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- Good gear for making videos
has never been more accessible.
And with that in mind,
it's always a bright idea to focus
on leveling up your lighting.
My name is Tom, this is "The Enthusiasm Project."
And today we are gonna talk about these guys right here,
the Nanlite PavoTube II 6C,
so you can see how sick these lights are.
This is not a sponsored video,
but you might remember a few weeks ago,
I did a review on the Aputure MC.
And the reason I bring that up is
because these are kind of similar in price.
These two are separate lights,
but each light individually costs about $100.
The Aputure MC costs about $90.
So they are roughly in the same price range.
This isn't a direct comparison video.
In fact, I would highly recommend if possible,
or better yet, when possible that you do this right here
and get both of them because they have different purposes,
they work differently and you can kind of never have
too many really great little lights.
Right now this is on continuous lighting mode
at 5,600 Kelvin, but I can easily with the push of a button,
switch it to be colored.
And of course, we've even got all these effects here.
You might have noticed the effect of these lights
in some of my more recent videos,
because I've been using them a lot.
So we're gonna dive into these today
because I haven't used a Nanlight before.
I kind of stick with my normal brands,
but I got these based on the fact
that Peter Lindgren uses them on his channel
and he gets amazing results with these lights.
He's got the big old tubes.
Those are the ones I originally wanted,
but now I'm so used to seeing the great quality
of these PavoTubes in his videos that I'm conditioned
to just associate them with great lighting.
In fact, you might call it a Pavovlian response.
Ugh!
I should say too, that these can sometimes be hard to find.
They seem to be going in and out of stock pretty frequently.
I'll put links down below.
If they're not in stock anywhere,
I did order mine directly from Nanlight
and they arrived in about four days, so that worked for me,
if you can't find them at any of your usual stores.
So before we talk about features and performance,
let's talk about what you get for your $100.
In the box you get the light itself.
And yes, I put my lights away to put them in the box
so I could take them out of the box right now.
The light comes in this little pouch,
which I actually did wanna bring up
because if you've purchased video lights before,
you know that a lot of 'em come in these little cases.
Case in point, this is another light that I recently got.
It's a tiny little light (zipper zipping)
that came in this really, you know,
nice case that I'll probably never use again.
And I don't know what to do with these.
And they just sort of pile up,
but I don't wanna just throw 'em out
'cause it feels wasteful.
But if I'm gonna travel with the light,
unless it's a really big or really delicate light,
I'm probably not gonna use that.
Whereas this, these lights are small enough
that you would wanna travel with 'em,
but you do wanna protect 'em even though they're durable.
I wouldn't wanna just throw it into my bag like this.
Put the light in the pouch and then put this
in your bag or whatever, and it's going to be protected,
and it's not going to take up very much space.
You also get a USB-C power cable,
which is how you charge the light.
And you can also run the light
off of an external battery pack
or even wall power plugged in for unlimited light usage.
You get this little strap, which is kind of neat,
because it's pretty durable and it has
a 1/4-20 screw on the bottom,
which goes right into the light itself,
and then gives you more options for hanging the light
and positioning it in more places
because now it has a strap.
And you also get these little metal plates.
The reason for that is because the back of the lights
have magnets built into each end.
But when Nanlight suggests you do in the instructions,
use some gaff tape, tape these to a surface,
and then you've got, well,
skin is too smooth,
but otherwise you would be able to stick these to a wall
or a surface that's not magnetic
and make it magnetic for your lights.
There are also 1/4-20 mounts on either side of the lights.
So you can put it on a C stand, a lighting stand, a tripod.
There's really no shortage of versatility
in terms of being able to mount this light.
So for the price, you get a pretty decent setup.
The lights themselves are pretty durable.
They're made out of heavy duty plastics and metal.
So they feel really solid.
There's a control panel on the rear of the light
that has a Mode button, a Switch button,
plus and minus buttons, the power button,
and the USB-C charging port.
Even without reading the instructions,
it was pretty easy to figure out how to use these lights.
It's super intuitive.
To turn it on though,
I've seen a couple people mention this,
if you just press the power button,
you'll see the logo start to go on,
but the light won't turn on.
You have to hold this down until the logo gets larger.
And then the light is on and shining in my face.
And to turn it off,
you just hold it down until the light turns off.
Otherwise operation is pretty simple.
The Mode button lets you switch between CCT, HSI,
which is hue, saturation, and intensity.
That lets you decide which color you wanna use.
Effect, and we have different effects.
If you wanna change any settings,
you just press Switch and then use plus and minus.
With continuous lighting,
you can go all the way from 2,700 degrees Kelvin,
which is very warm lighting, all of the way to 7,500,
which is very cool white daylight.
I keep mine at 5,600 most of the time.
On the back, there's also a little display
that shows your battery charge level
and the estimated remaining battery life.
Right here right now,
I've only got this light set to 5% brightness.
So it says it's gonna last for eight and 1/2 hours.
Obviously that changes if you increase the brightness.
If I go all the way to 100%,
which these are really bright lights,
I turn off my key light in this room.
Here's 100% brightness of this light.
It's relatively soft.
They work great as hair lights and backlights.
This is pretty well diffused.
It gives nice soft lighting.
It's not quite as diffused as the Aputure MC
because it has this specialized diffuser,
which I think gives a softer quality of light.
But these are pretty darn good and they are super bright.
Officially it says that they will run
for 65 minutes at full power.
You probably very rarely keep these at full power
because it's so bright.
That's gonna change depending on how you're using it.
I have found this rating to be pretty conservative.
So if it tells me it's gonna give me an hour of lighting,
I'll usually get a little bit more than an hour,
but I wouldn't use that as a law.
I think it's just a good guideline to go by.
I love that feature though 'cause it really tells you,
sometimes if you're like,
"I just need to film for 20 more minutes,"
and it says that you have .5 hours left,
you're like, "I could probably pull that off,"
and then you do and it's great.
And at full brightness these are rated
at 520 lumens with a CRI of 95,
which basically means they're super bright
and the color reproduction is pretty dang good.
So you shouldn't get any weird colorcasts or color shifts
when you're using these lights, unless you want to,
because you're setting them to some of those colors.
There's no app like there is with the Aputure MC.
The app is really fun to use with these,
but using apps is always inherently clunky
to a certain extent.
And so I like how easy it is to just use
this light by itself without having to do
anything else and it just works.
I really love the controls on these lights.
And then the Effect mode, we've got a hue loop.
I can change the brightness and the speed and the intensity.
And you can also select which hues,
if you wanna do the whole rainbow,
or if you just wanna do a little bit of the spectrum.
We can also do a CCT loop.
So kind of the same thing, except instead of all the colors,
we're just going from warm to daylight.
We can do one that's intensity.
So it goes from dim to bright.
And then there are a lot of other options,
a lot of other effects, fireworks, explosion,
TV, police car, party lights,
all this cool thing, paparazzi,
but they are again, just like the MC,
kind of based on flashing lights and they look great.
I'm super sensitive to flashing lights.
So I don't wanna test 'em here
because it will ruin my day.
So the reason I originally wanted to get these was
to replace these accent lights over here,
these ones right here, I've had these forever.
They're relatively inexpensive lights
that I found on Amazon.
They're just sort of RGB floodlights.
They're great for ambience,
but they kind of suck for video because they flicker a lot.
And so depending on my shutter speed and my frame rate,
I can deal with flickering from these lights sometimes.
And it can be very annoying,
and they might've even noticed it in some of my videos.
A big reason to invest in a dedicated video light is
that it won't give you flickering
at any frame rates or shutter speeds,
at least decent lights won't.
And you don't have to deal with that issue at all.
That is a very, very big deal
because when you film something
and it looks great and it sounds great,
and then you go to edit it and you realize
that there's a flicker that you didn't see
with your naked eye or you didn't even see in the camera,
that's a really big bummer.
So using dedicated video lights completely eliminates
that problem for the most part.
What I was hoping is that these were gonna be
bright enough to act as accent lights over here,
which they are.
And if I turn this on right here,
let's put this at kind of a blue,
if I turn this light off and now the Nanlight does work
as an accent light, but it's just not quite as bright,
these smaller ones, as I wanted them to be.
It looks great.
I just really love super bright high-key lighting,
which makes everything look ultra just bright and vibrant.
And these aren't quite bright enough
for the reason I bought them, but that's okay.
The fact that these didn't work
the way that I wanted them to means
that I'm actually using them a lot more
because now they are just constantly available.
And when I'm doing photography and B-roll and whatever,
I just put these everywhere, and mix and match 'em.
And I actually really love having two of them.
So maybe one day I'll get the giant four foot tubes.
Those would be more than bright enough to do accent lights
and then not have to deal with flickering
because I've actually enjoyed filming
some of my videos at 30 frames per second.
But I've been getting flickering
with these cheap RGB lights.
In the end, (crashing) in the end,
I think it is absolutely worth to invest in these lights.
I've been really impressed with them.
I think the tricky part is if you're searching for lights,
especially tube lights like these,
which have been really popular lately,
it's easy to just go on a site like Amazon,
search for video tube light or RGB tube light,
sort price lowest to highest,
and just get the cheapest option.
But considering that these are $100 each, not for both,
I think that is really worth it.
Same with the Aputure MC, which is $90.
That's a pretty affordable price
and it's gonna get you something
that's gonna work really well,
and last a really, really long time.
I can't speak for all of the lights in the world,
but I can speak for at least these ones right here,
that when it comes to brightness, color reproduction,
durability, ease of use, these are absolutely excellent.
And I've really been enjoying using them.
In fact, I'm so glad I have two of them.
If you can responsibly fit it into your budget,
I would recommend getting two because it's really helpful.
And then you too, can I have two tube lights for YouTube.
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