Takeaways from Cinegear expo 2012 this past weekend

Yes, this was the little brother to NAB, where most of the new gear got released, but there was still some stuff worth checking out.

Kino Flo has a new LED unit. They had to get into the game, everyone else is doing LEDS.  Called the Celeb 200, it looks about the size of a 2' 4 bank.  A little brighter than a 2' 4-bank, they say.  My impression?  Looked ok.  They do have a great reputation and plenty of capital to fool around with, so it's probably pretty decent.  Expensive though, if I recall, around 3000$.  I didn't get as much time with it as I would have liked. I like the idea of never switching bulbs, it fits the same functionality niche as a Diva lite, and its got to be better than those. The celeb copies its shape from the Vistabeam, which is good.  You can sit it upright on its side and it won't flop over, and it takes honeycombs. I'm optimistic.  Plus having that name, I think people will rent this one.

A company called Tessive marketing what it calls the Time Filter or a "soft shutter", trying to fix the longstanding problem of what 24fps does to rapidly moving objects.  It makes wagon wheels not spin backwards.  Pretty cool , really.  It's a variable ND that's synced up to the shutter and fades up and down in sync with the shutter so that each frame fades in and out rather than switching on and off. The result is you don't get "temporal aliasing". I watched his demo.  It was pretty impressive.  It really did make motion on video look much more like it does to your eye.  It actually improves the way film handles motion.  Worth a look.  Expensive, only for the rental market.  About 8000 to buy.  200/day to rent. Tessive.com

What else?  A variety of LED units trying to be the new workhorse. 
Aadyn lighting, they make fixtures that seem a lot like redheads roughly in size and shape factor, but he compared them to a brightness somewhere in between a 400 and 800 joker.  Seemed solid.  Bulbtronics, our favorite bulb dealer, getting into the LED light business, as is USHIO, our favorite bulb maker. I don't know what the market is going to do with all these. What was interesting about the bulbtronics lights is that theyre hexagonal and they can be mounted side-to-side repeatedly, so it ends up being like a beehive or honeycomb of LED fixtures beaming at you.  Kind of liked the concept.

You know what I think the lighting world needs?  Not all these dinky little LEDs that are trying to substitute for tweenies and small jokers.  We need a Big Light. A big hard source. One that subs for a 10k or a 6k, but only pulls 500 watts. put enough LEDs in one place, they'll get pretty bright.  Go big or go home.  Karl Rove tactics, attack them where they're strongest. After all these innovative clever gizmos, you know what light is still Mole-richardson's biggest seller?  the 10k Tungsten Fresnel.