held strong) are fine. What appears to have broken is where it all attaches to the fixture body itself(attachment points probably too small and metal not strong enough). Glad to hear that you pushed for a practical and strong design. Is September still looking good for the release/shipment date for the 675?

We should start shipping in September but we have a huge preorder to fulfill so it might take a few weeks/month to physically get it all out the door. There's leaving the factory, transporting to whatever country, customs clearance to then get to our warehouse, our warehouse to the reseller and then finally from the reseller to the end users. I never like to give hard dates because as we've all seen in the past few years there are lots of possible bottlenecks over which we have no control. But yes, we should start shipping in September.
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The problem with yokes mounted to a fixture on a fore/aft adjustable track is that adjustment. Usually you need a tool to change it, which I have a big problem with. And worse is that it can be very easy to misalign the two sides, skewing sideways. Generally the only way to fix such skewing is brute force, which not only sucks if the light is rigged somewhere but can be downright dangerous. I've seen people fall off ladders trying to shove these things into alignment, and no one wants to take the time to bring down the light to adjust the mount safely on the ground.

Fore/aft adjustment doesn't need to be infinite adjustable -- for most devices you only would need a couple of balance points. On the Orion 675 FS we considered having two mount points for the detachable yoke, one balancing just the light with its rather lightweight reflector and one as far forward as possible to compensate for fresnels, softboxes and whatever else may get stuck on the front of the fixture. In the end they two mount points weren't very far apart as most of the weight is in the front anyway due to our heatsink, so we just moved the mount all the way to the front and were done. Since it's detachable our angled yoke can be mounted angle forward to allow greater tilt down range with a softbox or angled backward to better center the weight over the lightstand. That doesn't change the center of gravity for pressure on the yoke mount to the head, but it can make a difference if you need to extend a stand way up and don't want to put lateral stress on the pole.

No one wants a light that's unnecessarily large and they do want the versatility of mounting various accessories, so sometimes that means a rig won't be perfectly balanced. It's a trade-off. Just build the mechanics so that they're strong enough to withstand the stresses involved.
 
Mitch Gross said:
The problem with yokes mounted to a fixture on a fore/aft adjustable track is that adjustment. Usually you need a tool to change it, which I have a big problem with. And worse is that it can be very easy to misalign the two sides, skewing sideways. Generally the only way to fix such skewing is brute force, which not only sucks if the light is rigged somewhere but can be downright dangerous. I've seen people fall off ladders trying to shove these things into alignment, and no one wants to take the time to bring down the light to adjust the mount safely on the ground.

Fore/aft adjustment doesn't need to be infinite adjustable -- for most devices you only would need a couple of balance points. On the Orion 675 FS we considered having two mount points for the detachable yoke, one balancing just the light with its rather lightweight reflector and one as far forward as possible to compensate for fresnels, softboxes and whatever else may get stuck on the front of the fixture. In the end they two mount points weren't very far apart as most of the weight is in the front anyway due to our heatsink, so we just moved the mount all the way to the front and were done. Since it's detachable our angled yoke can be mounted angle forward to allow greater tilt down range with a softbox or angled backward to better center the weight over the lightstand. That doesn't change the center of gravity for pressure on the yoke mount to the head, but it can make a difference if you need to extend a stand way up and don't want to put lateral stress on the pole.

No one wants a light that's unnecessarily large and they do want the versatility of mounting various accessories, so sometimes that means a rig won't be perfectly balanced. It's a trade-off. Just build the mechanics so that they're strong enough to withstand the stresses involved.
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Ah, now I understand one of the main benefits of having a fixture that detaches from a yoke. nice.

This reminds me of the problem I have with Kino Flo's ball joint mounts. They can't hold up a softbox. But I bought the ball joint mount for my Arri S60 and that thing is amazing. It can somehow hold up the S60 with their absurdly heavy barn doors or a softbox at any angle. As much as I appreciate cheap and light equipment, I've found that I'm far more satisfied with heavy and expensive.
 
cpreston said:
As much as I appreciate cheap and light equipment, I've found that I'm far more satisfied with heavy and expensive.
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I have a mantra related to all the gear that people cobble together or otherwise put up with even if their designs and executions leave something to be desired.

"There's only one thing worse that something that doesn't work, and that's something that kinda works."

If it just plain doesn't work then you get over it and move on, but if something kinda works then you struggle to make it happen and at some point it bites you in the ass.
 
So, I finally got a chance to look more closely at the fixture and yoke. The go-between attachment "plate" between the yoke and body is F'n plastic and attached to the body with about four little screws, and the plastic is what broke. I don't get it. The yoke is metal. The body is metal. The piece that joins the two together is plastic. PPE. Piss Poor Engineering.
 
^ wow, that would explain it! Not a good look for Aputure when they have such heavy accessories for that light
 
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