I’m often asked by students, “what’s a good light kit for starting out” and I find it a very hard question to answer, because it really depends on what you want to do. There really is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all one case light kit. I find that most of the commercially available light kits I’ve seen offer too many watts and not enough versatility. After years of creating a variety of make-shift kits from my lighting collection for particular shoots, I’ve settled on one configuration when I’m “traveling light,” and I think the best approach is to put together a custom kit that meets your personal lighting needs.

Drawing from my collection of lighting instruments, I put together a subset for doing interviews on my current documentary project, which has involved air travel to do interviews, so I’ve thought about a bare essentials kit that will fit into a single, manageable case on wheels that’s not too big, but offers enough versatility for doing nicely (albeit simply) lit interviews. This kit is an attempt to balance capability, cost, weight, and size with the requirement that the case could also fit in the hatchback of my car along with tripod, sound kit, and camera gear so I can park the car without any visible evidence of gear in the hatch.All together the kit draws 1,300 Watts, which in most cases works fine on a single household circuit without tripping a breaker (unless there’s already other high-current devices in use). Here are the components in the kit:

• Kata OC-88 GDC Lighting Case with Insertrolley
• Lowel LC-55 Rifa-EX soft light (lightweight and compact, most often used as a key light, sometimes used as fill with 1/2 CTB or CTB when using window light as key)
• Lowel 40 degree Egg Crate for Rifa (reduces spill)
• Lowel Rifa Balance Bar (helps to center the weight of the Rifa light on the stand, increasing stability)



• Arri 300W Fresnel with barn doors and scrim set (Fresnels offer crisp, easy to control light with the quality of sunlight, used as a back light or kicker)
• One or two Lowel Tota-Light(s) with umbrella (often used as a background light, for overall fill, or as a fill light if needed)
• Flexfill 38″ Silver/White reflector (often used as a fill light bounce attached to a microphone stand)
• Three or four Avenger A625B Light Stands, these extend to 7.8′ but are a compact 26″ when closed (depending on the number of Totas in tow)
• Hypoallergenic transparent powder base and make-up pads (for reducing shine on the subject’s face)
• Spare lamps in plastic foam-lined case for all units
• Two or three extension cords and cube taps
• Electric circuit tester
• Gloves
• Small tool kit including a Leatherman
• Flashlight
• Expendables (gaffer tape, C-47s, black wrap, trick line, and assorted gels and diffusion including half CTB and CTB sized with holes to fit the Rifa light).

This kit has worked out well over the course of over a dozen interviews since I put it together. It originally started out in a larger Pelican rolling case with additional instruments, but that quickly got the nickname “the beast” and I eventually trimmed down to the configuration above.
The Rifa LC-55 (500W) produces just enough light for most situations, and it’s the right choice for a lightweight and compact kit, however, if I could spare the space and weight, I’d rather be using a Kino Flo Diva-Lite. I’m considering adding to the kit (I still have a little room left in the case) one or two LED lights. These offer the advantage of small size and practical battery operation. I’m considering the Zylight Z90 (total creative control in terms of color and wireless control, however, a tad pricy) and the Lowel Blender (more affordable than the Z90, however, not as versatile as the Zylight). Back in July, I posted a comparison of four LED lights summarizing the results of my research.

Special thanks to Joseph Ingoldsby for asking the question that resulted in this post.

Update, July 15, 2010: The Avenger A625B Light Stands are no longer available, a reasonable replacement with a new stacking feature would be the Manfrotto 1051BAC Light Stand, Black – 6.75′ extended and 26″ when closed, not quite as tall as the older stands but for a portable kit, the stacking feature means they will nest more snugly in the case. — David.

Update, December 29, 2011: If I had to do it all over again, I’d get the Lowel V-Lights instead of the Totas, but I purchased the Totas long before the V-Light existed. I’m also thinking of adding one or two 150 W Arri Fresnels to the kit as accent lights along with replacing the cords on all the Arri’s with smaller cords that will fit better in the case. Some LED lighting is also on the horizon as costs come down. — David.

Over the past couple of years I’ve had a chance to use or take a close look at various LED lighting instruments available in the marketplace. Today you will find lots of inexpensive lights suitable for on-camera use available for anywhere from $50 to $500 from a variety of vendors. And while these little lights are certainly interesting, they are usually not bright enough nor versatile enough for demanding professional users.

Enter the next tier of professional LED lighting in the $500 to $1,000 range. This particular horse race has heated up with the addition of new lights from Sony and Lowel which join Zylight and Litepanels who have been around for a while. Things are sure to get even more interesting as LED price/performance continues to improve and designers incorporate new generations of LED technology into new and updated instrument design.

Based on my experiences shooting run & gun with the LitePanels MiniPlus at the North American International Auto Show last year as well as using it on my previous documentary project, using the Zylight Z90 during a lighting workshop I taught at the Pro Video Show and carrying it with me for several weeks on my current documentary production, messing around with the Sony HVL-LBP at Boston Media Makers, and taking a development prototype of the Lowel Blender out for a spin on a couple of interviews, I’ve come to some conclusions on the strengths and weaknesses of each design. Below is a comparison of the four units I’ve has a chance to work with along with my brief editorial on each. What is most appealing about LED lighting is being able to light using batteries as your power source for run & gun shooting with simplified battery management (using the same batteries for camcorder and light via sleds or D-taps) and the ability to dial in the color you need (using one of the more sophisticated designs) without fumbling with gels.

I will be following up this post with detailed reviews of the Zylight Z90 and Lowel Blender, which are the two units that stand out from the pack at this time. Stay tuned.

Manufacturer	Zylight	LitePanels	Sony	Lowel
Model	Z90	MiniPlus	HVL-LBP	Blender
Editorial	My favorite among the four lights. A versatile creative tool with unique special features. Offers a bright source, creative color control, and a smooth, wide, even beam that can be controlled with barn doors. Excellent build quality, state-of-the art color-changing HD-LED technology from Color Kinetics. One downside is the edge of the beam exhibits color fringing. The ability to set to any color (in addition to daylight and tungsten) and save user presets for instant recall make this a versatile performer and creative tool. The key question: is it worth the cost? From my experience it is, especially when you compare it side by side with the other three lights.	A solid performer, but not my favorite, , trails behind other contenders in terms of versatility. The MiniPlus was among the first on-camera LED lights to gain traction in the marketplace, and it helped prove the viability of LED technology in run-and gun shooting scenarios, however, it’s starting to look pretty long in the tooth compared to the Zylight and Blender lights, both of which run circles around the Litepanels in terms of versatility and build quality. Awkward design in terms of how the battery pack attaches to the back of the light, the way gels attach, and the lack of a locking power connector when using outboard power contribute to a lower rating compared to the Blender and Zylight.	My least favorite of these four lights, trails far behind other contenders in terms of versatility. Designed as a companion for Sony camcorder owners that use L-Series batteries. Typical Sony move to make a product that is designed to work only with their proprietary batteries. It’s a limited product in many respects. On the other hand, Sony owners who want "Sony Style" will like how it integrates into their existing Sony camcorder infrastructure. With the introduction of the Blender, there is no compelling reason to purchase the HVL-LBP. Look to the Blender or Zylight for a better LED light with more versatile powering options.	A close-runner up favorite among the four lights. A versatile and cost effective creative tool. The ability to dial in any balance of daylight and tungsten light on the fly makes this a strong contender for a camera light or versatile problem solving light you can always carry with your camera kit. If you don’t need the flexibility of generating the full spectrum of color, this might be the perfect light for you. Good build quality. Soon to be released and worth the wait. A well thought out design that comes directly out of designer Tom Robotham’s experience as a cinematographer. Information supplied is based on use of a prototype unit, features and specifications may vary from the final production units.
Overall rating
Beam quality	Smooth and even beam with gradual fall-off at the edges. Slight color fringing on the edge of a cut.	Daylight models available in spot or flood, tungsten models flood only. Relatively even spread, but not completely	Very spotty, but a diffuser and spot filter is included	Spotty, but comes with interchangeable diffusers that provides a choice of beams. Cracked ice looks nice.
Beam shape	Round and very even.	Rectangular, available in either Flood or Spot models (daylight) or Flood (tungsten). Diffuson gels available to smooth out beam.	Round, built-in condenser filter intensifies beam for spot use, built-in diffuser smooths out the bean.	Slightly rectangular, somewhat irregular. A set of diffuson materials are available to smooth out or break up the beam.
Cutability(how smooth is the edge when you "cut" the light with a barn door or other solid?)	Clean cut, barn doors work very well with this light (you can attach optional Arri 150W Fresnel barn doors via optional 3" Accessory Adapter)	Barn doors (if you fashion them) don’t work well, I would not bother trying to barndoor this light.	The side barn doors are not very effective.	Barn doors (if you fashion them) work somewhat better than the MiniPlus but I would not bother barndooring this light.
Dimmable	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Color	Three color modes: 1: white (3200K or 5600K); 2: color (can be set to any color and saturation); 3: gel (adjustable along tungsten-daylight and/or green-magenta dimensions)	Available in either 5600K (flood or spot) or 3200K (flood) models (gels must be attached to change color)	5500K (gels must be attached to change color)	5600K, or 3200K, or a variable mix of the two (via dials)
Mounting options	1/4"-20 thread on top and bottom (a variety of mounting accessories are available)	1/4"-20 thread on bottom (a variety of mounting accessories are available)	Aattaches to cold shoe, 1/4"-20 thread on bottom of shoe	1/4"-20 thread on bottom, production unit will probably come with a 5/8" baby reciever (a variety of mounting accessories are available)
Special features	Can be set to produce any color without gels, easy to match other sources Wireless control: optional Zylink controller can control up to ten units or groups of units Barndoors actually work, easily fited with 3" accessory adapter	Optional remote dimming module	Indicator with remaining battery strength.	Daylight/tungsten color changes without gels, easy to match other sources with a turn of a dial.
Power options	Can accept DC power from an external battery, D-Tap (Anton Bauer Style), or AC adapter. Threaded power connector for secure attachment of ourboard power connector.	Snap-on NiMH battery or power via optional snap-on battery sled that holds two camcorder batteries. Can accept DC power from an external battery, D-Tap (Anton Bauer Style), or AC adapter. Power connector for attachment of outboard power is not threaded.	Designed to work only with Sony’s L-series Lithium-Ion batteries (NP-F770, F970, can’t use NP-F500/300 batteries or third-party batteries) Battery attaches directly to unit or can be stored outboard using the included battery adapter cable.	Can accept DC power from an external battery, D-Tap (Anton Bauer Style), or AC adapter. Threaded power connector for secure attachment of outboard power connector.
Power consumption	30W (2-1/2A @ 12VDC); works with 9-24VDC	8.4W (0.7amps @ 12V); works with 10-30VDC	16W (2.23A @ 7.2 VDC)	13W (1.8A @ 7.2VDC); works with 7.2 to 15VDC
Photometrics(as stated by vendors) See note below on footcandles required for proper exposure. 1 footcandle = 10.76 lux	53fc @ 3.3ft. 13fc @ 6.6ft.	97fc @ 2ft. 24fc @ 4ft. 9.2fc @ 6ft. (flood)	55fc @ 3 ft. 6fc @ 9 ft. (with lens)	45fc @ 3.3ft. (single array) 90fc @ 3.3ft. (both daylight and tungsten arrays)
Lighting accessories	Optional accessory adapter allows you to attach standard 3-inch [76mm] softbox or barn doors (which are actually useful on this instrument)	Holder for gels, other accesories are difficult to mount (but really not needed since barn doors don’t do much with this design)	A diffuser and spot filter is included and attaches to the light.	Slide in diffusers, gels can be slid in along with diffuser if color correction is needed that can’t be handled in the daylight-tungsten dimension.
Size	5.3" x 3.0" x 2.0" [135mm x 76mm x 51mm]	6.83" x 2.30" x 1.18" [173mm x 60mm x 30mm]	4 3/8" x 6" x 5-1/8" [108mm x 129mm x 150mm]	4" x 3" x 3" [102mm x 76mm x 76mm]
Weight(without cables or power source)	16 oz. [454g]	9.6oz [360g]	14.9oz [420g]	14 oz. [397g]
Availability	Now	Now	Now	Fall, 2009 (estimated)
Street price(single unit, without power options)	$985	$640	$540	$650 (includes AC adapter)
Kit prices	Kits range from$1,180 (ENG kit with mounting hardware and battery tap) to $1,550 (with NP battery power option) (add $50 for barn doors, add $475 for Zylink wireless controller)	Kits range from $750 (camera mounting harware and battery sled) to $1,150 (kit with mounting hardware, gels, and snap-on NiMH battery)	$640 with NP-F970 Lithium-Ion battery	$740 for kit with battery sled (Sony or Panasonic or Canon), three front diffusers, handle & stud (estimated)
Product page links	Zylight Z90	LitePanels MiniPlus	Sony HVL-LBP	Lowel Blender

How much light do we need? All these photometric specifications are great, but in order to make sense of them, we need to know how much light we need for a decent exposure with our particular camera. You can determine this for your camera using a light meter and a white card as a 95 IRE reference or an 18% grey card as a 50 IRE refenence. Based on my own testing, you need about 40 footcandles for an exposure at f/2.8 without gain using a Panasonic HPX170 camcorder. (Note: if your light meter does not provide direct reading of lux or footcandles, you can convert it’s reading to foot candles using the technique described here). This is based on doing a conservative flat-disk light meter reading and setting the exposure so a white card is at 90 IRE (not at 100, you always want a little bit of headroom in the highlights). It’s easy to do these kinds of tests using the Zebra in most video cameras or the spot meter in some of the Pansonic cameras. Of course, if you’re willing to crank the gain, you will need far less footcandles for a good exposure, at the cost of added video noise.

What about cost of LED lighting? One of the issues that constantly comes up in discussons of LED lighting for video production, is it worth the cost? Certainly you can put 40fc on a subject using a 60W soft white household bulb (or a close to daylight GE Reveal bulb) in a white reflector fixture several feet away. This would cost a hell of a lot less than the equivalent LED light. So LED lighting is not about cost. It’s about versatility, control, smaller footprint, and lower power consumption. A professional on-camera LED light is going to use half to one fourth the power of a comparable incandescent lamp, thus providing longer running times when working off a battery. It’s a tradeoff between versatility, form-factor, cool operation, and consumption. In the middle of the mix you will also find flourescent fixtures that have their own unique set of advantages. Another thing to consider is only purchase what you need to use today, as LED production increases and new designs are introduced, you can expect the brightness to go up and the cost to drop over time, since LED technology follows the semiconductor technology curve and increasing demand for LED technology is driving down costs and driving innovation.

Putting the light output, cost, and size in perspective. So how does the output of these LED lights compare to other lights you are using? A Kino Flo Diva-Lite 200 provides daylight or tungsten light with an intensity of 120fc at 3.3′ or 32fc at 6.6′. A tungsten Rifa eX55 (with an EHC 500W bulb) provides a respectable 72fc at 5′ so it provides more than enough light for interviews. This is why a Rifa or Diva lights makes such a good key in a compact inteview kit, you can place either of them at a comfortable distance away from a subject and have plenty of light for a good solid exposure. And because the Diva is fluorescent, it runs cool, however, the Rifa is more compact due to the use of a small tungsten lamp and collapsible umbrella. The Diva is about the same price as the LED lights listed here, the Rifa is somewhat less. On the other hand, these more traditional key lights are much larger, heavier, and they require access to mains power, and they do not fit into your camera bag the way a Z90 or Blender does.

Each technology provides different affordances. Each technology has it’s strengths and weaknesses. When I want the quality of crisp sunlight, I’d use an incandescent Arri Fresnel, when I want something small and versatile for run & gun shooting, I’d use an LED light like the Z90 or Blender, when I want gorgeous soft light, I’d use something along the lines of a Lowel Rifa light or Kino-Flo Diva-Lite, of course, when the subject, location, and my favorite gaffer (mother nature) are all cooperative and in alignment, there’s nothing more beautiful than using skylight though a window as the key light. And in this situation, a little LED light can add that perfect twinkle in someone’s eyes. So an LED light in your camera bag can be there to help solve problems on the spot, with mininal fuss. A versatile LED light like th Z90 or Blender is a lights you will want to have in your bag of tricks in order to pull out when there’s no time to light and to carry with you when there is no space to carry lighting gear.

Did you find anything inaccurate in this comparison chart? Is there something I should include that’s not here? Please contact me and I’ll probably correct it. The information in this table is as accurate as I could determine at the time of writing. Some of the information was provided by vendors rather than determined empirically. The opinions in this table are my own and do not necessarily resemble reality. Your mileage may vary.

David: You’ve been a working cinematographer for a long time, what lead you to the development of the Blender LED light?

Tom: A couple of things came to a confluence. One was that I had been working on variable color temperature lights for a number of years. The reason I was doing that is because when I was doing narrative work every once in a while I would need something as a fill, as a special, as an edge, not as my primary light, because I’m usually color balancing to whatever is my key light sources, I wanted something and I wanted to be able to finesse it a little bit this, a little bit that, and be able to do it on the fly and by eye. So I had been playing with that notion. That’s one stream of information. The second one, and the primary reason for this is I started doing more non-narrative work, and in particular, I was in a situation where I was working in a very busy hospital, a very sensitive situation because of the patient care and it being pediatrics, and we were having some filming and some interviews that were near windows, and then we were going into a hallway, and interviewing doctors and nurses in a hallway on the fly and once they got beeped they had to leave, so we had to work fast. And then we’d be in an interior office and be able to have a formal interview and there might be incandescents as well as office fluorescents, so it was always a mixed light situation, it was always in a hurry, I very much wanted light that could be slightly off to the side, so it wasn’t a direct on-camera fill, I wanted something to be able to hold out to the side and have a sense of directionality. I played with, used, rented, LED lights and it was never quite easy enough, fast enough, to get what I was looking for to appear natural. And my source was always sort of insistent and visible. And I wanted it to just blend in and augment the available light. I did not want it to be calling tremendous attention it itself. So I grafted these two ideas together: the variable color temperature and the availability of high power white light LEDs that can be obtained on a black body locus. I worked through all of the technological issues to make it both something that was unique in the technology sense and easy to use.

David: For our readers who are not cinematographers, could you explain what you mean by “LEDs that can be obtained on a black body locus”?

Tom: In the 1930s people decided in France that there would be this large commission that would decide how much available light there is and what are all the colors. This is the CIE Chromaticity chart. Inside that is a line that tracks what we perceive to be white light. White light is what we’re primarily concerned with for film/video imaging, because that’s what we’re used to from the sun, approximately from fluorescents, from movie lights, from all of the different sources we’re usually using white light. And that white light is something that is tracked within this CIE Chromaticity chart.

David: But all white light is not the same, is it?

Tom: No, and especially when you go to most modern sources, and I’m not going to claim all, I’m a cinematographer, not a spectrophotometry expert, but you’ll see a lot of light sources that are both discontinuous spectrum and you’ll see a lot of light sources that don’t provide all of the available wavelengths and things like that, but they are close to the black body locus that white light Planckian locus, that curve that our mind says, “oh, it’s white light” “it’s not too green, it’s not too magenta, it’s not too amber, it’s not too blue. Now it is possible to obtain high power LEDs.

I have custom orders that allow me to select things that are on the black body locus. And that’s one of the functions that I want because I don’t really want to be messing around with a lot of plus-green or minus-green gels if I don’t have to. I want to eliminate all of that and be able to work by eye. So it was essential for me to land on a spot that corresponds to the world and how we perceive white light and what’s photographically acceptable as white light as a starting point.

David: A lot of LED lights come as either tungsten balance (3200K) or daylight balance (5500K) and you have to use gels with the lights if you want to change their color temperature. Now there’s something really different about the Blender, I can adjust between the two with knobs. Tell me more about that.

Tom: By having banks of these. For years I had used things like Kino Flos and other fluorescents that allow you to mix and match daylight and tungsten units, and boy it sure is nice to have half and half sometimes, or one daylight unit mixed with the tungsten, it will be just a little bit cooler, but to have two banks of what are nominally daylight and tungsten white balanced lights, I could dial-in all of my variable situation where I could be one sixteenth more warm, slightly more cool, and I could do by eye what I have always liked to be able to do, which is do something like have a back light be slightly cooler, or have my key light be slightly warmer than the ambient, so I don’t change my white balance, or anything, I can just dial in without having to use any gels, working by the monitor and my eye is trained so by my eye as well, what are warm and cool values that match the natural world and then have the artistic leeway to slightly warmer or slightly cooler, if I choose to.

David: So this light has two banks of lights, and it has two knobs and one switch. So it’s pretty simple to use.

Tom: It’s very straightforward, I’ve had students use it, and once they use it they see immediately what happens.

David: So tell me about some Blender usage scenarios.

Tom: I’ve used these in situations where I’ve had subjects near windows, and I’ve wanted to do what you would call carry the light from the outside. And I’ll bring this on the opposite side of the camera closer to the window and have that cool light from the window wrap more around the face of my subject which it doesn’t do on its own. And then have a second light, perhaps slightly warmer, coming from the inside, indicating the interior light. So I get a fully rounded form that matches my daylight, it can be close enough and bright enough that I can actually expose for the outside world and I have a sense of the presence of the world.

David: Can you share another scenario?

Tom: We were in a building with office fluorescents with a number of people doing a series of interviews. And one thing that was particularly interesting is that we were using the Blender light as a backlight, these were standard office fluorescents, they were somewhere between 3800K and 4200K approximately in terms of correlated color temperature, so they are in between value already. We had actually, for the first subject, used a fluorescent light that had 1/2 daylight and 1/2 tungsten bulbs in it that we were using to match the office fluorescents. Well, the second subject came in and their shirt was much brighter and we didn’t have flags, so here we had approximately a 15 lb. rig lighting as our key light, and we substituted it with one of my Blender lights. We brought it a foot closer, it’s a very bright light, but not too aggressive and not too intimidating for a subject. And just by tilting it up and taping a piece of office paper on it, because it doesn’t get hot [like an incandescent] we were able to flag the guys shirt, it cut perfectly with movie fluorescent we used [in the previous shot], and our backlight was slightly cooler. We were in an office environment and we were able to use it as a key and a kicker.

David: How bout one more?

Tom: Shooting run and gun hand-held in a hallway with fluorescents, with windows, with all sorts of wacky stuff, hand-held with a wooden handle off to the side. I was doing the interview, someone else was shooting. I could have a little bit of directionality. I just did it by eye, and we could roll in thirty seconds, cause we had the light out and plugged in to a battery.

David: Sounds like you might want to have a special pistol grip with the Blender light and a microphone on it.

Tom: That actually is not a bad idea, because sometimes it means asking the sound guy, “hey, you’re booming, can you hold this off to the side so it does not have to be on camera?”

David: That brings me to the thought, the miniaturization of these video cameras has really changed the way we shoot. The cameras are getting smaller, it changes what we shoot, how we shoot, what we can shoot. Well, now we’ve got LED technology that’s getting brighter and cheaper, and it’s changing how we light. How do you think these smaller LED lights like your Blender are going to change how we shoot, and what we shoot?

Tom: I think there’s a couple of things. One, they have sufficiently low power usage, it’s nice that they are more environmentally sound, but for us as shooters that’s way down the list, in terms of what it is that we need to shoot professionally, but it’s nice that you can run them off batteries, that you can run for an hour, you can run for two hours, and you’re OK to go. You can’t really do that a lot of the sun guns and tungsten types because they really drain power a lot more. So suddenly we’ve become a lot more portable. A secondary thing, and something that really surprised me with the Blender light, you end up lighting a bit differently than you would normally. Now I was going towards this myself, so I was not aware of it, until I put it into the hands of other shooters, and have them say, “Aha! I’m doing this now,” I was really surprised, because suddenly, instead of creating a light that is sort of obvious, and it becomes your key light, and it’s clear that you have lit the situation, which is what you see in a lot of interviews, you can actually dial this down, raise your subject to a level where you can control attention, but it’s not obvious. So it’s a naturalistic light in way almost like bounce sheets are. I don’t know about you but there are some times when I would rather have nothing plugged in, I’d rather have like a silver bounce here, and a white bounce there, or negative fill over there, and be done, because it can be very naturalistic, and embed your subject in their environment. As long as you can control attention, and you’re not busy looking at the background, you can actually focus on the subject, you’re good to go. Well, these work, because you can blend them almost like bounce sources that have intensity. And so you can approach it in a much more naturalistic way, and you might find yourself placing the light in a different place than you would normally, because it reads as if it was part of the environment, you might find yourself putting it someplace and dialing it very warm or very cool and saying, I wouldn’t necessarily go that far with another light source, but it feels like it’s the light from that other room, so I can get away with something that’s a little more tasty or more interesting.

David: I imagine the Blender will be popular not only with professionals but with newcomers as well.

Tom: For the people who are not coming into this by being technically savvy, they are coming in because they want to make images, they want to make motion pictures, they want to make narrative, non-narrative, whatever it is they are trying to do, they are not coming from a trained background, they are coming from a place, “these tools let me do stuff, I just want to do stuff,” well, here’s a light that allows them to just set it on auto white balance, or they just white balance to the available light, they can now dial in, look at their monitor, and they don’t have to consider what are the correlated color temperatures of those fluorescents, what’s coming in that window, is it sky?, is it day?, is it sun?, what’s coming from that desk lamp?, is it halogen?, is it incandescent?, you can work in a more intuitive way by eye, and I think that’s a huge difference in terms of making motion pictures imaging function the way us professionals are used to in terms of control, and putting that level of lighting control into the hands of people who can now use cameras, because there are now so many nice aids and assistance to making a nice picture with a camera, now there’s that level of assistance to making a nice picture through the aid of controlling your lighting, controlling attention to the subject.

David: I’ve put together a minimalist on-the-go documentary kit in which everything has to fit into a carry-on size hard case: camera, microphones, cables, batteries, accessories, maybe I’ve got room in here for a Blender. How do I attach the light to a stand or my camera?

Tom: I provide a swivel mount, it’s a 1/4″-20 thread on the bottom, I also have a wood handle, which is actually adapted from a file handle, with a 1/4″-20 stud on it.

David: Does that come with the light?

Tom: It’s an optional accessory. The people who want it, who want the light off to the side, immediately say, give me the handle, because they are running and gunning it. The people who say I don’t care about that, well, why bother loading them down with it.

David: What about powering options?

Tom: There are a couple. One, if you’re using a 2/3″ professional video camcorder, and you have a power-tap, D-tap it’s called, all you need is a 2.5mm center-positive connector on the Blender end and you can run this light. And at 14.4 volts you’ll be getting hours and hours of running time.

David: What if I’m using a smaller camcorder like the Sony HVR-V1U here?

Tom: Optional sleds. What I have are battery sleds that come in many different flavors to fit Panasonic, Canons, Sonys, and what I do then is custom wire them so you can use your existing camcorder batteries and not have to invest in a new battery system.

David: That’s handy, since I don’t have a lot of room left in this case for a whole new set of batteries. I’d love to be able to use the same batteries, the same battery charger, as I use with the camcorder.

Tom: I do not like extra battery systems, I don’t like going into a hotel and making sure every different charger is plugged in (laughter) I just want one battery system, so I knew that this would function that way.

David: With one of the camcorder batteries I have here, how long can I run the Blender?

Tom: They look like 2,800 mA batteries, or something like that, so it will last about an hour and a half, that’s what I’ve tested it, from an hour and thirty to an hour and forty minutes. Now there are two things that are worth noting, as it drains, it does not change the light output, what will happen, is this will simply blink off when it’s done. It does not change the light output as the battery drains. The electronics raise the voltage to the base level needed for the LEDs. It’s meant to accommodate [a range of sources] and it will simply blink off [when the voltage falls below a threshold].

David: Do you have plans for larger units?

Tom: Yes, this light, what you might call “pint-size,” is only the first in the line. The design is scalable and we will be making larger units in the future.

David: How can people purchase a Blender?

Tom: Blenders are currently being manufactured here in the United States. They can be ordered from my web site at blenderlights.com.

David: Good luck with the light, Tom, it’s a great idea.

Tom: Thanks so much, I appreciate you taking the time.

Update: Since I spoke with Tom, he has entered into an exclusive manufacturing and distribution agreement with Lowel who will be manufacturing and selling the Blender light. LED lighting will continue to make serious inroads into professional production, especially in run and gun documentary and ENG production.

Keywords: Light, Lights, Blender, Lowel, Interview, Tom Robotham, Lighting, Video, LED

Practical Sound Recording and Editing Techniques For Better Video
Friday, March 20th, 3:00pm to 5:00pm, Poolside Room, Fee: $25.00
(REGISTER NOW)
Sound is half the picture, yet most often it receives only casual attention. Viewers can’t articulate what’s wrong, but quite often it’s the soundtrack that either engages or distances them. This session will present practical techniques and a guide to the tools for recording and editing sound for video that will improve your work whether you are a beginning or intermediate video maker. Real-world problems in a range of shooting situations and their solutions will be presented. Discussion topics include microphone selection and placement, recording strategies for noisy locations, improving intelligibility of dialog, mixing in music without interfering with dialog, making sure your video sounds good on a wide range of devices, and doing it all in a manner that flows nicely with video editing. Special attention will be paid to working on a tight budget and getting the most out of modest gear.

Lighting Techniques for Better Documentary Interviews
Saturday, March 21st, 3:00pm to 5:00pm, Room TBA, Fee: $25.00
(REGISTER NOW)
This session will present through discussion, examples, and demonstration a practical approach to lighting documentary interviews ranging from low-budget existing light and one light techniques to classic three-point lighting and beyond using professional lighting instruments. The first half of the session will cover lighting fundamentals, a survey of popular lighting fixtures, screening of examples with a discussion of aesthetic and technical tradeoffs, and suggestions for putting together a kit based on your specific needs. The second half of the session will consist of demonstration using a variety of lighting gear so participants can gain some practical experience with the topics discussed during the first half of the session.

If you live in the Boston area and are interested in video production or post-production, this is the place to be on March 20th and 21st, 2009. A schedule of workshops (for fee) and free seminars is available at the Camera Company web site in the near future.

1. Lindcraft Gel Packs: these have one pocket that holds gels (standard sheet size and smaller) and it rolls up and secures with Velcro straps keeping your gels in order and protecting them from handling. Easy to use by laying it out on a flat surface. I have three, one for the diffusion/ND series, one for CTB/CTO/tint series, and a third for theatricals (a.k.a. party) colors. Check out Gel Packs on the Lindcraft web site.

2. Expanding File Folders: For smaller pieces (it’s handy to have small pieces ready to go for smaller lights) I keep them in three accordion multi-compartment file folders, one for the Diffusion/ND/CTB/CTO set, and another for tints and theatricals. I label the tabs with the gel type so when I ask an assistant, “put some opal on the 150 and 1/2 blue on the 300″ they can quickly find the exact gel needed. It does take some discipline to sort everything back to the right section after the shoot, but if you do it as you go, it pays off in efficiency in the moment of lighting. No more hunting for the right piece. You can find these in any office supply store and I found some plastic ones are pretty rugged. People who do theater usually use file boxes, but I don’t have that many small gels and I like to be as portable as possible, all my gels and accessories and extension cords go into a single duffel bag.

3. Another tip: write on two opposite corners with a sharpie the gel number. On the set when its dark and your in a hurry, you don’t want to try to figure out which gel is which. Writing the Rosco or Lee number on the gel will speed things up while lighting and makes putting things back much easier.

Download Slidshow (PDF, 8 MB), also check out my Reference Pages index.

If you live in the Boston area you will not want to miss the 17th Annual Pro Video Show sponsored by The Camera Company to be held Friday and Saturday, March 9-10, 2007 at Stonehill College, in Easton, Massachussetts (Exit 17B off Route 24). This annual event provides local media makers with the opportunity to check out new equipment, talk with fellow media makers, and attend a wide range of workshops and seminars. Yours truly will be presenting two of the seminars, “Delivering Video on the Web” and “Champagne Production Values on a Beer Production Budget.”

Here’s a description of my seminars:

Delivering Video on the Web
Learn how to make video available on the web, earn money with it, take a look at how it can be delivered to devices and web browsers, and examine the opportunities and challenges it presents. The launch of the video iPod, availability of video on iTunes, the explosion of viral video, Google’s purchase of YouTube, and the amazing quality of shows on blip.tv are all part of a tectonic shift in the media distribution landscape. Television producers, independent filmmakers, communications specialists, advertising executives and entrepreneurs will all learn how to benefit from the tremendous opportunities made possible by delivering their video on the web. Cost: $25. Saturday, March 10, 2007 at 12:00 NOON to 2:00 p.m.

Champagne Production Values on a Beer Production Budget
Video production budgets are tighter than ever, and the increasingly saturated media environment demands that your video must stand out from the rest. In this seminar, you will learn about the strategies, creative elements, and production tools that together deliver what viewers and clients often describe as “high production values.” Practical discussion and examples help you apply cost effective methods right away, resulting in champagne production values on a beer production budget. Cost: $25. Saturday, March 10, 2007 at 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Other workshops and seminars scheduled at this time (subject to change) include:

• Audio for Video (Sennheiser, David Missal)
• Planning a Production (Teja Arboleda)
• Editing Aesthetics (Eric Scott Latek)
• Apple Final Cut Studio, a Complete Workflow, (Alex Kaloostian)
• A Practical Comparison of DV, HDV & DVCPRO HD for FCP Editors (Alex Kaloostian)
• Docudrama (Eric Scott Latek)
• Final Cut Pro—The Next Step (Ed Krasnow)
• Lighting For Video Film Style (Tom Musto)
• Making History! Profiting from Biography and Same Day Edit Presentations (Hal Slifer)
• P2/Apple Work Flow (Bill Kennedy and Raj Lad, Panasonic Broadcast)
• Meeting of The Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE)
• HD Outdoors (Trevor Gowdy)
• Digital & HD 101 (AJA Systems)
• Adobe Premiere Pro Basics “Crash” Course (Eric Scott Latek)
• Digital Asset Management & Workflow (Focus Enhancements)
• Reflecmedia (Bogen Imaging)

Please keep in mind that all workshop attendees must check in at the Sally Blair Ames Sports Complex (main exhibit location) at least 15 minutes prior to class.

For more information call 781.769.7810 or visit The Camera Company web site. Seminar listing subject to change.

The New England Chapter of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) held its Annual Digital Production Showcase (which has become a mid-winter tradition) on Wednesday, January 17th at WCVB-TV’s studio in Needham, Massachusetts. My photos from the event are available on Flickr. In addition to being fed sandwiches and piping hot New England clam chowder (very appropriate given the cold snap) attendees had a chance to experience hands-on demos of the latest digital production tools in a collegial atmosphere. I thank SMPTE/New England for hosting such a delightful event in which I can catch up with what’s happening in the realm of digital production.

While vendors had lots to show, the really interesting conversations were on the show floor, abuzz with speculation of what vendors might be unveiling at NAB in Las Vegas this year. This year the show had more exhibits than ever before, and while the emphasis of the show is video post production and non-linear editing, I took delight in checking out several new cameras.

Marty Feldman from The Camera Company showed me the new HVR-V1U, Sony’s first entry into an affordable entry-level progressive scan HDV camera, it sports three 1/4″ CMOS chips. Also in the Camera Company Booth were two other popular HDV camcorders, the Canon XH-A1 and the JVC GY-HD250. The HD250 is a much needed upgrade to their ProHD line-up featuring 720/60p recording, HD SDI and component out, and a decent battery connector for Anton-Bauer batteries. The cheesy add-on connector that’s available for the earlier GY-HD100 was very fragile to put it politely. With the 250 the camera line has grown up

Vendors know that many sophisticated people will be kicking the tires at this event, so they send out some of their more knowledgeable representatives for this show, it was a good evening for getting answers to tough camera and post-production questions.

There was also talk among some Final Cut Pro editors that they are tired of rendering hell and are ready to switch to some of the real-time alternatives now available on “the other platform.” As editors mix different media types on the timeline these days, the time wasted rendering is becoming a serious productivity issue. More than one editor I spoke with expressed their disappointment that Apple has yet to address this issue and is apparently more concerned with iPods and iPhones than creative production.

1 Beyond was at the show pleased to offer Final Cut Pro editors an alternatives with the Matrox Axio running on their HD Octoflex eight processor workstation running Windows XP. When it comes to HD editing, and you start to compare prices and performance, the Axio solution is in the same ballpark as Final Cut Pro on a Mac Pro with a Kona 3 card but offers better real-time performance.

Why has it taken Apple so long to deliver a true real-time solution? There were no significant announcements at NAB from Apple last year regarding Final Cut Pro. Will Apple at NAB this year finally unveil the long-rumored next version of Final Cut Pro? Will it finally address the problems of real-time performance, color correction, and media management? Apple’s acquisition of Silicon Color and Art Box leads me to speculate that Apple may have something interesting to show. In the meantime, with deadlines looming, some editors tell me they are at the point where they would rather switch that wait. Personally, I’m going to wait.

In addition to their line of P2 cameras and decks, Panasonic had on hand their amazing BT-LH2600W 26″ LCD and BT-LH1700W 17″ LCD monitors. Although the blacks are still not as good as you will find with professional CRT monitors, these LCDs come very close and do a good job of simulating the color response of SMPTE phosphors. These monitors have a useful function that will superimposed a Waveform monitor display over the image. They also provide dual-rate SDI HD or SD inputs, component input (Y, Pb, Pr) as well as a PC RGB input. Most critical viewers will prefer to use a Sony BVM or PVM series glass CRT, but since CRTs have been phased out and sell on eBay for more than their original selling price, these LCD monitors from Panasonic are really looking good as a flatter, more environmentally friendly alternative.

With digital production comes the need to manage lots of storage, with high performance and reliability. I saw two RAID storage solutions that meet the needs of small to medium sized-facilities. 1 Beyond was showing off their Intelliraid C-XPR providing fiber channel performance designed specifically for video that allows you to work with 30fps, uncompressed, 1080i video without skipping a beat. Another storage option is the Terrablock from Facilis Technology. Francis Albert, president, founder, and former Avid guy, described it as a high-performance fibre channel storage soulution that can be shared between Linux, Windows XP and Mac OS X clients running a range of NLE applications. Their 12D model can support 10 clients over 4Gbit fibre and in terms of real-time performance is cpable of serving two clients at a time playing 24P 10-bit 1080 video, or a single client running 2K DPX at 24fps.

In comparison to the many new storage offerings like the two above, Apple’s XServe RAID is looking mighty long in the tooth. Why does Apple do that? They introduce an amazing product, market the hell out of it, sell a bunch, and then forgets about it for sometimes years? Sometimes I think Apple is like an ADD teenager that gets very excited about something and and then moves on to the next crush.

Tom Talbot of Rule Broadcast Systems showed me Anycast with Sony’s new add-on board that allows it to switch high definition, as well as mix HD and SD sources. Anycast provides cost effective switching of multiple cameras for covering live events and now with the ability to bring HD cameras into the mix, is an even more compelling offering for people who need to switch multiple cameras but are working on a very tight budget. Also in the Rule both was Sony’s F350 XDXAM HD camera, which I’ve had the pleasure of shooting with and I’m very impressed with the amazing image quality, in spite of 1/2″ chips and the MPEG-2 recording. With excellent image quality, variable frame rates, progressive scan, Blu-Ray disk recording, ENG form-factor, and the ability to put good glass on it, the F350 offers a compelling middle ground in-between the crowd of low-end camcorders with the fragile and problematic HDV recording format and the higher-end 2/3″ professional camcorders. I have to say I really like the XDXCAM HD disk format in lieu of tape idea.

David Talamas had the amazing little Zylight in his booth (which I raved about in my NAB 2006 post), along with the elegant Sound Devices 744T digital audio recorder and the JVC GY-HD250 which he’s very pleased with. The JVC has done well for them, and customers are constantly amazed with the picture quality, as long as you take the time to create a look for the camera. JVC has not yet figured out that they really need to tweak their default look. One of the reasons filmmakers are so happy with the DVX100 and HVX200 from Panasonic is that right out of the box they look great. The JVC can also look very good (I shoot with one now and then) but you have to tweak the settings.

WCVB-TV was a gracious host and in addition to providing a spacious location for this event, was taking attendees on tours of their facility. There was much more to see, including the latest offerings from Autodesk, Grass Valley’s portable news room, Panasonic’s DVCPRO HD cameras, decks, and P2 players, Avid’s product line, Harris-Leitch, Quantel, Telestream, and more.

1. The Zylight Z50 is a tiny LED lighting instument that can instantly changes from 5600K to 3200K light with the push of a button and can be programmed to to produce any color you want and you can save you favorites with presets. The devices can be put together and controlled wirelessly. This is a very clever idea whose time has come. Based on technology licensed from Color Kinetics and built around a HD-led (High-Density light-emitting diode) module that packs over 230 high-power elements into a single square inch, making the Z50 the brightest portable LED light available.
2. The most excitement created this year was without a doubt the excitement around the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company booth. Red is a digital cinema camera in development that promises to break the price/performance barrier for high end digital imaging. If they meet their agressive engineering targets, next year we’ll see working cameras on the show floor and what I expect will be some amazing demo footage.
3. One of the most useful tools I saw in Panasonic’s booth for P2 users working with a Macintosh was HDLog from Imagine Products. It can be used for viewing P2 video clips (stored in the MXF format) on the Mac and it will help streamline your P2 workflow from acquisition to editing. HD Log automatically creates log files from the P2 media that include thumbnails, metadata, and links to the video clips. You can use the application edit and add additional metadata, log and select clips, and convert the MXF clips to QuickTime files ready for editing. If you’re working with large amounts of media, the program can work with Imagine Product’s Mac Digital Clip Library, a library solution you can set up on an intranet or the web for IntraNet or Web to share of logs, thumbnails, and video clips.
4. Avid’s Interplay is a media production workflow and content management tool that provides centralized administration of creative, production, and business processes for postproduction and broadcast environments of all sizes. While this space has been fragmented with many vendors, a player like Avid putting a stake in the ground will change the playing field and could have a serious impact on how broadcasters and large postproduction facilities manage their creative workflows. There’s some confusion as to what the entry-level $16,000. system actually buys you, but we’ll find out as time goes by and Avid actually starts delivering solutions.
5. The KONA 3 is AJA’s new top-of-the-line 4-lane PCI Express video capture card for Apple’s Power Mac G5. It supports both SD and HD uncompressed capture and Dual Link 4:4:4:4 HD. It can play back uncompressed 10-bit and 8-bit digital video and 24-bit 48kHz digital audio. The card also supports hardware-based up-and-down-conversion to and from HD and has a live hardware keyer for compositing. There’s an optional rack-mountable 1U panel for the many connections the card supports.
6. Quietly hidden behind a laptop at the Apple booth, yet prominently displayed in the Matrox booth, was the MXO, an amazing little box that takes the DVI output from your Macintosh and converts it to broadcast-quality video. You can use it for frame accurate print to tape or to monitor HD or SD with a component or SDI display, an excellent idea that adds significant new capability to many Macintoshes that can play back compressed HD in real-time, yet don’t have the right PCI bus to support a Blackmagic or AJA video I/O card.
7. Grass Valley’s Infinity Digital Media Camcorder combines the best elements of camera design with IT recording and connectivity technologies. This 2/3″ camera has all of the bells and whistles you’d expect from a professional HD ENG camcorder and instead of using tape or a proprietary tapeless solution, it records to Compact Flash cards or Iomega REVPro disks (a professional version of Iomega’s inexpensive high-capacity REV disks commonly used to back-up personal computers. The camera will be competitively priced around $25,000.
8. Amongst the noisy demos, the shiny PowerMac G5s, and the new 17″ MacBook Pro, in the Apple booth one vendor was quietly showning something critically important as we generate more and more digital assets. Artbox Workgroup from Proximity is an asset management and workflow solution designed specifically for small broadcast and post production companies. The system helps you manage you media assets with a single media catalog that can be shared among multiple users. The system supports workflow management, search, and transcoding between a wide range of formats. They touted project level integration with Final Cut Pro. Now that the industry is almost done with the digital and high definition transitions, I think lots of attention will placed on asset management. For large organizations, there’s Artbox Enterprise that supports many additional features like access to the media catalog from within iNews or ENPS and sharing media beyond a single workgroup.
9. I had already seen this projector, but the images projected with Sony’s 10,000 lumen SRX-R110 4K (4096 x 2160 at 1.85:1) projector designed for large venues were stunning. Unlike a DLP projector, there was absolutely no perception of a grid or pixels, even while close to the screen. The projector offers great contrast (1800:1), plenty of detail in the shadows, clean highlights, and nice color. Is there a digital projector that can exceed the standards of 35mm projection? This comes close. These are the projectors Landmark has been putting into their theaters.
10. Sony’s PDW-F350 HD camcorder is an impressive contender that records onto XDCAM disks and comes in a very attractive price-point at $25,000 sans lens. Sony opted to go with three 1/2″ CCD imagers rather than 2/3″ chips. Users with existing 2/3″ glass can mount their lenses on this camera using the LO32BMT lens mount adapter. In addition to recording in 1080/59.94i, 50i, 29.97P, 25P, and 23.98P, the camera is capable of over- and under-cranking with frame rates ranging from 4 to 60 frames per second. This is the first time Sony has provided variable frame rates in a camera. XDCAM is a strong contender against Panasonic’s P2 cards.
11. Panasonic had many AG-HVX200 camcorders in the booth and although introduced last year, this camcorder was generating a lot of interest, this year they expanded their line of HD camcorders with the AJ-HDX900 2/3″ HD camcorder and the AJ-HPC2000 P2 HD Camcorder. The AJ-HDX900 is pretty much an HD upgrade to the popular AJ-SDX900. As we would expect, the AJ-HDX900 offers cine-like gamma with three film-like modes and shoots in 11 formats and, surprise, it records to tape, not P2 cards (I guess tape is still something customers want, for now). The AJ-HPC2000 is a workhorse HD P2 broadcast camera, and introduces the AVC-Intra (H.264 Compliant) as an alternative to DVCPRO HD in order to double the capacity of the P2 cards. I was disappointed to find out that neither the AJ-HDX900 nor the AJ-HPC2000 offers variable frame rates like the AG-HVX200 little brother or AJ-HDC27H big brother.
12. VFinity was demonstrating their elegant web-based solution for content management, production, and publishing that supports non-linear video editing and multimedia publishing workflows with an end-to-end digital solution that enables creative collaboration and media transcoding, digitizing, and easy reuse of any form of media. Since they have built the system from the ground up using web services and the latest open standards, they don’t carry legacy baggage like some of their established competitors. They showed me a cool demo: Searching for a Final Cut Pro project using their media asset search engine, picking it out from a set of Google-like search results, and then opening the project. Then they showed me the same thing on a different workstation connected to the network. VFinity works with any kind of media and is accessble via a web browser. Looks like an interesting solution for creative media professionals working in corporate, broadcast, and large post facility environments. I know several people involved with the company, so I may exhibit some bias.

In general the image exhibits much more noise in the low-light situations we were working under than the HVR-Z1U would have. On the other hand, the tiny camera is much smaller, mobile, and relatively inexpensive. If you don’t mind a little video noise, the CMOS chip of the A1U does an adequate job.

Settings: Cinematone Type 1, CineFrame 30, Black Stretch On, DV (Standard Definition) recording, Squeeze mode, Manual exposure, Color Temperature: 3200K Preset.

Post Processing: No color or density correction was done to these images, the only post manipulation was to stretch the image in the horizontal dimension in order to restore the 16:9 aspect ratio (no scaling was done in the vertical dimension).

Calculating Exposure: Zebras were set to 100 in order to indicate absolute white hlghlights, a Sony PVM-8042Q video monitor (calibrated to the color bars from the camera) was used to determine overall scene exposure and shadow detail. The histogram was also used as an aid in detemining the proper exposure, not as nice as using the spot meter in the Panasonic DVX100 and HVX200 cameras, but having the histogram is much better than Zebras alone.

Lighting: Since were were working on a tight schedule with a microscopic budget, we used existing location lighting as a starting point, then added light as needed using a small light kit. The kit consisted of an Arri 1K Open Face, an Arri 650W Fresnel, and two Arri 300W Fresnels. In the bar scenes, the supplimental lighting was used for back/side lighting, sometimes clean, other times with 1/2 blue or theatrical blue gel. The bathroom scene was lit with a single Arri 300W Fresnel with Opal Frost. The living room was lit with a 300W Fresnel overhead and the Arri 1K Open to the side bouncing off two pieces of foam core. Less is more. Don’t be afraid of the dark, as long as you’ve got some nice highlights at the top of the range, it’s ok to have large portions of the frame dark, especially in a haunted bar.

We often start with dialogue, but contemporary scripts are becoming more sophisticated, going beyond dialog and adding cinematic devices to develop characters, convey action, and move the plot along. This book provides the essential visualization companion to your favorite screenwriting book. You’ll find this to be a good reference of cinematic devices. The language of light, sound, and motion breath life into a screenplay and this book is a good start.

A Cinematic Storytelling Bibliography is available.

Originally published as “This Ain’t no DV, This Ain’t no HD, This Ain’t no Fooling Around: A conversation with David Leitner about ‘The Technical Writer’” in the The New York Independent Film Monitor, Volume 8, No. 4 (January 2003).

The Technical Writer, directed by Scott Saunders, tells the story of an agoraphobic technical writer who lives in a basement apartment in New York City. The film strikes a balance between noteworthy technical achievement (shot and posted in Sony’s IMX MPEG-2 Digital Format) and compelling visual aesthetics. I recently had a conversation with David Leitner, who played a unique triple role as Cinematographer, Producer, and Technologist.

Tamés: The Technical Writer straddles a painterly quality and a documentary quality. On the surface there’s a lot of existing-light cinematography, but there’s clearly more to it.

Leitner: I’m using tiny amounts of light, but if you really look at what is going on, the colors are artificial. In my mind I was going after a Lucian Freud look, with fallow, morbid colors. Lucian Freud is a British painter and a grandson of Sigmund Freud. His paintings are often large nudes or portraits, and the color tones in the skin are morbid, greens and greys and flat sienna colors. The work has a sense of morbid human flesh and a lot of it.

Tamés: How does this fit with the film?

Leitner: The technical writer in the film is a man who lives in a basement Manhattan apartment and he’s agoraphobic. He has a fallow, drained complexion, and I wanted to convey that aspect of him. He spends most of his time in front of a computer screen. I wanted that computer screen to be the key light in many cases. That you could say is naturalism. For instance, if the camera was pointed at the face, you did not see what was on the screen. We would display color fields [on the LCD computer monitor] to give you the impression he was looking at different web sites going from a blue to a red, and then a second later to a green, but it does not feel unreal, it does not feel non-naturalistic. It may be a little over-the-top, and this is a tension I like to play with a lot.

Tamés: Yes, the lighting is natural and yet it’s not.

Leitner: In some of our scenes, if you walked onto the set you would be looking for the light switch, but they were lit already. If you look at a lot of the lighting I do it looks natural, but if you look a little closer, I’m fooling around with things. And I can’t explain it. I just know when I do it and if I like it. If you look carefully at the film there are a lot of unmotivated primary color light sources, but what are we talking about here is using tiny lights. My biggest colored light was a 30 Watt mushroom bulb, they are so tiny you don’t realize they are in the scene but I often place my light sources in the scene.

Tamés: Your work as a cinematographer on this and other films reminds me of Nestor Almendros. I remember reading a story he wrote in A Man with a Camera about shooting Days of Heaven in which the gaffer would set up the large carbon arcs lights every day and Nestor would ask him to turn them off. Almendros shot some comparisons with and without the arcs in order to show his gaffer the difference, however, the gaffer never came to the screenings of the dailies.

Leitner: He came from a documentary tradition. He was a maverick, as well, and that we share in common. If you can shoot at light levels that are comfortable and normal, in other words, not artificially boosted, do you shoot in a stylized way [pick and choose from the past] or do you shoot in a naturalistic direction as many people with a documentary background would be inclined to do?

Tamés: There seem to be more and more films being shot this way, and I don’t think it’s just about budgets.

Leitner: This is actually a bit of a revolution in cinematography. If you look at still photography, particularly the great documentary photographers, they used no lighting at all. So why in that very related field use of natural light is celebrated in terms of results but not in our field? It’s because we have been using these mechanical devices that required a great deal of additional lighting. Light levels had to be higher in terms of luminance to create a useful exposure. Today we have reached a point where technically the huge amounts of artificial light are no longer necessary.

Tamés: What inspired the time-lapse photography in the film?

Leitner: Back in ‘76 I attended a Warner Brothers summer student workshop and we shot in New York. We got on the Circle Line with some Super-8 sound cameras from Boston and we went around Manhattan… so in these movies you’re flying around Manhattan and the bridges are wizzing over your head, I’ve never forgotten that experience. In a personal way, shooting the time-lapse in The Technical Writer was my homage to that.

Filmmakers doing time-lapse in the past had to take the film to the lab and wait to find out if the exposure was right, if there was a hair in the gate, etc. The MSW-900P has an optional picture cache board that makes it the first true time-lapse video camera. What I can do with the 900P camera is phenomenal: I can shoot for five minutes and see my results a minute later, squeezed to 10 seconds. It gives me ideas, the ability to adjust things which allows me to evolve all sorts of techniques, some of which are in the film.

Tamés: You’ve been talking about advantages in production, but what does this new IMX digital 1/2″ tape format [MPEG-2, 50Mbps, 4:2:2, I-frame, 3:3:1 nearly-lossless compression], with double the bit rate and color resolution of miniDV look like when you screen it?

Leitner: I have to tell you the MPEG looks terrific. We were able to do screenings on a large plasma display with playback from a PAL miniDV player and this retains the clarity of digital reproduction.

Tamés: So, with all these tools it’s easier than ever to make a film that rivals bigger budget productions shot on film?

Leitner: It’s quite the opposite, it’s more complex today that it has ever been. I look back with nostalgia to the days when you just had to hold up a light meter and read a single reading to get a light level. You were not thinking about color space issues, detail circuitry… Back then the cinematographer was the only person who knew what the image was going to look like. They were magicians and as such they knew something that no one else knew, and there was a lot of mystique attached to that person.

Tamés: So, how has the cinematographer’s role changed?

Leitner: Today you are working with large monitors, usually high def monitors. Everybody looks at it, hair looks at it, make-up looks at it, gaffers look at it, the director looks at it. If it works well, then it creates a kind of true communal creative activity. My gaffer, Sam Wells (an experimental filmmaker) came up with a good metaphor: it’s very much like mural painting where someone draws the original cartoon and then all kinds of painters fill in the colors at once.

Tamés: Does this make for a better mural?

Leitner: When it does not work, you have all kinds of people that are looking at the monitor thinking they can do it better. What it has done has fundamentally altered the dynamic of the film set. When only the cinematographer knew what the image was going to look like, there was a whole lot of fear and uncertainty on the film set. For instance, to be a first assistant cameraperson you were pulling focus all of the time but you did not know till the dailies were printed how much of it you had ruined. Many camera assistants have become alcoholics and there is a reason for that.
Today, when you are working with these large displays on the set you can see instantly and it lowers the fear and anxiety quotient and sets are a lot calmer. Now again, some people will think this is great and some people will think it’s terrible for the art, but what is undeniable is the change that is taking place.

And it has another profound implication, people, are basing lighting decisions and cinematography decisions on what they are seeing on these monitors. Now if you accept the fact that no two monitors are exactly alike in terms of the way they are set up, their display is rarely a fixed thing. And the monitor is sitting in different lighting conditions, outside, indoors. The monitor and the color saturation look completely different in different ambient light conditions.

Tamés: Given that you can’t expect to make serious lighting decisions with a monitor this sounds like a problem.

Leitner: Lighting decisions are being made based on this, and you can say they should not be, you can say this till you are blue in the face, but people are going to do what people are going to do. As this practice becomes common that is what the filmmakers expect to see on the big screen, whether it’s film projection or video projection. On the other hand, no two images will ever, and can never, match, and yet, that is what some filmmakers expect.

Tamés: You shot almost all of the film with the new Zeiss DigiPrimes. Why did you choose to work with these lenses?

Leitner: For a number of reasons, first, I needed the apertures that only primes can deliver, second, prime lenses not only provide clearer images, they are considerably smaller. The director had done a previous film with a Betacam but his orientation was miniDV. In fact, he originally intended to shoot The Technical Writer in miniDV, so he wanted a very lightweight camera. As it turned out, the IMX camcorder (before you add camera and lenses) weighs in about 8 pounds, it’s reasonably light.

Tamés:So much of the film was hand-held?

Leitner: Yes, I would not have done that with a giant lens. I shot some of the pick-up shots with the Fujinon 6-30mm, that lens was way bigger than the camera! I wanted to keep the camera profile small. I used clip-on matte boxes, sometimes I just ripped the matte box off. I had this smallish camera, I got the best possible image quality, under the lowest lighting conditions, which meant I reproduced images full of subtlety.

Tamés: Could you have shot the film any other way?

Leitner: No. I took the technology I had assembled [Sony’s MSW-900P MPEG IMX camcorder, Zeiss’ DigiPrimes, DuArt’s ArriLaser Film Recorder, etc.]. No one had ever put these lenses on this camera, no one had used this camera to shoot a feature. I put them together with the expressed purpose of shooting in this style and getting this result. I knew what was possible, and it all panned out.