ACADEMY ULTIMATE GUIDE TO LIGHTING
MASTERCLASS
The kit every filmmaker should own and how to use it ULTIMATE GUIDE TO LIGHTING
WORDS ADAM DUCKWORTH
W hether your experience is all in filmmaking or you’re a photographer who is making the move into videography, you have to get to grips with lighting. Stills shooters often have experience with flash, but it’s obviously useless for video. When it comes to filming, continuous light is the only way to go, which brings its own issues and challenges. The first is that it’s nowhere near as bright as flash, so if you plan to use video lights outdoors on a bright day to overpower the sun, then you’ll be out of luck. Using video lights effectively means understanding where and when they can be used for different effects. Just as with stills, lighting can be hard and directional or soft and diffuse, and each gives a very different look to your film. Large light sources provide softer, more flattering illumination and are ideal for portraits or approximating daylight on a cloudy day. Smaller or more focused lights give harder, more crisp light ideal for backgrounds or hair lights.
and often needs fixing in post with dedicated software and often lots of time. Noise from the lights is also a consideration. Some lights have fans to cool them, which can be useless if you are using them for interviews, since a decent mic will pick up the noise. And there’s also a huge variety of choice, from powerful HMIs to LED light panels, fluorescent tubes and more, there’s a bewildering array of light sources available for video. So, here is the Pro Moviemaker crash course in basic lighting, and the right kit you should look at investing in. “Lighting can be hard and directional or soft and diffuse, and each gives a very different look to your film”
Many video lights can have a colour temperature dialled in. And many of the new ones can even change colours, as they have full RGB colour spectrum at the turn of a dial. Another consideration is flicker rate. As mains-powered lights flicker at 50Hz in the UK and Europe and 60Hz in the USA, you have to be careful to set a shutter speed that doesn’t clash, or else you’ll see flickering on the screen. Many LED and HDMI video lights are specially designed not to flicker, but incandescent and fluorescent lights are prone to it. And in slowmotion it’s even more of a problem, as you have to find a light source where the flicker frequency is not lower than the refresh rate of the camera sensor. So a US-spec camera recording 30fps generates flicker when artificial light is present if it’s shot in Europe. In slowmotion, the problem is increased if the frame rate and the refresh rate are mixed and not in line with the light output. Hence why in fast frame rate video the flicker is much more apparent
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PRO MOVIEMAKER AUTUMN 2019
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