LED on film

[iamjoehan]

Hi Roger,

Would you say there is a striking difference exposing film using LEDs? I haven’t shot a proper narrative on film in a while and that was when LEDs were just coming out so much of my units were tungstens and kino’s.

I’ve defaulted to those on my ask/order but they came back with Aputure 1200D and Astera Titans as alternatives. Seems like many vendors are no longer carrying tungsten or HMI units.

Should I be worried and source some tungsten/HMI units?

Topic

[Sean Buffini]

Thats an interesting question. You could get very scientific but I don’t think it will effect your work. I don’t know enough about film chemistry to know which wave lengths of light are reactive to film, but modern LEDs have pretty decent photometrics so I doubt there would be any meaningful difference when comparing to older technologies.

In terms of brightness, some manufacture’s comparisons between their LEDs and traditional HMI’s can be a little misleading. Beam angle and fall off are usually very different. But again, probably not enough of a difference for it to effect your work.

[Roger Deakins]

There are more and more good LED options coming into use with a larger spectral range, something which was an issue in the early days. I would not be worried about using LEDs and they do have many advantages. However, it comes down to the film and the conditions in which you are working. I don’t see an alternative to using an HMI (or a Dino etc) to imitate ‘moonlight’ right now, though there may be one I am not aware of. In the lower range of lighting, where there would be a 650, a 1K, a 5K, or even a 10K, the LED alternatives are as good if not better. To dispense with gels is a great advantage!

[iamjoehan]

Thank you so much both for your responses! No gels on set is a huge cost savings for sure.

Roger, could you expand on LEDs not quite being able to imitate moonlight?

My scope of moonlight doesn’t go further than lighting through a small window or living room  at the moment but I guess for night exteriors, such as your famous True Grit, I could see LEDs lacking behind?

[Roger Deakins]

I don’t know of an LED lamp that is as powerful as a large HMI but I may be out of date there!

[Stip]

This year several companies brought out spotlight LEDs with power around 3500 Watt, which is roughly equivalent to 4K HMI or 12K Tungsten fresnel.

So still quite far from large HMI units.

[Davinki]

This reminds me of a quote from Benoit Debbie on his work for the beach bum, I don’t completely agree with the idea that digital cant do what says it cant do as certain cameras have a wider color gamut than print film but that’s besides that point ill let uall read and give your thoughts “The outstanding merit of using LEDs with celluloid film is that you can see and feel the separation of the colors you create on set. With digital, it’s very difficult to see any layers of color. Take green for example, you can record green digitally, but it’s hard to register the cyan, red yellow or red inside this green. But the nuances are all there on film.”

[Davinki]

*Debie

[Stip]

As you suggest, he’s not right about digital not being able to do what he describes and I think it has been debunked enough by now.

Maybe he said it like this because it was an interview for Kodak 🙂

[Author]

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