Night Filming & Quiet Power Sources for Lighting

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Gukbe2000

Member
Hi everyone,

I'm working on shooting a film this summer that has some night time scenes. Some of the locations are allowing us to use their power for lighting but at some locations there just isn't any power we can access. I'm hoping to get some recommendations regarding the best power source to use for filming that's quiet, won't affect the audio recording and affordable (we're on a tight budget). Generators are loud, of course, and "quiet" generators are pricey even to rent. I've heard of people building small housings for generators (with proper ventilation) to muffle the sound. I've also looked into power inverters which are silent. If anyone has any recommendations or suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
 
Generators in some sort of housing, or a well dampened van. Once you sit down and do the math you'll quickly realize that inverters on a bank of batteries is ridiculously expensive, takes a huge number of batteries that you have to haul around and isn't quite as reliable. So get a lot of high quality extension cords or plan on doing your sound in post.
 
Cassius said:
Generators in some sort of housing, or a well dampened van. Once you sit down and do the math you'll quickly realize that inverters on a bank of batteries is ridiculously expensive, takes a huge number of batteries that you have to haul around and isn't quite as reliable. So get a lot of high quality extension cords or plan on doing your sound in post.
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Thanks for the suggestion. A housed generator seems like the best option at this point. You're right, the math on inverters and batteries just wasn't worth it. Thanks again!
 
REALLY long extension cords will allow you to use a generator if you put it kinda far away. We've used this trick a number of times to avoid this problem. Worked pretty well. We also had a great sound guy with an killer field mixer. So, I'm sure that helped a bit.
 
if your extension cord is too long and you're running large lights, you'll trip the circuit. don't know the technicals but the longer the cord the less you can run off of the gennie.

so if you've got a 3200W rated gennie. but you've got it 100m of cord away... then you can probably only run about 2000W off of it.. maybe less

also make sure your ground isn't damp/wet where your connections in the cords are. if you're shooting on grass then it gets wet at night time. so you need to tape up the connections with plastic bags or put them on blocks of wood etc. also the connections can heat up and fuse sometimes.

make sure you know the gennie is reliable. i was on a night shoot with 5 gennies recently and 3 failed the first night. then they were fixed.. and 2 failed the second night....

if you get a diesel gennie... don't let any one near it who doesn't know how to start a diesel... i've had that happen too.

work out what lights and what setups you need. get the gennie you need and do the sound later.

figure out a good place to put the gennie so you dont have to move it. or figure out an easy way to move it a lot.

also bring way way way more cables and power boards than you think you'll need. power cords fail. and power boards are a life saver.

also you need to light the crew equipment area and the green room/tea room area. so take that into consideration when working out wattage and lights and cabling.

kettles use a crap load of power. and those constantly hot large kettle things... you know those large electric thermoses can use 2000w... so yeah. figure everything out.

that's all i can think of right now :) hope it helps
 
We shot a 20 minute short last summer that approx. 15 minutes of dialogue was shot in an desolate area where a generator was necessary. We have a 3500 watt generator and used 150' of extension cords between us and it (10 awg. cords). We also used good directional microphones on a boom pole so that our microphones were always pointed at the ground which eliminated 95% of all background noise. And honestly I spent no time editing out the generator noise, just noise that was made naturally by people or the environment. We didn't have any power problems or audio problems, as far as interference between us and the generator we just used our cars as a buffer. Should be no problem for you if you prepare right.
 
keep the gennie balanced both on the ground and outputs of power, meaning if it has several outputs for AC or bigger balance the use as the gennie will start to become very very loud or blow all
together if you try to overload one of its circuits, if it has four curcuits try to use all four and split it up, or basically make sure you are not taking more than 500w more from one curcuit than the others.
 
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