Hi, Carl here for ProAV TV.
And today we are looking at the Arri Skypanels, which are possibly the best LED soft panels
in the industry.
This is the s30-c, this is the larger s60-c, and there's an even bigger s-120 which is
twice the length of this s-60.
The c on the end of the product names means colour, because these are actually full RBG
leds.
So you don't just get bicolour control of your colour temperature.
You can also adjust hue and saturation, which we will go into in more detail in a minute.
Theres also an RP version of each of these lights, this stands for remote phosphor and
means the light is slightly brighter, but the colour temperature is fixed.
So as you’d expect from Arri, these are premium quality, workhorse products which
are designed specifically for use on film sets.
This shows in pretty much every area, the build quality is superb and robust, the power
uses 16 amp connections and the larger lights use larger spigots, so you need big combo
stands to hold them.
These are clearly designed to be used on professional film sets, in studios or on location with
a crew, gaffers the whole works.
I think there's little doubt that if your looking for an led panel that will stand the
test of time and be used and abused for years, these would be a fantastic choice.
They are big and heavy compared to some competitors, but built fantastically well.
So lets look at what they can do.
They have some neat tricks up their sleeve which we will look at in a minute, but lets
first see how well they work as normal soft lights.
You get full control over colour temperature from 2,800 to 10,000 kelvin which a wider
range than you normally find, plus a green or magenta shift which is nice.
Dimming is impressive from 100 to 0.1%.
But lets look at the all important meter readings.
So the first thing you notice here is that these are the brightest soft LEDs I have seen
so far.
All of these readings were taken at 1m, and the S30 comes in around the 6000 lux range
which is twice as bright as most of the competition, and the S60 is nearly twice as bright again.
Hitting 10 or 11 thousand lux at 1m.
Colour temperature is also nearly spot on here, almost exactly 3200 kelvin in tungsten
mode or 5600 kelvin when set to daylight.
The big shock though is when you look at the TLCI scores.
This is a score out of 100 that measures how colour accurate the light output is.
This affects skin tones, colour reproduction and so on.
both lights when set to 5600 kelvin get an acceptable but not impressively high 91 TLCI,
and when set to 3200 the S30 gets 81 and the S60 is down to 78.
Its worth pointing out that this may be able to be improved by tweaking the light, for
example theres a green / minus shift which was set at 0 for these tests.
So this might not be the whole picture.
But its certainly very interesting.
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So now lets look at the exciting part of the lights, the Hue and Saturation controls.
With the push of a button you can change from colour temperature mode to Hue & Sat mode
which lets you dial in basically any colour you want.
This is obviously useful for adding some interest to the background and for recreating the light
coming from artificial sources.
With the latest firmware though Arri took this one step further by adding pre-made lighting
effects in the menu.
You know get a whole range of different options like police car, paparazzi flashes, fire or
candle light, television and loads more.
These also each have various options you can change to customise each preset.
For example in the police car you can choose if its only blue light, or red and blue and
how many times it flashes.
These could easily be dismissed as a gimmick but I think they could actually be quite useful.
The amount of times I've tried to recreate firelight on a short film for example.
Ive stood there waving branches and moving filters in front of a hot tungsten light for
hours to make it look like a campfire.
So I think these could be a quick, simple way to recreate different light sources for
people in narrative work.
Arri have also made a whole host of accessories to help you work with the sky panels.
Theres the remote, which plugs into the USB port on the light and copies the control panel
on the back of the light.
This lets you control the light when its up high and out of reach.
Arri’s attention to detail really shows here as well, for example they have a magnet
on the back of the light which means you can quickly secure it to a metal light stand.
But that is just the start of the accessories list, theres different diffusion amounts,
barn doors, honeycombs, egg crates, bars, hard cases and more.
One that stands out from the list though is the sky bender.
This is designed for when your mounting the light along the top or bottom of a green screen
or white background.
It basically bends the light to give you even light coverage across the background, rather
than being bright on the side near the light and dark on the opposite site.
Very clever.
So what do you think of the Arri Skypanels?
Do you agree that they are the best soft panels out there or are there better lower cost option?
Let me know in the comments section below.
Thanks for watching and i’ll see you in the next one.