I recently was working on an annual volunteer project for Corral Riding Academy, a Cary, N.C., non-profit organization that helps at-risk teenage girls turn their lives around.
Lori Bennett, A.C. Lighting's Southeast sales rep, was kind enough to come help with the green-screen shoot for the project, and brought with her a couple of Chroma-Q Studio Force V 12 Phosphor fixtures (for which A.C. Lighting is a distributor). We made use of these for lighting the talent in the shoot, while using a couple of rented fluorescent fixtures for lighting the green screen. (I especially appreciated the LED fixtures because using my personal tungsten Fresnels would likely have popped circuit breakers.)
My first impression on firing up one of these fixtures was ‘Wow’! These fixtures are super bright, and really, really wide.
Chroma-Q is mentioned a lot within the pages of Church Production Magazine. Their Color Force fixtures, used by many churches, are very nice color-mixing RGBA LED fixtures with high light output, excellent fade curves that match tungsten fixtures, and that never flicker on video. Their Studio Force V 12 Phosphor fixture is designed to provide white light in adjustable color temperatures from 3,200 through 5,600 Kelvin, and provides up to 4,200 lumens of output. A.C. Lighting reports that many TV studios are using them to light their studio spaces. My first impression on firing up one of these fixtures was ‘Wow'! These fixtures are super bright, and really, really wide. LED fixtures are often known for having a rather narrow beam spread, requiring significant distance to get a wide enough beam. Not these. From 12 feet away, one fixture completely washed our test area with a very even beam. Much nicer than what I get out of my higher-end Fresnel fixtures.
In the room we ended up using for our green screen shoot (thanks to Triangle Community Church in Apex, N.C., for the use of their facility for the project), we had windows letting in daylight, so we went with daylight color temperature on the fixtures to light the talent. We illuminated the screen with chroma-green lamps, so we were not overly concerned about needing to match to those fixtures.
The Studio Force fixtures looked great on camera, and while more than bright enough, didn't put out the heat that my Fresnel kit would have. So, our interview subjects didn't have to deal with “baking” for the 30-60 minutes they were being interviewed. In addition, the fixtures can be completely controlled manually, which is what we did on our shoot, and have the ability to store two presets into the fixture to make returning to your settings on the next day quick and easy. The fixtures can also be controlled fully via DMX. The fixtures have adjustable settings for their cooling fans, enabling them to run as quietly as you need. Magenta and green levels can be fine-tunes, and pulse-width frequency can be set to one of four settings. I found that the fixture worked perfectly with my Canon C100 cinema camera right out of the box. While we did not test them in lighting the green screen, I have no doubt they would have excelled at that, and from a very short distance. They probably would have worked better than the fluorescent fixtures we used, and would have given us a more even wash on the screen.
These fixtures are strong performers, and are well worth looking at for equipping a studio. Though, they are not inexpensive, sporting an MSRP of $1,750—their low power consumption can offset some of that cost, especially if you are retrofitting a space to become a studio and that would otherwise require new power runs for conventional lighting and additional HVAC to remove the waste heat from tungsten lamps.
