continuous lighting for digital video & stills?

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cheeky_chappie

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Tim
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Hello All

I'm an amateur videographer / photographer. for video I'm using a Sony HDR-SR10E and for stills a Canon PowerShot G5 (ancient I know :'() with a SpeedLite 420EX used on-board.

my video work gives great results ... when working outside! inside however is a different matter with anything but great results unless room is very very bright naturally. my stills work is fine whether inside or out, however the results I get inside using the 420EX aren't as good as I would like.

I'm on a budget (who isn't these days?) and I'm ideally seeking a lighting kit that will suffice for my interior video and stills work. I should point out the spaces I shoot in when indoors are never any bigger than 5m x 5m with average height ceilings.

I need continuous lighting for the video work and, whilst I appreciate flash might be best for stills, I'm also hoping the kit I select will suffice for my stills work as well. here's what I'm looking at:


this with 2 x 105w bulbs and white umbrellas (giving 1050w equivalent in total?)
http://www.smick.co.uk/sonline/2-li...mbrella-continuous-lighting-kit/prod_361.html

this with 2 x white umbrellas (giving 1500w equivalent in total?)
http://www.smick.co.uk/sonline/2-light-trilight-digital-or-video-kit/prod_310.html

this (giving 600w equivalent in total?)
http://www.warehouseexpress.com/buy-lastolite-rayd8-c5000-two-head-fluorescent-kit-8035/p1030357


I appreciate these kits aren't up there in terms of quality, but as long as the kit I purchase gives a bright, even spread of light that's all I'm looking for really.

bearing in mind the smallish size of my interior locations, do you think any of the above kits will meet my needs, if yes which one, and will it also suffice for my stills work, maybe used in conjunction with the 420EX?

any thoughts / advice welcome :cool:

Tim
 
Talk to any cinema lighting rental company they constantly upgrade and sell of the old stuff to the eastern block, divert a couple of redheads and stands thats all you need with tracing paper & reflectors.
 
thanks for feedback, will definitely check the ebay seller out. as for the kits I've listed, are they no use or do you think any of them would do the trick?
 
I'll start up my own thread if I start to encroach but as I have a similar query and this has been unposted in for a couple of days, I thought I'd weigh in with my position.

I'm also looking at investing in lighting kit but primarily do video. That said, model photography is something I want to get into but I can't really afford kit to do both jobs (although I'd have thought continuous lights and a speedlite should do a pretty good job?)

I guess I'm just asking how good a job continuous CFL lighting will do for stills work, it's the best I'll get on my budget for video. How well will this translate?
 
red heads are pretty much the standard kit wrt video... seeing as they're basically just lamp holders, I wouldn't worry too much about getting the overpriced arri or similar ones, but just get the lamps from a decent retailer.

That lastolite set looks pretty neat, though is obviously only two lights (rather than key, fill and rim), and I'm dubious about the 'claimed' power of lights, and 300W isn't that much anyway... having lights that didn't use an entire plug socket's power, and heat the room to beyond boiling must be nice though :D

http://www.linkdelight.com/index.ph...en-Light-Kit-220V/Detailed-product-flyer.html looks pretty reasonable, dunno about the quality, but as I said, put some proper bulbs in and I can't see you having much of an issue - though if you can, spend the money and go for something that won't get quite so warm maybe?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Pro-Studio-Li...graphy_StudioEquipment_RL?hash=item2a0249a213 looks a pretty neat set - can;t imagine the softboxes are at all portable, or the lamps too colour fast, but it probably all works pretty well...

Shame the shiny new LED panels are still insanely expensive, as they're just... perfect :P daylight balanced, lightweight, cool, flat, low power... amazing. shame even the tinyest one is about £300 :(
 
I guess I am struggling to get why you wouldn't have CFLs over readheads these days. 125W CFLs give you 625W equivalent and you get them for the same price, obviously lower power, a lot less heat and daylight colour range. Only ebay but there's a couple of 125W softboxes for £130. It isn't 3 point but I could buy 2 or the 3000W version of your second link.

Not sure what you mean by colourfast, the CFLs again seem to do a pretty good job there (although maybe I'm missing something) they have a CRI of about 90 and are specced to a temperature.

Sure I'm missing something but to me it seems everything you're saying about LED panels apply to these. Am I right or missing the point? How will they compare on full power to a flash set up?

As for LED panels, the only ones I've ever used were a set we have at my uni which cost something ridiculous like £1000, which is particularly ridiculous when you see how little light they spit out. No brighter than the screen on my laptop.
 
You need to bear in mind that the power output of ANY form of continuous lighting is insignificant compared to flash.

For example: 625 w of quartz halogen is in theory roughly equivalent to 625j(or Ws) of flash energy BUT the flash is discharged in something like 1/1000th second, to get the same theoretical amount of light from the continuous light the shutter speed would be 1 second.
In practice, at least 2/3rds of the energy from the continous light is in the form of heat, so the actual exposure would need to be around 3 seconds - or in other words, the flash is 3000x the power!

Now, if you use fluorescent lights you get a theoretically white light without much heat, so that's a much better choice. But the light from the fluorescent has a discontinuous colour spectrum (no magenta content) so some colours are not recorded accurately (and this has nothing to do with white balance. The higher the colour rendition index the better in terms of colour accuracy, 90 should be the absolute minimum.

So, really you need fluorescents for your video and flash for your stills, but if you're happy to use high ISO for your stills and can live with both less than perfect colours and the fact that you can't fit different light shaping tools, then fluorescents will work.
 
quick update on this one, i ended up opting for the ebay kit (3 x 500w heads) as it's a reasonable price and everything is included within the kit. i have a video shoot with it in a couple of weeks so hopefully it'll light my scenes sufficiently well to merit the high def camera!
 
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