Kino flo tubes

M

max123

Member
Hi all,

I just borrowed an HVX200 from school and a few Kino-flo tubes. I have blue, red and gold tipped tubes.

Since I am shooting in a room with no windows and I am strictly using the Kinos as light sources, As long as I do white balance, what are the benefits of using different color-temperature tubes?


Karle
 
Well all 3 tube colors represent the color temperatures to which they correlate to. Blue is 5500 deg Kelvin (daylight), Red is 3200 deg Kelvin (average incandescent motion picture lighting), and Gold 2900 deg Kelvin (this ballances to average incandescent lighting). Most bulbs used in your home lighting fixtures start at around 2900-2700 and get more yellow over time. I find the gold tubes work better for incandescent lighting since almost all movie lights actually clock in at around 2700-3000 deg. The red tubes are almost always bluer than 3200 deg most often around 3500 deg K. If you are shooting in a room with home fixtures with regular bulbs then I would use the gold tubes for a neutral color ballance. If you have fixtures with flourescent tubes then shoot some tests you may need to swap them out unless the color difference works in you story.

There is no rule about any of this but often staying neutral in terms of lighting sources is a good place to start, daylight colored sources outside during day and incandescent sources for shots with mostly that kind of lighting. Sometime mixing can work to your advantage but you have to have that work into the story. I love mixing lighting sources and using color to illustrate the story rather than neutral colors of light.

Cheers
Robert C. Fisher
Cinematographer
 
Actually, the red tipped tubes are 2900 degrees Kelvin (warmer) and the gold tipped tubes are 3200 degrees Kelvin (average tungsten temp.)

In regard to which color temperature source you should use when given a choice, from what I understand, imaging chips tend to prefer daylight over the redder tungsten color.

.
 
I'm not so sure about that. Since indoor videos are usually taken under Tungsten light, I think the sweet spot of most cameras should fall midway between Tungsten and Daylight color temperatures. How can we test this?
 
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