I Still Love Tungsten

Run&Gun

Run&Gun

Veteran
paulears said:
It's hard enough for us Brits to convert measurements and money into things the American members understand, plus we have to say 'tube' and 'ground' quite often too, so 'brolley' is understandable - even though my US browser wants to change it to trolley anyway. I think I may spend a week posting in real English once I've gone down the apples and pears and got off the rag and bone.

I've only got into bi-colour recently but have to report the slightly lower brightness limits me a bit. I'm quite content now working at 5500K or so 100% LED. I tried to mix tungsten and LED at first, but it never worked that well. One thing I do know is that Fresnel microgroove lens are not a patch on an old fashioned Fresnel of the Arri style. My 650W and 1K Arris are by far the nicest 'quality' light. All the different LEDs are somewhat bland by comparison.
Click to expand...


This if from the thread on panels vs. point source, but it is the perfect quote to start this.

I've been on the record as saying I still prefer the look and feel of tungsten and how it's superior for skin tones. Well, it was just reinforced, again, a few weeks ago. I did a shoot for a church that was using the former studio of a famous(infamous) former mega/televangelical church from back in the day. The grid is 100% tungsten, with big Arri 5K fresnels and the like. My Lord(no pun intended)... Skin tones just look so good. Everything just looks so good. Everything is just so rich and warm and vibrant and alive. There is no need for color correcting or even any kind of grading besides laying a "709 LUT" on top of the slog 2.

My buddy that recommended me for the shoot said they loved my stuff, but I told him the tungsten lighting did the real work and heavy lifting. It made my images look great. It made me look like a hero. I didn't do anything except point my camera at what was going on.
 
Completely, utterly, emphatically agreed. Still hauling at least one ancient Lowel V-light and Pro-Light with me on every single job.

Also got into weekly church service recording at an Episcopal church building dating back to the 1820's. Beautiful gothic architecture, lots of ornate wood, Tiffany stained glass, and a diffused 1K and 650 are all they need to set the whole thing off perfectly. Since I do it for very low budget, they're cool with me using the job as a testbed for different setups, technologies, etc, so I've deployed every light I own at one time or another. The good ol' hot lights just do the job best.

If I know a location interview has 0% chance of being in front of a window, you bet your ass I'm lighting with W.
 
It's always a little demoralizing to have someone seated by or passing by a tungsten practical and glimpse a brush of color on their skin so much richer and healthier than what I'm shining

For overall interview quality, though, I think it's a wash between making them comfortable and not totally sweaty with LED vs optimal skin tones with tungsten
 
On Weds I fired up my old tungsten lights (LTM Peppers + an Arri). Been a long while. Ya, they made skin look great. Luckily, there were gloves in the case and I remembered to turn off the lights to cool before we packed up everything else.

So beautiful. So hot... :-)
 
Its not hard to not be suprised.

If you look at all those graphs of LEDs... they dont have any deep red.

And shooting with no deep red is the same as shooting with a (physically) blue filter in B+W - any skin imperfections go from dark red to black.. which is bascially ugly.

Shooting with red light lowers skin contrast .. ie smoothens the skin.

Googiny 'black and whte photograhy blue filter portrait' demos the rough skin look of not enough red light and googling I guess 'hollywood classic portrait' shows the opposite - the smoothening effect of tungsten.
 
Still hanging on to my Arri Softbank kit but my open face 1K sort of fell apart at the yolk but it was 25 years old.
Count me as a fan, I still use my 150 and 300s as hair/rims when using daylight LEDs. Debating about trying to hunt down
a used Arri 1K open face as the key to my kit (1k open, 650 frensels x 2, 300 fresnel x 1, 150 fresnel x 1). If I have a
cool room with good HVAC, I agree, Tungsten is still a great tool, just not quite as convenient as LEDs. The skin tones and smoothing
are really missing from modern LEDs.
 
puredrifting said:
Still hanging on to my Arri Softbank kit but my open face 1K sort of fell apart at the yolk but it was 25 years old.
Count me as a fan, I still use my 150 and 300s as hair/rims when using daylight LEDs. Debating about trying to hunt down
a used Arri 1K open face as the key to my kit (1k open, 650 frensels x 2, 300 fresnel x 1, 150 fresnel x 1). If I have a
cool room with good HVAC, I agree, Tungsten is still a great tool, just not quite as convenient as LEDs. The skin tones and smoothing
are really missing from modern LEDs.
Click to expand...

Look out for the arri 750 plus too. They replaced the 1k open face lights and have a built in speed ring.
 
puredrifting said:
Still hanging on to my Arri Softbank kit but my open face 1K sort of fell apart at the yolk but it was 25 years old.
Count me as a fan, I still use my 150 and 300s as hair/rims when using daylight LEDs. Debating about trying to hunt down
a used Arri 1K open face as the key to my kit (1k open, 650 frensels x 2, 300 fresnel x 1, 150 fresnel x 1). If I have a
cool room with good HVAC, I agree, Tungsten is still a great tool, just not quite as convenient as LEDs. The skin tones and smoothing
are really missing from modern LEDs.
Click to expand...

rob norton said:
Look out for the arri 750 plus too. They replaced the 1k open face lights and have a built in speed ring.
Click to expand...

I bought two several years ago. I believe the reflector design is supposed to make them equivalent to the old open face 1K's, if not stronger.
 
Is there ANYONE who doesn't agree? I mean, plenty of people say this or that LED is good enough or well worth, but I don't know anyone who prefers any type of light (from a pure IQ standpoint) over Tungsten.
 
mcbob said:
Completely, utterly, emphatically agreed. Still hauling at least one ancient Lowel V-light and Pro-Light with me on every single job.

Also got into weekly church service recording at an Episcopal church building dating back to the 1820's. Beautiful gothic architecture, lots of ornate wood, Tiffany stained glass, and a diffused 1K and 650 are all they need to set the whole thing off perfectly. Since I do it for very low budget, they're cool with me using the job as a testbed for different setups, technologies, etc, so I've deployed every light I own at one time or another. The good ol' hot lights just do the job best.

If I know a location interview has 0% chance of being in front of a window, you bet your ass I'm lighting with W.
Click to expand...

My first light kit was a Lowell three light kit. Two Omni's and a Tota. Bang for the buck if you just needed to light up someone or an area, it was hard to beat a Tota with an umbrella. I was probably still banging some Lowell's through Chimera's as recently as four or five years ago.
 
ozmorphasis said:
Is there ANYONE who doesn't agree? I mean, plenty of people say this or that LED is good enough or well worth, but I don't know anyone who prefers any type of light (from a pure IQ standpoint) over Tungsten.
Click to expand...

I have lots of LED's, now, that I like and that give me conveniences and versatility that are impossible with tungsten, but they still don't look as good in the absolute sense.
 
Run&Gun said:
This if from the thread on panels vs. point source, but it is the perfect quote to start this.

I've been on the record as saying I still prefer the look and feel of tungsten and how it's superior for skin tones. Well, it was just reinforced, again, a few weeks ago. I did a shoot for a church that was using the former studio of a famous(infamous) former mega/televangelical church from back in the day. The grid is 100% tungsten, with big Arri 5K fresnels and the like. My Lord(no pun intended)... Skin tones just look so good. Everything just looks so good. Everything is just so rich and warm and vibrant and alive. There is no need for color correcting or even any kind of grading besides laying a "709 LUT" on top of the slog 2.

My buddy that recommended me for the shoot said they loved my stuff, but I told him the tungsten lighting did the real work and heavy lifting. It made my images look great. It made me look like a hero. I didn't do anything except point my camera at what was going on.
Click to expand...
All that inconvenience of using hot lights to get pleasing skin tones only to use a crappy colored Sony camera with I assume your overly warm and fake looking skin tone Canon lenses.

I tend to think camera and lens choice have more a difference on skin tones than the difference between a 97 CRI LED light vs a 100 CRI tungsten light, but I've never done tests to confirm such a theory.

In any case, high end shoots and DPs use LED lights (and HMIs which have around 90 CRI) very often, while they don't use lower end cameras and lenses often, so clearly they don't consider the slight color differences worth worrying about even with their big budgets.

Avengers Infinity War and Endgame had around 200 Skypanels in their package and I can't say while watching it I ever thought, "Man, these Skypanels have even lower CRI than a Gemini and don't even get me started when comparing to Tungsten." Biggest budget movie ever. Maybe not the best cinematography, but I thought it looked good.

Meanwhile, I do watch things like Stranger Things and think, "This would have looked better if it was shot on Arri."

Maybe I should watch comparison videos of tungsten vs LED to see what I've been missing out on. Everyone knows Tungsten looks better, but is the difference really that different to deal with the drawbacks? For most, it's not.



morgan_moore said:
Its not hard to not be suprised.

If you look at all those graphs of LEDs... they dont have any deep red.

And shooting with no deep red is the same as shooting with a (physically) blue filter in B+W - any skin imperfections go from dark red to black.. which is bascially ugly.

Shooting with red light lowers skin contrast .. ie smoothens the skin.

Googiny 'black and whte photograhy blue filter portrait' demos the rough skin look of not enough red light and googling I guess 'hollywood classic portrait' shows the opposite - the smoothening effect of tungsten.
Click to expand...
Morgan Moore thought the ETC fos/4 panels may handle the deep reds well, as he said, "The way [fos/4 panels] talk about red is both obvious and also really interesting meaning these lights could be significantly better than many/all other leds."

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...Panels&p=1986828973&viewfull=1#post1986828973

He may be on to something and you should probably listen to everything he says.
 
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Brawley went on about how he lit the Great almost exclusively with tungsten on account of *checks notes* colors and skin tones
 
Obviously some DPs prefer using only Tungsten lights, but I'd say the majority use LED as well, along with HMI which is lower CRI than LED. One way is not better than another; it's just a matter of preference and style of the DP. But again, if we're speaking of majority, I believe the majority use a mix of lights instead of going Tungsten only.

Deakins used 100 Skypanels for a scene in Blade Runner 2049. I believe he also uses Tungsten sources quite a bit.

https://www.arri.com/en/company/arri-news/news-stories/2017/lighting-blade-runner-2049-


Going back to my original point; I think it's a bit short sighted to be worried about Tungsten vs LED as far as skin tones if one is not currently getting the best skin tones from other factors that are more likely to affect skin tone quality, namely camera and lenses. Then again, tungsten lights are more affordable than the best cameras and lenses for skin tones, so I suppose it's a more attainable color quality improvement for many.
 
Everyone seems to have got caught up in the CRI and colour temperature side of LED, yet now video production of all kinds, from business video to mega movies grade absolutely everything! Nobody seems to care a damn about the quality of the actual light. In the incandescent lighting days we would criticise brand A over brand B by how the beam reacted to a finger waved in front, or the shadow on a nose, or if we could see the join between the beam from one light merging with the next. We’d slap diffuser on lights and then keep swapping it till the soft was perfect. I worked on a Disney production here in the UK where they flew in white deli bags from New York because they were exactly the right softness.

We don’t care now, we are obsessed with CRI and CT and have thrown away optics that took years to get just right. We even had our favourite Redheads. Open face and the ONLY difference being the tiny differences in reflectors, but we could see it. Now we have COB and light sources that are no longer as small as an arc, so that quality of light has gone. We have panels of LEDs in a matrix behind diffusion material, so our soft light is a different quality to the old reflected tubular types. We’re now sticking grid and crates on these things and discovering the results are different. We have more theatrical designs revamped to allow gobo projection and hard edge shutters but they look different.

Lighting ‘look’ has totally changed, but we forget this, and just bang on about colour, when everyone now has an editor that lets you mess that up at the touch of a mouse. CRI seems a very strange thing to use to assess lighting quality. It’s a very small bit of it that’s fixable simply in most cases, unless your shooting lights were radically different from each other.
 
paulears said:
Everyone seems to have got caught up in the CRI and colour temperature side of LED, yet now video production of all kinds, from business video to mega movies grade absolutely everything! Nobody seems to care a damn about the quality of the actual light. In the incandescent lighting days we would criticise brand A over brand B by how the beam reacted to a finger waved in front, or the shadow on a nose, or if we could see the join between the beam from one light merging with the next. We’d slap diffuser on lights and then keep swapping it till the soft was perfect. I worked on a Disney production here in the UK where they flew in white deli bags from New York because they were exactly the right softness.

We don’t care now, we are obsessed with CRI and CT and have thrown away optics that took years to get just right. We even had our favourite Redheads. Open face and the ONLY difference being the tiny differences in reflectors, but we could see it. Now we have COB and light sources that are no longer as small as an arc, so that quality of light has gone. We have panels of LEDs in a matrix behind diffusion material, so our soft light is a different quality to the old reflected tubular types. We’re now sticking grid and crates on these things and discovering the results are different. We have more theatrical designs revamped to allow gobo projection and hard edge shutters but they look different.

Lighting ‘look’ has totally changed, but we forget this, and just bang on about colour, when everyone now has an editor that lets you mess that up at the touch of a mouse. CRI seems a very strange thing to use to assess lighting quality. It’s a very small bit of it that’s fixable simply in most cases, unless your shooting lights were radically different from each other.
Click to expand...

One of the selling points for the Arri Orbiter is the way the light shapes, even with the open face modifier and no diffusion.

It will be a while before we get back to the nuances like that across the board.

New lights, who dis
 
Has everyone really moved on that completely? Tungsten is still about 40%-50% of my personal lighting package. And I still use them all the time. Blondies, 650w Dedos and the 150w DHL4 Dedos they'll have to pry from my cold, dead hands.

I had a very interesting experience recently with a short that I was able to shoot almost completely with tungsten. It's been my first, true, one-light colour pass - drop the S709 LUT on, a fractional s-curve for contrast and that's it... I've literally never done a simpler colour grade in my life, as there was nothing to correct. And it's because everything we needed was there thanks to having the fuller spectrum of Tungsten sources.
 
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