Chinese Ball + LED ?

I have not yet Charles, that will be the first thing I do. Everything was iced down yesterday and I didn't want to bust my ass trying to get to my gear.
 
Was able to run a quick test, and yes the camera picked up flicker when dimmed with the cheapo $8.00 dimmer.

No flicker when run full blast without dimmer via power supply and IDX battery. Shot at 23.976 and at 60 fps. The Epic is out on a shoot so can't test higher frame rates.

No idea if a higher quality dimmer will make a difference or not with these lights. But the LiteGear Non-Flicker dimmer is right around $300.
 
In theory the Litegear dimmer should do the trick.

If you have the ability to shoot a Macbeth chart and compare the output of the LED to a known clean source (in this case, daylight would probably be your best bet, or HMI), that would be most, uh, illuminating!! In general the daylight flavors of cheaper LED are more accurate than the tungsten ones. The first generation of Literibbon looked fine to eye but photographed quite green. The newer PRO line is very accurate.
 
Can you make a "chinese softbox" type of light if you put some reflective material, like you find in a softbox, inside half of the china ball/lantern sphere? Would this even work?
 
David W. Jones said:
Was able to run a quick test, and yes the camera picked up flicker when dimmed with the cheapo $8.00 dimmer.

No flicker when run full blast without dimmer via power supply and IDX battery. Shot at 23.976 and at 60 fps. The Epic is out on a shoot so can't test higher frame rates.

No idea if a higher quality dimmer will make a difference or not with these lights. But the LiteGear Non-Flicker dimmer is right around $300.
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In my experience most cheap consumer LED controllers use pwm at 50hz to dim the leds. You may want to try a 1/50th sec shutter when running your LEDs at anything below full power.
 
I did a quick mockup test without constructing a proper center insert, but was a little disappointed. A single strand is not going to be enough light for a 24" lantern. And in a 16" lantern I prefer the output of the 85w CFL I had been using over these LEDs.
 
I work for a company that is building LED into sets and stages. While prototyping different ideas and solutions we buy LED tape from different manufactures by the 10s of meters. One product we just got in is a bi color tape. I haven't looked at it on camera but to the eye I was rather impressed with the color rendition. After reading this thread I was planning on taking some of our used and offcut products and giving this a shot. Another idea we had was powering some of our 12v product from a 12v Dewalt battery.

Give me a couple of weeks and I may be able to whip something up.
 
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