LIGHTING QUALITY GE AR .
Avoiding problems - and matching them Tim Kang is Quasar Science’s expert on colour, and emphasises that the best way to avoid quality issues, particularly where LED video walls are involved, is “always to do a camera test... bring it into the grading room and have a colourist work with it”. The last step, working in post-production, is key. “It’s one thing to say it’s wrong, but the pushback will be: oh, I’ll just fix it in post. You need to bring it into that environment to show how much of an issue it is. If you try to fix it, you might cause unintended consequences – noise, rotoscoping, work and money.” Computer-controlled LED lights sprout features about as fast as they can be imagined, and Quasar’s pixel tubes have the flexibility to keep up with the best. Or, as Kang explains, with the worst: “I’ve been trying to build colour-quality choice into our design. I just created a new function where you can ramp the spectrum between the best our diodes can produce for any colour point, and the worst, plus everything in-between as a separate parameter. I wanted it to be an effect you could use on purpose.”
Quasar also pays a lot of attention to colour quality (see ‘Avoiding problems’ across the page). For bulk photons with the same attention to detail, we turn to Rosco. The company’s full-colour Mix range distinguishes itself on spectral quality, and is available in 100W through to 360W options, with the large Maxi Mix designed to approximate the size and shape of a four-foot, four-tube fluorescent pack. For more in full-spectrum white, consider the Switch range, achieving up to 520W. The latest incarnation of Rosco’s colour-mixing technology is the pocket-sized DMG Dash, a tiny 14W light selling at LCA for £280. It can be mounted on cameras as an eye light, or tucked behind production design to provide a sneaky fill. Like the rest of the range, it uses the company’s six-emitter technology for a more complete spectrum, and achieves around 250lux of 6500K light at a metre. Litepanels’ original design more or less defined how archetypal LED lights work. Perhaps fittingly, the company’s latest development is also a one-by-one, the Gemini 1x1 Hard. As the name suggests, it omits diffusion in favour of an array of small lenses, to create a
defined, punchy beam. This is a flexible approach – it’s easy to diffuse a hard light, but tough to concentrate a soft light. The Gemini sells for £1754 and is rated at 200W, although the actual output will, as ever, depend on the colour selection. It’s described as an RGBWW device, including red, green and blue, as well as two colour temperatures of white emitters. In comparison to devices using one white emitter, which rely on RGB to adjust colour temperature, the Gemini 1x1 Hard should maintain better quality across the whole range of whites. Much as Litepanels invented the foot-square panel, Astera has specialised in almost everything else. Best known for its highly- capable, fluorescent-tube designs – a mainstay of anyone depicting a nightclub or neon-lit future – the company has also produced the Nyx Bulb and a range of PAR-derived
“Litepanels’ original design more or less defined how archetypal LED lights work”
UNLIMITED USE Titan Tubes work indoors or outdoors, AC- or battery-powered, and wired or wireless DMX
57. NOVEMBER 2021
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