How powerful should my video lights be?

[Teamcasa]

LED is not a bad choice.

These guys have some very good ones.
Nocturnal Lights SLX video light setup demo unit

 

[ronscuba]

It sounds backwards, but you need more powerful lights during the day than at night or in a cave. During the day, your lights need to overpower the sunlight to be seen, that's where the 3-4ft. limitation people talk about comes from.

There is also a big difference between a video light and a normal tech light. Video lights have a very wide beam 70-110 degrees typically. The normal tech light has a very narrow beam for signaling. The narrow beams penetrate the water column better than a wide beam.

Halogen is older technology but so what ? It works, it's reliable and it's inexpensive. $3000 is a lot of money to spend on video lights. If you have a $1200 camcorder, it doesn't make much sense to me to buy $3000 lights.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[nadwidny]

Halogen is older technology but so what ? It works, it's reliable and it's inexpensive.

And it gives a colour that some don't like as much as HID.

$3000 is a lot of money to spend on video lights. If you have a $1200 camcorder, it doesn't make much sense to me to buy $3000 lights.

Lighting is everything. It's more important than the camera.

 

[Papa_Bear]

The light needs to be in the 5500K range to look natural! Some are too hot and look blue, not good in Blue water! 5500K is the color temp of the sun! I agree about the angle of the beam is another reason the 4ft is a good target! Narrow beams shine further! But create hot spots!

 

[ronscuba]

It's nice to have choices. I would hate for halogen to disappear just because it's considered old technology.

While it looks more red than HID, for video, it's not a huge problem. When color correcting in post, it's a lot easier to cut down on red than to add it. Manual white balance is also a good way to neutralize color.

I'm only a hobbyist. I decided to go with a higher level camcorder/housing and less expensive lights. I guess some decide to go the opposite direction and spend more on the lights and less on the camcorder/housing.

I think what's most important is the end result.......a nice video. Like many things, there is more than 1 way to get there.

 

[PerroneFord]

The light needs to be in the 5500K range to look natural! Some are too hot and look blue, not good in Blue water! 5500K is the color temp of the sun! I agree about the angle of the beam is another reason the 4ft is a good target! Narrow beams shine further! But create hot spots!

According to all the cinematography literature (and what I was taught in my days of photojournalism) the sun shifts color depending on a number of factors. Warm implies a cooler kelvin number, such that 5500 is in fact warmer than 6500. Overcast days tend to fall to the blue/cool side above 6000 kelvin, while a sunset over the desert would fall to the warmer side nearer 5000k and would include more red.

Since the reds of the sun are absorbed by water, it would make more sense that an artificial light source below water should be skewed toward the warm to bring some balance back. Thus Halogens should actually offer some advantage in light quality. Unfortunately, since they are so inefficient, they are somewhat reduced in light quantity given the same power as LED or HID. It would be quite a curious thing to see if one could effectively gel an HID to give a warmner light below water as we do above water. While you would lose a stop or more of exposure, it would give some color balance back.

While white balance seems critically important, and it is, it presupposes that we actually have a full spectrum of light in the first place, and that is certainly not always true.

Ronscuba, I don't see Halogen technology disappearing just yet, but I fear it's days are numbered. It consumes far more power than newer technology, and with little gained IF we can indeed apply gels to more efficient technology.

This stuff is amazing to me. Underwater filmmaking.

 

[Papa_Bear]

The temperature goes up with the spectrum in Kelvin scale 2800 is Tungsten lights very blue and the higher you go the hotter toward red you go with a flattened histogram. The point is flash and good video reproduces the 5500K of natural Sun light was my point! I missed a "Some" in my sentence! it is the basic same scale as the rainbow with ultra violate on the top end of visible light. I use HIDs and the gel will kill the light cutting the range below workable distances! The reason you set the WB on a camera to cloudy is to inject more red into the picture. If you go to a program like lightroom you can see the temperature at work and its effect on the histogram!

 

[ronscuba]

Halogen's inefficiency is not as bad as it looks when used for video. Since you can instantly turn them on/off, the short burn times are somewhat misleading. I never liked that HID mfrs. recommend leaving the lights on the whole dive. For video uses, it seems like such a waste and I imagine it might be a problem scaring fish away on night dives.

Unfortunately, I agree that halogen will eventually go, but hopefully something cheaper than HID will come along. I'm happy with how my halogens perform. While I MIGHT be happier with the HID performance, as a hobbyist, price is always a consideration. I just can't bring myself to ditch my $600 halogen lights for a $3000 HID setup.

LED lights looks very promising with it's warmer color temperature, ability to instantly turn on/off, adjustable power, better efficiency and longevity of the diodes.

 

[PerroneFord]

LED lights looks very promising with it's warmer color temperature, ability to instantly turn on/off, adjustable power, better efficiency and longevity of the diodes.

It's been quite something to note in the feature film industry the demise of Halogen (in large part), and the move to HMI. But in many instances there has been a rapid shift to Flourescent and LED lighting, especially in close working and beauty light. While I have not seen anything in large lighting (10k+ HMI) from the LED camp, the set lighting and portrait style lighting is seeing a nice shift to stuff like the Lumapanels.

Perhaps an adoption of this technology will bring the costs down sooner rather than later and really begin to trickle down to amateurs like us. I still can't afford that Hydroflex stuff!

 

[PerroneFord]

The temperature goes up with the spectrum in Kelvin scale 2800 is Tungsten lights very blue and the higher you go the hotter toward red you go with a flattened histogram.

These examples seem to indicate otherwise:

Colour Temperature Chart

Kelvin Color Temperatures

Color Temperature

Color temperature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All seem to indicate that as Kelvin temperature rises, color shifts more blue. This agrees with the white balance presets on my video camera (Panny DVX100) and others I have used.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but my experiences seem to be different than yours.