halogen lights

[Filip Staresinic]

Hello.
The most cheap and strongest light that I can find in my town is halogen reflectors ranging from 50 to 1000 W.
They kind of allways produce orange-yellowish light.
Is there anything I can do to improve quality of these lights, maybe some diffusers, gels? They radiate very high temperature so that is a bit of problem with diffusion and gel sheets, or?

 

[Cool Lights]

Yes, the worklights are a lower color temperature in the 2700 to 2900 K range. Normal video (tungsten) is 3200K. That's why it seems more orange (warm) to you. You can try some 1/8 (very slight) CTB (color temperature blue) gel to see if that helps but it could go too far the other way as well.

One thing to remember though, how your eyes see it and how the camera sees it are two different things. Once you white balance under that light, white be white on video. It won't seem quite so warm -- other than in real temperature terms to you at that point.

 

[FBAS]

I'd say a little warmer than 3200 (like 2800K) isn't that bad because most household lights are between 2600K and 2800K as well. When your lights are a neutral 3200 then they are worse to mix with normal tungsten light.

When you need higher temperatures in the 4000K range (to mix with some fluorescents) or 5000-7000K (to mix with daylight) then you need to gel anyways.

However if you want to go from 2800 to 3200, then a 1/4 CTB should be the gel of choice (from my experience, only measured with a Sony DXC D30, not a real color-temperature-meter)
As long as the lamps have barndoors there's no problem with the heat. I have recently used Lee 1/2 CTB gels on a bunch of 1kW fresnels and they were on for about 8 hours a day, 10 days in a row. The gels looked like new when I took them off. Okay, fresnels emit a little less heat because of the lens, and the barndoors were pretty good (=huge), but nevertheless it got pretty hot were the gels were placed. If you place a gel right in front of a worklight though, it will be white within half an hour.