Took part in a shooting recently. Nothing extraordinary, a simple television serial shooting for a small channel, without any TV Stars. What I mean to say is that it was a low budget kind of situation, being filmed on DVCAM to save costs.
Having come from Kenya recently, where I was working in low budget situations almost all the time, I was immediately struck by how organised the shooting technology had become in India. Or maybe it was just this unit, I am in no position to generalise really.
Let me begin by explaining what I mean by using the word ‘organised’. I have to begin with the lights-they were LED lights made in China, with dimmers attached to them, no facility to switch off rows but just dim the whole thing. As is usual with LED lights, the dimming causes no change of colour temperature, unlike conventional movie lights. The interesting part was that these were lights running off batteries, not any ordinary batteries but lithium ion ones.
I noticed that the lithium ion batteries looked similar to the ones powering the camera (a standard high-end Sony DVCAM one). It turned out that the lights had been adapted to use these lithium ion batteries, identical to the long-life ones that power video cameras. So now the unit could use the same chargers as the one for the camera and have more batteries available all around.
As LED lights typically use very little power, the batteries were enough to power a six hundred watt output light for eight hours, or an entire working day. The unit used four lights in typical set-ups, but due to the LED lights did not need to use any diesel generator or rely on external power sources. They were ‘independent’ in the best sense of the word.
Of course you still had to charge the batteries at night and that needed electrical power. But you’d need that anyway to charge your camera batteries. Added plus to the no diesel generator was no cables running anywhere, no noise worries so ‘cleaner’ sound.
Then I noticed that the guys had adapted their camera monitor to run on the same size lithium ion batteries. So no electrical power or other power source required there, again saving on diesel generators which are standard to our business in India as much as overseas.
I was left dumbstruck by the efficiency of the whole set-up and how much it eased life, beside giving the unit a lot more flexibility to adapt to location shooting.
A lesson in technology learnt.
Having come from Kenya recently, where I was working in low budget situations almost all the time, I was immediately struck by how organised the shooting technology had become in India. Or maybe it was just this unit, I am in no position to generalise really.
Let me begin by explaining what I mean by using the word ‘organised’. I have to begin with the lights-they were LED lights made in China, with dimmers attached to them, no facility to switch off rows but just dim the whole thing. As is usual with LED lights, the dimming causes no change of colour temperature, unlike conventional movie lights. The interesting part was that these were lights running off batteries, not any ordinary batteries but lithium ion ones.
I noticed that the lithium ion batteries looked similar to the ones powering the camera (a standard high-end Sony DVCAM one). It turned out that the lights had been adapted to use these lithium ion batteries, identical to the long-life ones that power video cameras. So now the unit could use the same chargers as the one for the camera and have more batteries available all around.
As LED lights typically use very little power, the batteries were enough to power a six hundred watt output light for eight hours, or an entire working day. The unit used four lights in typical set-ups, but due to the LED lights did not need to use any diesel generator or rely on external power sources. They were ‘independent’ in the best sense of the word.
Of course you still had to charge the batteries at night and that needed electrical power. But you’d need that anyway to charge your camera batteries. Added plus to the no diesel generator was no cables running anywhere, no noise worries so ‘cleaner’ sound.
Then I noticed that the guys had adapted their camera monitor to run on the same size lithium ion batteries. So no electrical power or other power source required there, again saving on diesel generators which are standard to our business in India as much as overseas.
I was left dumbstruck by the efficiency of the whole set-up and how much it eased life, beside giving the unit a lot more flexibility to adapt to location shooting.
A lesson in technology learnt.
No comments:
Post a Comment