Hi,

I use a Mole Richardson biax-4 for a key light and have recently been given two fixtures with 650 W lamps. They're great but 650 is a lot of light. Is it better to get smaller lights or dimmers? If dimmers, which ones?

Thanks,

Ty Ford

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We have a 4 light ARRI setup - 2x 600s and 2x 300s. We use dimmers all the time. I don't know the name, they were home made and bought on ebay. I find I can dial in (or out) any hot spots and then when I get things balanced I do a white balance last. I like the control.

Chadfish

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Willy Wonka

I built my own dimmers from parts I got at Lowes. Using the higher quality parts helps reduce interference that mics might pick up but if you have well shielded cables it shouldn't be a problem. I'm running the dimmers with 500 watt bulbs (one for each bulb). I made sure the dimmers were rated high enough to handle the load. I don't have any problems unless I try to use an unshielded cable on a mic near the lights.

Yes I do get SOME interference when my boom mic cables tangle up with my light/dimmer cables. All in all I'm happy with my dimmed lights though.

C

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Willy Wonka

The fact you get on with dimmers is a little odd, I was going to post a big no-no - and was a bit surprised it's being recommended. The 650W lamps you have don't have a very high colour temperature when full on - probably 3000, or even less. A couple of points on the dimmer and it's dropped to a much, much redder light. When I'm using dimmers, I tend to set .8 on the scale and then I can go up a notch, or down a notch without too much swing in the colour. With my redheads, I use the scrm to adjust the output. Watching the colour change as you dim is a big effect. If you have the key right, and are just dropping fill, then the colour shift isn't that noticeable until you go more than a couple of dimmer points down - as long as you don't have too much obvious white content. It is VERY obvious if the talent has a white shirt, or there is a table cloth in shot. Moving the light source further away is much more effective and stable than playing with dimmers.

Yeah, I'm sure you're right that it's bad form to use dimmers for anything critical, but on the other hand I find that a lot of lighting "no nos" are based on film rather than video. With video one can white balance and correct the color shift.

Or am I mistaken?

Chad

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Willy Wonka

I'm aware of the color shift when using vastly different settings on my dimmers. Most of the time I don't dim that much because of this and because I try to balance my light by using reflected light most of the time anyway. I like a lot of light if I can get if diffused properly. I'm not much on shadows for effects but that's a function of the sort of videos I'm doing.

I find myself shooting indoors often where it isn't possible to back up a long distance. I don't like shooting in a large room because of the acoustic problems it presents. So I usually use 2 500 watt bulbs for my key and fill lights with one bounced off the ceiling and the other direct on the subject. I rarely have any color temp problems with this especially if I do a manual white balance adjustment (which I do pretty much every time I shoot anything important).

It's also generally possible to fix a lot of problems in post with Vegas but I try to get it right with the lights so I don't have to take the chance I can't get it right with the software. So far I haven't had anything come out looking too bad but I haven't shot any subjects with white shirts I can remember. I'm sure I'd end up with blown out colors if I was using the amount of light I usually go for. I'm sure I would have to back off all the lights and I'd try to do it equally to keep the color temp similar. And like Chadfish says you can set the wb manually and fix most problems as long as your lights are all at pretty much the same temp.