Digital Video - November 2007 - (Page 42) LIGHTING’S NEW WAVE ELEMENT LABS’ OFFER The Kelvin Brick and Kelvin Tile, for instance, manufactured by Austin, Texas-based Element Labs (www.elementlabs.com/products) are two LED fixtures capable of color shift changes within the fixture. Each of the Kelvin fixtures feature clusters of LEDs in various colors that, when combined in various intensities, can produce any color between 1,000K and 10,000K with the colors ranging between 3,200K (tungsten) and 6,500K (daylight) offering a high CRI of 95 (color rendering index, or a simulated full spectrum light). The Kelvin Brick is a small, compact (1.7 in. x 6 in.) on-camera light that puts out a modest 14.4 footcandles at 3 feet (just a little less than our proverbial 60W bulb), but as an on-camera fill light, that’s more than enough illumination for most situations. Where it is too much, the Kelvin Brick can be dimmed down with no color shift for 100 percent of the dimming range. The Kelvin Tile is a 1-square-foot panel of LEDs capable of outputting 46 footcandles at 3 feet. The Kelvin Tiles can be hooked together to create larger sources of any particular size necessary. Both fixtures feature Element Labs’ “Digital Gelling” system, which utilizes software control and an external “Paintbox” to adjust the light color to any specific color from the swatch books of the two major gel manufacturers, Lee and Rosco, by their gel numbers. The fixtures Litepanels’ 1x1 LED lighting units can fit into a frame assembly for larger configurations. Drawing just a few watts of power, Rosco’s LitePad generates soft, even light and almost no heat. are also DMX controllable. In June, Element Labs announced a strategic partnership with Kino Flo, one of the primary manufacturers of fluorescent light technology for the entertainment industry, who offer the Kelvin fixtures for rent in the U.S. LITEPANELS AND LED LOVE The Burbank, Calif.-based manufacturer Litepanels (www.litepanels.com) has two similar fixtures, the 1x1 panel and the MiniPlus on-camera light. Although the Litepanels fixtures do not feature color shifting, they do offer much more intensity than the Kelvin fixtures. The MiniPlus fixture puts out about 50 footcandles of illumination at 3 feet, about three and a half times more than the Kelvin Brick. Because the Litepanels fixture does not have multicolored LEDs, it features three times the diodes in a relatively similar42 dv november 2007 ly sized fixture (6.7 in. x 2.5 in.). The same is true for the Litepanels 1x1 fixture, which has an output of about 170 footcandles at 4 feet. The 1x1 fixtures can be interlocked to create a single larger fixture—Litepanels offers a four-fixture kit for just this purpose. Litepanels also offers daylight (5,600K) fixtures in flood (50 degree) and spot (20 degree) varieties. The tungsten (3,200K) fixture is only available in flood, but Litepanels has ready-made full CTO (3,200K) slide-in filters for the daylight units. Just like the Kelvin fixtures, Litepanels are also dimmable from 0 to 100 percent without any color shift. Two more fixtures are available from Litepanels: the Ringlite and the IR (infrared) emitters. The Ringlites come in two sizes, one for DV/HDV cameras and one for larger film and video cameras. The Ringlite Mini, designed for smaller video cameras, has a 10.5 in. diameter with a 5 in. lens opening and weighs only 3.5 lb. The Ringlite Cinema has a 19 in. diameter with a larger opening for cinema lenses. Both Ringlites are fully dimmable in addition to having three discreet circuits to illuminate the outer, middle or inner ring of LEDs around the fixture. They are also available in 3,200K flood, 5,600K spot and 5,600K flood options like the 1x1 fixtures. With all three circuits lit, the Ringlite Cinema 5,600K spot fixture puts out 240 footcandles at 5 feet, while its smaller sibling in the same configuration puts out 84 footcandles at 5 feet. For those working in the dark, Litepanels also offers an infrared emitter fixture, which is a similar size to the MiniPlus, but has infrared LEDs that put out non-visible light for use with infrared sensitive film or video cameras. All of the Litepanels fixtures can operate from standard AC power or from batteries. Litepanels fixtures have been used on such films as Transformers, World Trade Center and Live Free or Die Hard, in addition to television shows such as Ghost Whisperer, What About Brian and the reality series Ghost Hunters. “We get into a lot of tight spaces on Ghost Hunters,” says DP Brian Hodge (interviewed for an upcoming DV story on the Sci Fi www.dv.com http://www.elementlabs.com/products http://www.elementlabs.com/products http://www.litepanels.com http://www.litepanels.com http://www.dv.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.