PORTABLE LEDS | GEAR
RIGHT Coming in packs of eight, Astera’s NYX bulbs pack a punch, but require mains power as a result
calls SmartSoft, obviating the need to carry frost or diffusion filters and creating a very flexible all-in-one package. The X1 sells with yoke for £2880, or a little less with the swan neck. The Titan X2 (£4300) is larger at 420W, if you need more. Having created LED lights built like stills strobes and LED lights built like fluorescent tubes, it’s little surprise to find LED-based devices that work like tungsten light bulbs. At 14W each, Astera’s NYX are among the more powerful, movie-targeted LED bulbs, using the same RGB, plus mint and amber emitters, as the company’s tube lights. For their power-to-size ratio, they sacrifice on-board batteries, requiring mains or DC supply. A kit of eight sells for under £1100. Astera is probably best known for those famous tubes, now available with internal power in three sizes: the 550mm, 36W Helios; the 1035mm, 72W Titan; the enormous 144W Hyperion, measuring just over 2m. Each uses Astera’s segmented light engine, providing individually controlled pixels that make effects like fire realistic by moving the light source. The large version sells for just over £1000, reasonable for any 144W colour mixer, let alone a tube-slim option with all these features.
The collimated beam measures a punchy 3000 lux at ten feet, slightly less than double the brand’s Astra 6x. Anyone keen to run on batteries could remove the mains power supply from the yoke and save weight, but either way, flexibility is the winner. Offering any colour, as well as soft or hard in a single package, makes it a real space-saver. It sells for £1920. Rotolight’s range includes circular alternatives to the common foot-square light. The Anova range is broadly circular, making for less angular reflections in sunglasses and eyeballs, and offers a pile of features for cinematographers and photographers. The Anova Pro 2 is a 72W device, weighing 3.34kg with the yoke, and has individually collimated optics. Uniquely, versions are available in bicolour, fixed colour or 110° coverage at about £1550. Meanwhile, anyone perusing Rotolight’s catalogue for more power will encounter its Titan range. The Titan X1 is chunkier than the Anova. It’s a square panel light, weighs 6.8kg and has 230W nominal power, with full colour mixing from RGB and two shades of white. The key feature, though, is the electronically controlled variable diffusion that Rotolight
LITTLE AND LARGE – LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION For those moments when a compact LED light won’t do, the big set-up people at Lights, Camera, Action (LCA) like to show an image of a Chroma-Q Brute Force illuminating a windmill – something we generally can’t do with a battery-powered light that anyone can comfortably pocket. Designed to approximate the mighty quarter Wendy light that would usually consume more than 10kW of power, the Brute Force 6 is built from six Studio Force II fixtures, offering full colour mixing, while consuming no more than 3.6kW. Similarly, large-scale studio set-ups are accommodated by the Creamsource SpaceX, designed to replace 5kW of tungsten with 1.7kW of LEDs. Nonetheless, the headline application is most probably replacing notoriously power-hungry, and therefore expensive-to-run, tungsten space lights. As a result, the SpaceX model has also been employed in big parabolic reflectors and other applications besides. LCA also has smaller options – with Rosco DMG’s diminutive Dash pocket light and Litegear’s Litemats, combining large and small scales by making broad sources of soft light much easier to rig. LCA now offers full colour mixing with the Spectrum series.
JUNE 202 1 | DEF I N I T ION 35
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