Litepanels Astra review

Litepanels Astra Review

 4.5/5 stars

If you're into lighting with LED panels at all, you must have heard about the Litepanels Astra that came out last year. Litepanels were the first in the field of LED panel lighting for video, and after being thoroughly and extensively copied over the years, they've now released a spiffed-up design of their original product. They were also kind enough to lend me one, and here are my impressions after playing with it around the house and using it on several shoots.

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What I noticed first is how bright it was. 
  

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LED panel comparison: color charts, vectorscopes, light loss

People ask me all the time, "what LED panels do you recommend?" "What's the color like on that panel?"and ""Does putting an Airbox Softbox on the light affect the color?", so I decided to do some testing, as scientifically as possible.  What you're looking at is footage shot of the DSC labs OneShot chart, where each of the color patches is carefully calibrated to match up to the six points on a vectorscope, as well as four skin tone patches that line up with the "skin tone" line on a scope.  A perfect light source and a perfect camera would land each of the dots right on the vectorscope targets.

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More lighting and camera gear 2014: FS7, Sourcemaker blanket, Twintube Dolly, Gruvgear Muver

New lighting and camera equipment from 2014 that bears mention:

Sony's Fs7 has been one of the most ballyhooed releases this year. I recently got the chance to do some testing Adam Wilt and Art Adams. Adam Wilt wrote some thorough articles about it which are worth reading. I'm looking forward to reading Arts writeup when its done, but here's my really quick .02 - like the smarty handgrip. All those controls you can operate without taking your eye of the eyepiece! I was also very impressed with the dynamic range. S-log 3, we were actually short of hard pressed to create an indoor situation that exceeded what camera could still resolve. Granted,  our biggest light was an 800 joker, but it was still impressive that the camera could still see detail on the t/45 white curtains where the beam of light was hitting them as well as in the unlit T/1 patch of dark wood in the foreground, about eleven stops apart.  We'll wait and see the actual test results though once Art has done the edit.

Sony FS7, test shoot w/Art Adams and Airbox Lights

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Custom Catch Lights or Eye Lights

Lighting Exercise: Custom Catchlights

I've always had this thing for unusual catch lights in people eyes, something other than the usual rectangle or dot.  Catchlights, also referred to as eyelights, are generally understood by photographers and videographers to be important; people's eyes seem a little dead when there's no light reflected in them. Not coincidentally, the times there's no light reflected in someone eyes is usually when there isn't any light source in front of them, so they're usually a bit backlit or sidelit anyway, which might lead people to feel that the person looks a little gloomy. 


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Airbox LED softboxes on: Mirrorless better than DSLR for video?

Is mirrorless the new deal for DSLRs and lower-budget smaller-scale video shooting?  Or I guess I should say "DSLM".  That's the new term I heard at the WPPI trade show in Las Vegas last week. It was most often mentioned cheek-to-jowl with the term "hybrid" photography, which was also new to me. Mirrorless and hybrid are a trend, which you can see with the field dominating Canon releasing its EOS-M to jump into the fray.

Will Crockett feels strongly this way.  his aurdience is primarily photographers who are transitioning over towards video, since their clients are asking them to.  Some of mine are asking me the reverse:
"did you shoot any stills when you were shooting that part?" And my answer's always, uh, no, because I was shooting video. I didn't shoot any stills.  Maybe that's a lack of planning on my part, that maybe I SHOULD shoot stills along the way when I'm shooting video. So shooting "hybrid" is apparently more and more of the new deal for all of us.

I pressed him on a few of the points in his video.
1.Why's he think it's so much easier to shoot video with mirrorless like a gh2 or gh3 than with the old favorite the 5d?
response:  a) autofocus actually works on mirrorless cameras for video, but autofocus in unavailable in video to DSLRs other than the Sony a99.  b)mirrorless is natively 16:9, making post a little easier. c)more video options like 720 or interlaced available in mirrorless and Sony alphas  d)better overall low light performance in mirrorless.  Performance in his words being a combination of being able to autofocus, judge AWB, and produce good image quality above ISO 2000.



2. Autofocus for video:  I said I still find the autofocus on my GH2 not sufficiently reliable for video work. Sometimes it can follow a moving subject, sometimes it just completely blows it and makes the background really sharp.
Response: Agreed, but still better than you can't ever use it at all.

3.Lots of lenses available:  My impression is yes, you can use lots of lenses on a micro 4/3 mount, technically the most of any format, but in reality, a lot comes down to the quality of the adapters, and a lot of the affordable ones are crap. The lack of iris control on my Canon EF mount lenses when on a m43 mount, not to mention the sloppy wobbly connection between the lens and the camera, makes those lenses basically unusable on m43. There is that cool 550$ smart adapter from redrock micro, but that's pretty spendy. Not to mention the 2x crop factor of the M43 sensor, where your nice wide 24mm EF mount is all of a sudden basically a normal perspective lens.
Response: agreed.  He tries to avoid using adapters except for his Leica glass. Using native lenses is far preferable in most cases.

One thing that can be handy about mirrorless is they're much smaller and usually less expensive for both bodies and glass than pro DSLRs.  Now that Lumix has put out a series of top-quality lenses for M43 format, it feels like a real alternative. When I first got my GH2, there was no fast "normal" zoom available, the equivalent of the Canon L 24-70 2.8. It caused me some heartburn.  Thankfully, now there are the Lumix G X series lenses, which are awesome.  And small! And not that pricey! Only about 1200$ each.

Small camera? Small can be very good sometimes.
When you're just using it as a SLR-style camera, or traveling, that's cool.  I find once I kit it out with all my crap for video, like my d-focus cage, rods, monitor, full-size tripod, and mini slider, it's far from small. Sure is nice to rig up on something.

Here's when little is a big advantage. Check this out:

I don't think you could do that with a chunky SLR with a big lens on it.  well, maybe, but it wouldn't be as fast and it would be harder to do and bounce around more and maybe not work.



Conclusion:
While it's not the only way to shoot video, and all of our favorite DSLRs are still leading the field, I think the day isn't that far away when it will just seem like the more logical choice to shoot video with sleek little DSLMs packed with pro video features than with "big" DSLRs. They're just more video-friendly.  I'm not going to get into the partisan fight about which camera looks better, but there are a lot of just plain practical concerns that make mirrorless attractive. HD live feed to your monitor, for one, so you can keep stuff in focus once you start rolling.

When you're shooting small like this, you'll want your lighting kit to be pretty compact too. What better way than totally collapsible almost weightless softboxes for your LED panels? Check us out.
yours
Tom Guiney
Airboxlights.com
Inflatable softboxes for LED Panels

Micro Grip and Lighting Kit

Sometimes I get this notion like I've got all the answers on something, an of course that means I don't. I got my eyes opened a bit on how small you can go with gear and still be very effecive. This is particularly relevant when you're working by yourself or with a very small crew. I gaffed a Chrome spot for a dp named Norman Bonney, and he had a whole kit of totally miniaturized gear, optimized for fitting in one vehicle and for taking on airplanes.
Kit was
1 case: 4 LEDs, 2 1x1 panels and two 6" x1' panels
4 skinny little 18/3 "stingers"
A bag of slender aluminum stands, of a degree of sturdiness that I had previously dismissed as Mickey-mouse student film stuff. Some stands were 3/8" studs at the top, some were standard 5/8" studs.
Portable fold-up flag kit
Collapsible 4x6 westcott scrimjim frames and a duffel bag full of soft goods.
Instead of heavy duveteen, he carried lightweight ripstop nylon
And the grip kit: instead of heavy steel 2 1/2" steel gobo heads, these tiny little 1 1/2" grip heads. So this is what your "C-stand" looks like:

A tiny stand, a tiny head, and a tiny cardi. Slender, but big enough to handle this lightweight collapsible 4x frame on an interior set:

And all the bags and cases were 49 lbs or less and less than 62" long, making it all air-travel ready.

I dig it!  I shoot a bunch of little jobs where it's basically just me, and if everything fit in bags and cases and didn't weight all that much, that would be just fine with me.

Handy items in my kit as far as extreme portability are the inflatable softboxes I make to go with my LED lights.  They just squish down on top of the lights in the case and add barely any weight or bulk since they're inflatable. Also handy are these cheesy "Impact" brand light stands that I got a while ago and then regretted because they seemed so flimsy.  They've proved really reliable, even if they are lightweight. They work.  When I'm not bringing "any" lights, I bring my two 1x1 panels in their laptop bags and these two lightweight stands and my little briefcase of small LED units and Airbox softboxes.  

Trivium: "Impact" is one of B&H's house brands of gear, along with Pearstone and probably a few others.

Hi-speed shooting, tungsten filaments, and flicker/pulse

Tweeted on the topic of high- fps shooting today.  More info here:

It is commonly understood that when you're shooting above 120 fps, you can't use small lights, that a 5k is the smallest light that you can use.  Why? In brief, because a smaller, thinner filament can cool and therefore dim quickly, as the AC voltage cycles up and down 60 times per second on a 60-hz system.  To the eye, and a normal framerate, the very brief dim period of out put in between +120volts and -120volts that happens 60 times each second isn't visible at all, the same way you can't see hummingbird wings or helicopter blades.  When you're shooting extremely high speed, these "brief" dim periods are extremely obvious, and the lights that appear steady to your eye appear to be pulsing in a very odd way.  With larger, thicker filaments, like on a 10k or 20k, it takes a much longer time for the heat and light to dissipate out of the metal, and by the time the filament would be noticeably darker, the voltage has already reached it's next peak and the brightness of the filament is restored.

Today it was pointed out to me by a DP I'm about to work with that the "nothing under 5k" rule is actually a conservative overcompensation(a little typical of us gaffers and electricians, I think).  I've pulled maxibrutes (9 x 1k Par-64 bulbs) off of an order because I heard that we were adding a bit of high speed.  Jim Matlosz (Www.dpmatlosz.com) clearly knows what he's doing, if you look at his site, and he said, "Yeah, you get away with it sometimes. 1ks?  Yeah. I've seen them flicker, and I've seen them not. We'll try it." But in any case, he firmly asserted that 2k is the safe smallish light, not 5k.  

Regular tube-shaped kinos are fine when they're bright enough, because kino ballasts ramp up the frequency of the current to about 10,000 hz.  Interestingly, the u-shaped kinos like diva lights, parabeams, and vistabeams are problematic sometimes.  That requires further research; I don't know why they aren't fine and the straight tubes are.  They must use lower-frequency ballasts.

"Flicker-free" HMIs:- those arent really flicker free.  Their brightness still increases and decreases 60 times per second, but they become "flicker-free" by squaring off the top of the AC sine wave.  The amplitude(height) of the wave is increased, but a filter is applied that cuts off the top of the wave beyond a certain point, which gives you an almost completely flat-topped, steep-sided waveform, almost a true square wave.  This results in seeing the maximum brightness for a relatively longer time out of each cycle and having the transition between brightness peaks be relatively brief.

In any case, don't use flicker free HMIs at a framerate higher than 150 fps. Some people say 120, but that might be just staying on the safe side.

yours
Tom Guiney, gaffer and DP
Airboxlights.com inflatable LED diffusers for Litepanels
twitter lighting tips @airboxlights

Expansion @airboxlights twitter feed of lighting tips, tricks, and opinions

I'm Tom Guiney, a gaffer, electrician and DP for fourteen years in New York City, and the owner/inventor of Airboxlights.com, your source for ultralight inflatable softboxes/diffusers for Litepanels.

This blog is intended as a co-blog to my twitter feed @airboxlights, where I put lighting tidbits up a few times a week,  sharing my lighting work experience in the world of commercials, on-air promos, reality shows, corporate videos, movies, tv shows, and music videos.

Expansion on recent tweet:

tidbit: Underused light- molebeam beam projector. Powerful defined tungsten beam. Hard model key? window light? like a tungst xenon.

Here's a link: http://www.mole.com/lighting/beams/tun_beam/tung_beam.html

Have you used them?  They are awesome!  They put out a powerful super-refined beam with very distinct edges.  Useful in some of the same ways a leko is, except for when you need more than 750 watts, the maximum size HPL lamp.  Molebeams come in 2k, 5k, 10k, and 20k.

A molebeam is great when you need something like a shaft of light effect, but you're in a tungsten lighting situation.  A bit like a xenon, but without a lot of the obvious problems of xenons, like unreliability, the hole in the middle of the beam (on older ones), and being unable to unplug them in a hurry for fear of exploding bulbs.

Also very useful to bounce into a board that's rigged up and behind the subject. If it's too much hassle/time/logistical difficulty to actually rig a backlight, you can generally rig up a piece of silver/white beadboard there, with tape if nothing else, and then hit it with a leko or a molebeam, since they  don't really spill the way a fresnel does and won't require any gripping to keep spill off of the front of your subject.

Also useful just as tungsten source to use as a bounce source for key/fill/wherever, not rigged; it's still a 2k/5k/10k/20k.

Useful for creating crisply-defined shadows as well. 

You can always soften a very hard source, but you can't harden a mushy source.  Try casting a crisp shadow with a kino, tell me how that goes.



yours
Tom Guiney, gaffer and DP
Airboxlights.com inflatable LED diffusers for Litepanels
twitter lighting tips @airboxlights