An essential element on getting an excellent video result is correct lighting. Too much, too little or the wrong kind and you’re in for dissatisfying results.
Achieving correct lighting is an art form in itself and requires the right mix of knowledge, experience and equipment. Whether you confine your work to the studio or run-n-gun in the wild, there’s a lighting solution that’s just right for you. In this buyer’s guide we’ll explore several types of lighting options and their uses.
Tungsten
Tungsten lights have been a video and film lighting mainstay for many years. A tungsten filament, combined with halogen gas and enclosed within a quartz envelope, produces a constant output and color temperature throughout its life. They are affordable and produce large volumes of very bright, high-contrast light, producing sharp, crisp shadows. Fortunately, light modifiers are available to control and soften tungsten’s brilliant beams as needed.
Hydrargyrum Medium-arc Iodide lamp
HMI or Hydrargyrum Medium-arc Iodide lamp is another lighting option that is very popular with professional video producers. Unlike traditional lights, HMIs are daylight balanced and produce a great deal more light than tungsten halogen lights of the same wattage. For example, a 600W HMI produces as much light output as a conventional 2000W unit with daylight filter and a 2500W HMI is equivalent to the output of 10,000W of traditional tungsten. Requiring less power, they run much cooler, and like their tungsten brethren, they can be modified to contain and direct all that awesome brightness.
HMIs are considerably more expensive to buy and maintain than conventional lights and each requires its own bulky ballast to crank the voltage up into the necessary range. Once switched on, they cannot be used immediately, as they require a bit of warm-up time before reaching the correct color temperature.
Fluorescent
Fluorescent lamps produce a very pleasing soft light that wraps beautifully around the subject, making them great for portraits and other applications requiring more diffused lighting. The light-producing tubes are affordable, have long lives, consume much less power than tungsten, are cool to the touch and available in both 3200k and daylight color temperatures.
Fluorescents put out considerably less light than either tungsten or HMI lamps. Bank lights are available with multiple tubes and greater output but are larger, heavier and too bulky for easy travel. Newer designs, however, seek to resolve some of these issues. CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps) are daylight balanced and similar in size to common household light bulbs with the same screw-in base.
Light-Emitting Diodes
Individual light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are very small and are commonly used as indicator lamps on electronic devices. Many LEDs, combined into single panels, however, have numerous advantages and are fast becoming extremely popular lighting solutions in the video world.
LEDs are daylight balanced, consume low amounts of energy and are very cool to the touch. The diodes have extremely long life spans, rated in the tens of thousands of hours. On the one hand, they can be very compact, perfect for on-camera use or hard to light locations, such as lighting car interiors. On the other hand, they can be bundled together into large multi-panels for a cumulative effect. The intensity of LEDs can be varied, without altering the color temperature, while the color temperature itself can be independently changed between 3200K and 5600K.
The primary disadvantage of LEDs are their cost. And while their output is less than either tungsten or HMIs they may well offer the best of each world. They have the compact size and light weight of tungsten; the low power requirements, cool operating temperatures and longer life of fluorescents; lower cost than HMIs and, on some models, variable intensity and color temperature.
