You could replace the glass in the light.
Due to the amount of heat you need tempered glass. Frosted tempered glass of the right size may or may not be impossible to find. It cannot be cut, it has to be cut to size and then tempered. I used to etch glass using hydroflouric acid however this is extremely corrosive and deadly stuff to work with.

This is one of the problems with tungsten / halogen lights. Everything is a pain in the butt about them. You can buy fluro work lights down here, I assume as they're made in China you can buy them anywhere on the planet. Way, way better lights to work with. Put some decent CFLs in them and your problems are over and your video will look better.

Bob.

I'd stay away from vinyl regardless of fire risks. Shower curtains lose a huge amount of their new weight after a year or so due to outgassing, and the fumes definitely are a health risk.

I second the recommendation regarding CFLs. I once used halogen work lites, but have switched entirely to CFLs. I recently bought some good 45-watt 5500K CFLs and they work well - http://cgi.ebay.com/4-x-45-Watts-Perfect-Daylights-STUDIO-VIDEO-PHOTOGRAPH_W0QQitemZ360151510898QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item53dab3ef72

You are probably better off buying sheets of real film diffusion. They are fire resistant
$6.50 for an almost 2 foot square sheet.

http://www.filmtools.com/31-lee-s216.html.

You may want to spend $25 on a roll of blackwrap too. Very very helpful in controlling light in a DIY kit.
http://www.filmtools.com/blacfoilblac.html

I recently bought some good 45-watt 5500K CFLs and they work well - ...I just looked at that eBay auction and I'd be very interested to hear what you actually received. They are listed as 45 watts, but the lettering shown in the auction photograph, on the base of the bulb, says "26W." I realize that CF bulbs are sometimes rated based on the equivalent light output of a traditional incandescent, but normally those ratings are about 4x the connected load of the CF. Thus, for a 26 Watt CF, I would expect it to be advertised as equivalent to a 100 Watt bulb.

So, my question is: did you actually get a 45 watt bulb? If so, I'll definitely purchase a set. I have a lighting kit that was made in 1932 (this is actually accurate; my dad built it when he was a young boy). I use 400 watt tungsten bulbs and would definitely like to get something a little more modern, and just a touch cooler.

If you use cooler lights you can actually use bubble wrap. Big bubbles for less diffusion and smaller bubbles for bigger. It is cheap and works.

j razz

Both good ideas. Blackwrap is very useful.

I don't think I've seen the vinyllite in a long time but I still have the remnant of a roll stashed somewhere. It was a Lee or Rosco product. No idea if it's fire retardant but when I mentioned flame and toxicity I was thinking about that roll.

You could etch the glass of a worklight. This will make the light scatter but it doesn't really soften things much. Softness is the effect of filling in wrinkles and blemishes and generally making shadows blur out. You could develop your own softness scale by holding up two fingers in a V and judging how far away from a surface they need to be to make it so that you can't discern the two shadows.

Softness comes in small part from that scattering of light but in larger part from the size of the apparent source. Think of it this way: hang a 4'x4' cloth in front of a light and arrange it so that the light fills the cloth. Now go stand on the other side, where your talent might stand, and point your right and left hands at the right and left sides of the cloth.

How wide an angle are your arms describing? The wider the angle, the larger the apparent light source and, assuming the cloth actually scatters light, the softer the effect.

Now back up another 30 feet from that white panel and point again. What's the angle of your arms now?The light reaching you is that much less soft and if you did the 2 finger test you'd see that they cast a much more defined shadow.

This large size of the source is what gives you the softness.

Rob Mack

From our own Victor Milt:



The last few minutes he demos his Nanolight.

Bob.

Bob,

Is it possible to put CFLs (replace) into a work with halogen fixtures? I'd need to find some sort of adapter, if such a thing even exists.

Ken

Johnmeyer: "They are listed as 45 watts, but the lettering shown in the auction photograph, on the base of the bulb, says "26W."

I looked at the bases of 2 and found they actually say "43 watts." Curiously, they also say 120vac @ .64 amps, which would be almost twice 43 watts. I presume the 43 watts refers to what gets to the bulb itself after the electronics get done doing their thing.

Incidentally, I was quite concerned about flicker now that I'm shooting 60p, but I set the camera for 1/60 sec., 1080p and checked the waveform frame-by-frame. As I recall, there was no variation in light at all while going from one frame to the next. I'm guessing that the electronic ballast includes a full-wave rectifier and maybe even some capacitance for filtering. In any case, they don't seem to flicker and quickly reach full brilliance after turning them on.

They are rather bulky and won't fit just any base; I use cheap plastic sockets from Home Depot, merely hanging them from their power cord.

I ended up buying white rip-stop nylon, which is fire-resistant (commonly used in hot-air balloons). Gonna try them out today.

Once I start making videos with my new-found knowledge, I'll post them so you can see how your help has improved my product!

Cheers,

Ken

Often, lights with solid state ballasts draw amperage that doesn't match the wattage rating. Other electricians have told me that a 4x4 Kinoflo draws more like 4 amps than the 1.3 I might expect. I've never checked it with an amp meter though.

I've had pairs of HMIs with solid state ballasts kill small gennies that I thought were more than big enough for the job, but it seemed like this was some serious waveform voodoo acting in a kind of beat frequency. Very weird, but weird stuff happens sometimes.

Incidentally, I was quite concerned about flicker now that I'm shooting 60p,Thanks for answering my question about wattage. That is really useful. Also, I forgot to ask about flicker, but you anticipated my next question. I'm going to order a few of the 43 watt bulbs and also one of the 80 watt bulbs. I didn't know there was such a thing as an 80W CF bulb, much less one that is specifically balanced for daylight.

Rip stop nylon is usually sold in rolls as "Grid Cloth". You picked another very popular fabric and surely got it cheaper than you would from a specialty store.

Pretty much anything white will work, off-white will give you off-white light, and sometimes a fabric might have a faint color cast. But there's no super ultra secret trick to this. Just common sense.

Rob Mack

Drapery sheers from any fabric shop is good. Most are flame retardant. Beware of heat, especially with halogen worklights.

> I looked at the bases of 2 and found they actually say "43 watts." Curiously, they also say 120vac @ .64 amps, which would be almost twice 43 watts. I presume the 43 watts refers to what gets to the bulb itself after the electronics get done doing their thing.

This is because the current in a typical CFL is out of phase with the voltage by a significant amount, typically 60 degrees or so (i.e. their impedance has a large reactive component). The technical term for this is "Power Factor" and a typical CFL will have a power factor of about 0.5, meaning that the power (in Watts) it dissipates will be approximately half of the figure you get by multiplying the RMS volts by the RMS current (in Amps) (which are the figures that are marked on the CFL).

W = pf x VA

By contrast, old fashioned (GLS) tungsten bulbs have the volts almost exactly in phase with the current (i.e. their impedance is almost entirely non-reactive, i.e. pure resistance) giving them a power factor very close to 1. So in the case of GLS, W = VA (as near as makes no difference).

Mark

Another approach is to bounce the light instead.

Get a piece of cardboard.
Get tin foil.
Crinkle the tinfoil.
Tape the tinfoil to the cardboard, shiny side up. Crinkling the tinfoil makes the light scatter in different directions. The overall reflection will be both soft + directional.

That should give you more light output than shining light through diffusion. Depending on size, this light will be much softer.

Beware of heat, especially with halogen worklights.

This can't be stressed or repeated often enough!!
Too many DIYers don't pay attention to the heat that can come off halogen worklights.
The result? An unwanted emergency visit from your local fire department :-(

Mike

Like I said, put your hand up there first. If you can't hold your hand in the light indefinitely, you sure can't hang cloth there.

The other thing, though, is that you'd be much better off stretching fabric on a frame so that it can't simply waft onto your hot lights in a breeze. You can make a simple frame out of PVC parts (although making it stand up is another challenge if you don't have gear).

Rob Mack

Actually, making a PVC frame stand is easy. Use a T connector on the bottom two legs, and add 12"-18" of PVC to both sides of the T so that you can put sandbags or other weight on them to hold them up/in place.

as for halogen work lights - i simply took the glass out and had it sandblasted. they now have frosted glass.....

gave up with them though when 45+watt cfl's became available.