HMI / HID Lighting?

[Cool Lights]

Maybe more like 3600w for running on household current without having to call an electrician. That's just 10 amps and most household plugs will handle 15 watts no problem. Same for breakers as long as the total amps drawn on the circuit doesn't make them trip (maybe two or three plugs per breaker is average). It just depends upon if we can get them to build us some 1200w ballasts for 120 volts or not. I think it will be a major problem for us to use 220v in the usa. Most won't want to put in special circuits.

 

[PaPa]

i really wanna pick up their 2000 thing, outputs around 2400 watts of daylight. But it seems as though you can only get a softbox, and no doors are available?

 

[Amulet Man]

1200w PAR would be the ideal fixture. HMI Fresnels are of limited value outdoors (unless they're 2.5k or above), and smaller than 575w is of very limited value too (unless it's a PAR). A low-cost fixture larger than 1200w doesn't make much sense because you start running into problems powering them. 1200w PAR is the sweet spot.


Would it be a simple lamp replacement? Or a whole new fixture? If it's a lamp then yes; if it means re-buying a whole new light fixture then probably not something to spend a lot of design/development effort on. I don't know how Arri's doing with their ceramic tungsten HMIs, but I would suspect that for the many starving indie filmmakers and new-to-the-business professionals out there, they'll just get regular quick easy cheap tungsten fixtures for their indoors needs. What we don't have now is a practical/good affordable PAR fixture, especially a 1200w with an affordable electronic ballast!

Open-face? Bah.
Fresnel? Meh.
Parabolic, with interchangeable lenses? Sold. :thumbsup:

For the color temp, could you add a permanent UV filter with something like a 1/4 CTO tint to it, to convert one of those slightly-off-temp bulbs into being more like 5600? Might be a quick and easy solution, and I think we're likely going to need UV filters in place at all times with these inexpensive bulbs, right? One good piece of glass that filters out UV, does minor color-temp correction, and provides shatter protection...

Why is a par so much better? Is it more efficient due to the changable lens design (therefore a more focused beam if necessary) or is the reflector superior to an open face or fresnel? Will it output more light, even if bounced, and by what margin?

Thanks a bunch! Looking forward to a 575w...that would be sweet.

 

[Cool Lights]

Why is a par so much better? Is it more efficient due to the changable lens design (therefore a more focused beam if necessary) or is the reflector superior to an open face or fresnel? Will it output more light, even if bounced, and by what margin?

Thanks a bunch! Looking forward to a 575w...that would be sweet.

The answer is both. Lens and reflector. The placement of the bulb is different too. You've got the bulb in a hole in the center of a parabolic reflector. In a fresnel you've got the bulb just placed in front of the reflector. Not bad but I think Barry likes a par better because of this. Fresnels are just good all around general purpose lighting instruments that allow you to sharpen or focus the light. But a par is made to to be really efficient.

You can't believe how bright this 150w is right now. rogar-SunGlass(DBG When I stick a 575w in there it'll probably be time to wear the arc welder eye protection.

What about the 1200w? A real 1200w (haha) like Barry suggested. Not a 420w posing as a 1200 or 2000w. I hate it when people list equivalent wattage out front like its actual wattage.

Who else would vote for the 1200?

 

[Cool Lights]

i really wanna pick up their 2000 thing, outputs around 2400 watts of daylight. But it seems as though you can only get a softbox, and no doors are available?

It's really just a simple solution for putting out a bunch of light like a floodlight. No special focusing reflectors, barndoors, etc. You'll have to DIY up some other stuff to get it to be more controllable.

 

[Justin Kuhn]

miracom, I'm wondering when you're going to start selling those hybrid lights you've been posting pics of, and if you have an estimate of their price?

 

[Barry_Green]

Okay, re-thinking now... a 150w HMI might be nigh unto useless for daylight lighting (unless it's a PAR) but could be very useful for indoor lighting. I just love blue accent light; we did that in Dissonance, we're doing it throughout HVX BootCamp Volume II, so having some 150w blue lights putting out 600w worth of tungsten (the dreaded "equivalent" would actually be a handy instrument to have.

I've got a couple of 575w HMI fresnels, and they're about as useful outdoors as Donald Trump would be. I shot a scene in Zombie Hunter with 'em, I literally had to mount them on the hood of the truck about 2' from the talent, blasting away, to get any usable amount of light out of 'em (when compared to the surrounding daylight). A 1200w PAR would have lit them up like Snoop Dogg lights up doobies.

PARs are awesome, they're like light cannons. In "Siren" we lit up buildings from across the street using 1K tungsten PARs, even with blue gel on 'em. A 1k fresnel wouldn't have lit up anything whatsoever in the same circumstance. Of course, you get a much narrower beam; the PAR (Parabolic reflector) focuses the light beams to be a very tight, intense beam. That beam can travel long distances with great intensity, but doesn't spread out much. Good PAR lights have interchangeable lenses so you can put in a wide-spread lens if you need the spread too.

What's the start-up and restrike time like on these metal halides?

 

[Cool Lights]

Okay, re-thinking now... a 150w HMI might be nigh unto useless for daylight lighting (unless it's a PAR) but could be very useful for indoor lighting. I just love blue accent light; we did that in Dissonance, we're doing it throughout HVX BootCamp Volume II, so having some 150w blue lights putting out 600w worth of tungsten (the dreaded "equivalent" would actually be a handy instrument to have.

I agree, I was just wondering about the utility of a HMI 150w fresnel for inside use. No argument about outside. Personally, I'm not so interested in "blue lights" but love to have some lights I can use to put up random and scattered patterns on the wall. I'd just get some tungstens but it wouldn't be good for my image.

I've got a couple of 575w HMI fresnels, and they're about as useful outdoors as Donald Trump would be. I shot a scene in Zombie Hunter with 'em, I literally had to mount them on the hood of the truck about 2' from the talent, blasting away, to get any usable amount of light out of 'em (when compared to the surrounding daylight). A 1200w PAR would have lit them up like Snoop Dogg lights up doobies.

Yes! Now we just have to find an attractive and cutting edge housing to put it in. The 1200w bulb is too physically big for our 575w cast aluminum housing. I think the kind of uses many of you are putting these to tells me a 1200w HMI floodlight would be uninteresting to "indies" like the fresnel is.

PARs are awesome, they're like light cannons. In "Siren" we lit up buildings from across the street using 1K tungsten PARs, even with blue gel on 'em. A 1k fresnel wouldn't have lit up anything whatsoever in the same circumstance. Of course, you get a much narrower beam; the PAR (Parabolic reflector) focuses the light beams to be a very tight, intense beam. That beam can travel long distances with great intensity, but doesn't spread out much. Good PAR lights have interchangeable lenses so you can put in a wide-spread lens if you need the spread too.

Pars are really almost a spotlight without the special lens setup that makes a spotlight what it is. Because of that they aren't as long as a spotlight. Can be in a much shorter package. Our 575 will have interchangeable lenses. There's 4 different lens for this 6.5" lens model but we can only offer 3 of them (headlight looking, clear and a kind of diffused looking "bumpy" thing--how's that for a technical term)--the fourth is made for another manufacturer that has a patent on it. Too bad--I loved that lens!

What's the start-up and restrike time like on these metal halides?

5 to 10 minutes for warmup and 5 to 10 minutes for restrike. We haven't seen one yet that could immediately relight. Some make a bit of noise on startup. Others are pretty silent. They all look sickly green until warm of course but even the most pro, expensive HMI units do too--to my knowledge.

 

[Cool Lights]

miracom, I'm wondering when you're going to start selling those hybrid lights you've been posting pics of, and if you have an estimate of their price?

The HMI's I'm talking about in this thread will be in the same time frame as my dimmable fluorescent models. Whichever turns out to be the slower project will hold the other one up since shipping from China to USA is an issue and all this has to go at the same time. I'm hesitant to give a timeframe now because I can't control the manufacturing time very much. Once we've got the final design and they get busy making them it's usually at least 30 days and then another 25 days to ship to the USA (or so). Our main holdups right now are testing the dimmable flo solution and testing all these candidate bulbs and ballasts. Can't make a fast decision on this because the wrong decision would make a mess.

Price? Well a lot of things can change but the target price for these pars is $599 for the 575w and $799 for the 1200w. And yes, that's real wattage. A 575w unit will put out the equivalent of about 1700w of light. A 1200w unit will put out the equivalent of 3600w of light. Not bad. Almost a 4K type unit without the heavy power requirements--that you plug into the wall like a hair dryer (LOL). And for under $800.

 

[Barry_Green]

5 to 10 minutes for warmup and 5 to 10 minutes for restrike.

Yeah, I was afraid of that. That right there is gonna kill this as a tungsten replacement among the indie crowd. Indies are doing 30 to 50 setups per day(!) Adding 10 minutes between setups just added five or six hours to your shoot day. Not gonna happen.

For special-purpose lights they'll have a place, sure, but as the main weapon, the main go-to light? That's probably gonna still be the old cheap tungsten fresnel, supplemented by fluos.

I've got HMIs, all sorts of tungsten, and various fluos. I'd say I use the fluos and tungsten about equally for 99% of my lighting setups, and HMIs rarely; maybe for the other 1%. The warmup and restrike time, the heavy ballast, etc. limits their usefulness; nowadays they only really come out when I need to simulate sunlight through a window or something like that, or if I'm doing a closeup outdoors on an overcast day where a reflector won't work. Daylight fluo tubes really changed everything for indoors work.

Little spot-pars using daylight CFLs might be interesting. What would happen if you put that massive 200w fluo in a PAR-style reflector housing -- would that produce anything useful for an HMI substitute? I've got a couple of those Lowel Scandles, and with the silver cone reflector they almost halfway sort of worked as a budget HMI on an exterior dusk shot; with a proper parabolic reflector they might be somewhat akin to a 150w HMI PAR. Big and bulky, yes, but at least no green spike or restrike time requirements.

If you can find a way to get a CFL to deliver more of a hard-light look, that might be a more-accepted general-purpose tool than going with the HID.

 

[Cool Lights]

Yeah, I was afraid of that. That right there is gonna kill this as a tungsten replacement among the indie crowd. Indies are doing 30 to 50 setups per day(!) Adding 10 minutes between setups just added five or six hours to your shoot day. Not gonna happen.

That's HMI and metal halide. You have to be okay with the warm up and restrike. I think there's still some people out there though that are interested in this type of thing. We have lots of studios contacting us about our fluorescent products. I can only think that a studio would be interested in this too since they may need this kind of harder light from time to time.

Little spot-pars using daylight CFLs might be interesting. What would happen if you put that massive 200w fluo in a PAR-style reflector housing -- would that produce anything useful for an HMI substitute? I've got a couple of those Lowel Scandles, and with the silver cone reflector they almost halfway sort of worked as a budget HMI on an exterior dusk shot; with a proper parabolic reflector they might be somewhat akin to a 150w HMI PAR. Big and bulky, yes, but at least no green spike or restrike time requirements.

If you can find a way to get a CFL to deliver more of a hard-light look, that might be a more-accepted general-purpose tool than going with the HID.

I doubt it. Yes the reflector would be big but we could handle that. We can get the right size reflector for these off-the-shelf but it is going to be big. They're designed for warehouse downlight use.

Imagine the size of the lens though if you wanted a real par. With the surface area on those bulbs and the quick drop off, I just don't see how you can make them hard.

Anything could be considered a point light source if you get far enough away from it--it gets smaller relative to where you are (if you see what I mean). The problem is though, the farther you get away from a fluorescent the more it drops off. Its just not that strong and bright like the concentrated source in an arc, HMI or tungsten lamp.

Just doubt it can ever have the punch of a small bright concentrated point light source in front of a reasonably sized mirror and a reasonably sized lens.

 

[vidled]

That's HMI and metal halide. You have to be okay with the warm up and restrike.

Well, with HMI you do certainly have hot-restrike capability, when using an electronic ballast and an appropriate bulb (HR). The e. ballast may also give dimming capability (usually ~50-100%)
A low cost HMI electronic ballast in the 575W+1200W size would be sweet. And a 1200W & 575W HMI Par light, like Barry mentioned, as its accompaniment.
Unfortunately, this is all not very easy to make, and there's a reason for its current pricing. A low cost alternative would be nice though.

 

[Cool Lights]

Hot restrike is really just a function of the lamp. I think the ballast is no problem and yes we've got the 50% dimming ballasts samples coming in 575w and should be here soon. The 1200w is the hardest to find but we have two choices now.

The CMH 575w and 1200w lamp samples I have on order list hot-restrike capability so we may have that covered too but they are, of course, correspondingly higher in cost. Not sure about coming up to speed with color immediately yet though. The smaller 150w lamps I have right now don't have hot restrike but their prices are incredibly low for what they are and what they deliver.

I'm definitely doing the Pars. Looks like not enough excitement about fresnels to justify them for now though. Maybe later after we get the pars out.

With my "new" Kliegl Bros. 150w HMI Fresnel, I've got my personal fresnel needs covered for a while. ;-)

 

[vidled]

I'm not sure if you are making an electronic ballast for your HMI bulbs yourself or getting something "off the shelf"; but if possible, a combined 575W/1200W ballast would be VERY nice. It would -obviously- allow to operate either a 575W version or the 1200W version without having to get two ballasts.
What's the weight of the 575W ballast?

Edit: Oh wait, you are talking about Ceramic MH bulbs, not HMI? Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you'd moved to HMI.

 

[vidled]

I've got a couple of those Lowel Scandles, and with the silver cone reflector they almost halfway sort of worked <snip>
If you can find a way to get a CFL to deliver more of a hard-light look....

Barry, what is the beam angle you're getting with them Scandles & cone? And what would be your "ideal" beam angle? I.e. how much of a narrow spot can/should/could it actually be...5°, 10°, 15°....?

 

[Cool Lights]

I'm not sure if you are making an electronic ballast for your HMI bulbs yourself or getting something "off the shelf"; but if possible, a combined 575W/1200W ballast would be VERY nice. It would -obviously- allow to operate either a 575W version or the 1200W version without having to get two ballasts.
What's the weight of the 575W ballast?

Edit: Oh wait, you are talking about Ceramic MH bulbs, not HMI? Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you'd moved to HMI.

Not sure about weight but will let you know. The 150w ballast was very light and relatively small. The 575 looks like it will not be too much bigger or heavier. Don't know on the 1200 yet but the package looks relatively small.

These ballasts will drive either HMI or ceramic metal halide. Lets take a moment to talk about what the difference is between the two because there's a lot of confusion about this.

HMI is Sylvania's brand of ceramic metal halide--in fact HMI is a trademark of Sylvania. So HMI is ceramic metal halide. Sylvania was the first to come out with this type. The main thing was Sylvania was the first to come up with this hot restrike idea and that's one thing that separates it from some CMH. So HMI is a brand name but not a technology. The technology for all the good bulbs of this type is ceramic metal halide. More competitors are offering bulbs like this including Philips and Chinese companies and some also have hot restrike. My guess is that if they use the term HMI in their name then they are probably paying Sylvania a royalty of some kind.

Here's some links for anyone interested in more info on this. Notice the trademarks in this first one:

http://www.osram.com/pdf/about_us/environment/hmi_hti_2007.pdf

and here they talk more generally about the families of MH products:

http://www.osram.com/products/display_optic/entertainment/halogensteamlamps.html


Anyway, its not hard to find a ballast that works with all this because they are all basically the same--MH or CMH from the ballast's point of view, but as always there can be some incompatabilites so it all needs to be checked out.

Since I first got on this I've only been looking mostly at the CMH bulbs. The problem with simple metal halide is that its CRI can't get much above 80 or so. Ceramic can easily go to 95 or so. So there you have it. CMH is HMI. If you find a competitor that does hot restrike and has a high CRI, its not too much different from an HMI bulb.

As for the combo 575/1200 yes that would be nice but I don't know if it's doable right now. I'm looking for an off-the-shelf ballast at the moment to satisfy the price point I'm trying to reach. One that will run off universal voltage too would be great. We've got the dimmable models coming in both 575 and 1200 and will report back as soon as I know more. Pretty cool stuff.

 

[PaPa]

Miracom, im slightly confused as well. Are you involved only in those fluorescent tubes? Or are in part involved with alzo ? Just seems like all these questions are being asked and i cant really clue in which brand of light is being discussed...

 

[vidled]

So there you have it. CMH is HMI. If you find a competitor that does hot restrike and has a high CRI, its not too much different from an HMI bulb.

I'd guess there is sufficient difference to your source of bulbs and "normal" HMI/MSR bulbs to necessitate that distinction when you refer to your lights though, but maybe not. If you provide the light and the ballast, could one pop in a Philips or Osram bulb then?
Now THAT would be VERy sweet!

 

[Cool Lights]

I'd guess there is sufficient difference to your source of bulbs and "normal" HMI/MSR bulbs to necessitate that distinction when you refer to your lights though, but maybe not. If you provide the light and the ballast, could one pop in a Philips or Osram bulb then?
Now THAT would be VERy sweet!

Yes thats my expectation that the ballasts will work with Philips (who calls their "HMI" MSR and Osram's HMI too. Our pars should work with them as long as the substitute bulb you want to put in is in the same socket config of G12 or G22.

I think we've just mostly fallen pray to a bunch of marketing hype. Confusing HMI as a technology and not what it is, just a tradename. Then lots of others use this trade name in their products and it becomes even more confusing. The light fixture companies have added to the confusion by using the tradename too. They've done a great job at marketing and making everyone think it was an exclusive technology club that you couldn't join unless you paid big bucks. What's happening now is that we're finding out now about lots of other choices that are more reasonably priced.

If we call them all what they are, CMH family, with some bulbs having better quality than others, then it becomes less confusing.

Other companies are arriving in force with these bulbs too. Time will tell if the quality is the same. We're looking at the G12 and G22 socket types only right now.

As for bulb config's, a lot of the ones I see for sale online are in a double-ended package with a bubble in the middle and the sockets on each end ("SFc 15.5" is the cryptic name for the socket type). I just don't see how the double ended kind would work as well in a par.

 

[Cool Lights]

Miracom, im slightly confused as well. Are you involved only in those fluorescent tubes? Or are in part involved with alzo ? Just seems like all these questions are being asked and i cant really clue in which brand of light is being discussed...

PaPa,

Up till now, "Cool Lights" (www.coollights.biz) has been selling fluorescent video lighting and DIY info and parts for making your own fluorescents. Cool Lights isn't affiliated with Alzo, Britek, Imagewest or any of those others. We are a manufacturer and a family business (my wife Sally and I) and only sell our own lighting products and bulbs. Our fixtures will always be usable with other standard types of bulbs though.

I am a product developer and in general, I'm interested in selling cutting edge lighting technologies that are more efficient than tungsten. What you're seeing unfold here is our development process for some new products. I got interested in this last year and am just now getting to it. The reason I got interested is the same reason I got interested in fluorescent: the prices are too high of existing stuff and I like debunking some of the mystery behind these things too ($3000 or more for an HMI? come on!). Its the mystery that keeps things high priced. Everyone thinks there are some special or proprietary components made just for manufacturers and that helps to keep things high. I love to show people how they can do the same thing or darn close to it for a lot less.

This ceramic metal halide (CMH), while its more hot than fluorescent is still cool compared to tungsten. Also, we feel that to offer a rounded product line we need both hard and soft lights. The only energy efficient, usable hard light I see at the moment is a CMH. So our softlight series (fluorescent) will continue with non-dimmable and sometime later in the year dimmable versions. At the same time we add the dimmable softlights, we'll be adding a new series called "the hardlight series" which will include a metal halide par or two. Perhaps later a metal halide fresnel. These will all be reasonably priced like our softlight series is. So, we're far from getting out of the fluorescent business, just adding some other exciting stuff. Hope that clears up any confusion.