What makes a good LED light? – ON THE COUCH Ep. 25 part 1 of 3 – O’Connor Hartnett, Mark-André Voss

by Nino LeitnerJuly 24^th, 2015

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In episode 25 of ON THE COUCH, I was happy to welcome filmmaker O’Connor Hartnett and Mark-André Voss from F&V Lighting.

We started off by talking about how lighting for film has changed with technology over the past 10 years or so. O’Connor mentioned that LED lights became a standard in his lighting kit for smaller and medium-sized productions. Especially daylight balanced lights were only available in huge sizes like HMIs, with added ballast, huge power consumption and flicker issues – albeit with an enormous output of light. Now with LEDs, O’Connor said we are more flexible.

Mark said that there is an obsession with CRT values when measuring light quality, however that is only one aspect of the quality of light – it depends on many different factors that cannot be reduced to one denominator. He recommends assessing the quality of light always in the circumstance it’s used for. He said it also depends on the digital camera used, because every sensor type (like CCD or CMOS) sees light differently, and even among those sensors there are huge differences.

We then moved on to the product range of F&V with the various lights they produce in the LED range, which they focus on.

According to Mark, LEDs will tremendously develop in the future, and there will be much brighter and stronger LED lights in the future. We also compared the Kinoflo type of light with LED lights and how the “multiple shadows issue” with 1×1 lights can be overcome.

In the next segment of this episode of ON THE COUCH, we talk about the increasing light sensitivity of cameras and what that means for shaping light and shadows on-screen.

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