Rental houses dying one after another?

[leteeci]

That is true..

I love flo's since I got them ( five pieces )..

Last time we had shoot commercial and DP needed one hour to light every scene with hard light ( it was cooking set in kitschen )...
From experience, I know that I would lite the same set with flos in 15 min..

So, you can imagine.. We had shoot all night - 12 hours for 12 sequnces.. all night long..


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[Patryk_Rebisz]

Really? In New York City, where just about all non-high budget shoots are hampered by small locations with limited house power? I don't doubt that you've never wished you had them if you don't own them since your experience with them may therefore be limited, but I would strongly encourage you to look into them. I don't own any since they're just too expensive for me to justify getting given the frequency of people renting my gear, but they're on every shoot that I work on and I hope that continues to be the case until the fluorescent tubes are substituted with LED retrofits.

I've worked with Kinos a ton. Most of the time as a way to light greenscreen cyc or to a lesser extend a white cyc. On sound stage usually you have a large space and also have to light a larger space so you do not key with fluorescents but rather with HMIs or tungsten lights. In small locations because Kinos are so top heavy and require signification amount of sandbags i kind them as cumbersome as a tungsten unit with a soft box accept the tungsten unit will deliver beautiful full spectrum. I use kinos but i just don't lke them that much. Again everyone making their purchase decisions on their preferences and perceived usefulness.

 

[7213]

Like most businesses, overhead and lack of cash flow will kill a rental house. Staff, mostly full-time, costs money, every week or two. Health and liability insurance. Overhead like having to pay for leased equipment (dollies, cranes) whether it's working or not. That's a big one, especially if production is down.

Plus, there seem to be more owner-operators nowadays. In the "olden times", rental houses would at least make money selling equipment to these people, even if they would be losing future rentals. You pretty much had to go to a rental house to buy real equipment, they were the distributors. Now, anyone can order online through B&H or Filmtools or whoever.

 

[Ryan Patrick O'Hara]

I'm not seeing a lot of rental houses go under. I do see the typical short run of post houses and VFX shops. Seems that they appear, run strong for years and then fold. It's a fast cycle compared to rental houses. None of the camera houses I know have gone under. Not one. Some rebrands, but that is it.

 

[Paul Hudson]

I'm not seeing a lot of rental houses go under. I do see the typical short run of post houses and VFX shops. Seems that they appear, run strong for years and then fold. It's a fast cycle compared to rental houses. None of the camera houses I know have gone under. Not one. Some rebrands, but that is it.

It seems to be more houses that specialize in G&E than camera Ryan. Check Joseph Finn's website. I believe they are auctioning two now and recently closed a huge G&E house in Detroit ( probably for obvious reasons).

 

[bclighting]

Soon everything will be owned by PRG or 4wall. It's hard to compete when they have the means to give things away to get the gig.

 

[David G. Smith]

It seems to be more houses that specialize in G&E than camera Ryan. Check Joseph Finn's website. I believe they are auctioning two now and recently closed a huge G&E house in Detroit ( probably for obvious reasons).

Yeah, that rental house in Detroit is Mid America Cine. It is pretty sad for this area that they have gone. We still have Detroit Power and Light, which has been around for a long time, but they are farther away, for me.

 

[heri]

For a weekly webseries, we had to rent 3 kinoflos for each shoot. Same for event coverage (conferences, corporate)

That was 4 years ago. The Canon C100 or the new DSLRs (GH3) are now so sensitive that you can get away with one basic LED for lighting needs.

It's the same for many other productions, I see them around and no one budgets for light rental anymore

 

[Moseph]

For a weekly webseries, we had to rent 3 kinoflos for each shoot. Same for event coverage (conferences, corporate)
That was 4 years ago. The Canon C100 or the new DSLRs (GH3) are now so sensitive that you can get away with one basic LED for lighting needs.
It's the same for many other productions, I see them around and no one budgets for light rental anymore

Not to belittle your line of work, but your choice to change from a few kinos to a litepanel isn't going to be what puts a rental company out of business. Like Ryan said, they care about jobs like this. We had so many 18k's (13 in total as I recall) that most of them had to come from a different rental house than the rest of the electric gear.

 

[Grug]

It seems to be more houses that specialize in G&E than camera Ryan. Check Joseph Finn's website. I believe they are auctioning two now and recently closed a huge G&E house in Detroit ( probably for obvious reasons).

Interesting. Down here, most rental houses barely stock any lights whatsoever - G&E (the big stuff at least) seems to come directly from Gaffers with big trucks.