[Music]
ETC is not necessarily a technology company,
but that doesn't mean that we can't use
advanced technology in our little niche for example.
And so I think the original intent of ARG
was to basically go out and do blue-sky type of technology research.
I like to think of us as working on things
that are beyond the scope of our current product lines.
We tend to get drawn into things that we currently make as well.
So the idea is to create technology that the company can use,
and then if the company decides to use it we help promote that and distribute the information to others in the group.
ARG stands for the Advance Research Group.
That is very specific because we are intended to experiment and research in order to advance the future of the technology.
We might see something interesting that relates to the quality of light, and its use in technology,
and we have the luxury of being able to investigate it, and then when or if we discover something useful,
we then hand it over to R&D to see what they can do in terms of putting it into future product.
ARG was formed in 2016. It was Fred's idea.
He specifically wanted a group that was focused on research.
He has always been passionate about the quality of light.
Fred and I ended up in conversations and sharing knowledge about what we loved about tungsten and what...what we didn't want to give up.
Technology that's available today for LEDs allows a lot of awesome things to happen. Right?
There's a lot of awesomeness that can happen because we're able to use LEDs in our light fixtures today.
However, we also give up some things because of that technology.
And if you consider that relative to tungsten, for example, we give up some of the long wavelength reds that are so beautiful.
If you've known me for more than five minutes, you know I love the long wavelength reds.
I want all of the long wavelength reds. They do such beautiful things. It's so luxurious.
So one of the things that ARG does is continue to search for ways to raise that bar.
How do we raise the bar? Because we're not going to give anything up.
It's not OK to not have something in the spectrum because it's hard, or expensive, or challenging.
In the ARG group we are very fortunate to have some spectral tuning capabilities that are not available commercially.
So we can play with a lot of things here. And so we did.
We started with the question, “What is the best light for camera?”
We have spent at least a decade now thinking about the best light for live events, for theater.
When we first started working with the Selador line. It's been a decade that we've been looking at it.
But we've been focused on the live scenario, what happens with your actual eyeballs, and it was time to broaden the question to the camera.
The first question there is how to define best.
What are we really trying to make better? What is flawed?
And how do we investigate this without knowing all of the special sauce the camera companies won't tell anybody?
Right? They're not gonna give away their secrets. We don't give away our secrets.
So what can we start to look at?
[Music]
Color is a figment of your imagination. Okay?
There is no physical measurement that measures color that I can, I can measure with an instrument.
What people have developed over time is a mathematical model that kind of simulates what you think you are seeing when you see colors.
So what we're trying to do is we're trying to take that mathematical model and make it closer to what you're actually seeing. OK?
It's not a perfect model, but if it's not math or something that it can measure with an instrument, then how do I make color look better to you?
Because it's not something that I can measure. It's strictly a subjective thing.
We set about the task of setting up an experiment to determine best and we set up the room with a bunch of different colored objects.
We got some fruit, we got some wood, a bunch of natural objects, and we had some consumer products that would have very familiar brand colors,
so that people who came to participate in the experiment would identify, "I know what this red or blue or yellow is supposed to look like to me."
And so we set up a scene and we got some models to participate, so we had a variety of skin tones, and we set up some lights.
We started playing and we got some cameras with some monitors and we set them all different ways,
so that we were mimicking what would happen in a broadcast condition, or in a more low resolution condition, in a smaller gamut, versus a wider gamut.
We looked at Rec. 709 and Rec. 2020. We looked at different color temperatures. We looked at processing the data different ways.
If you're looking at raw footage versus something that's been processed within the camera, for example, and we started to try to analyze what was happening.
We used the footage and set up a viewing booth.
We needed the viewing booth to feel more like a real world environment so they could be comfortable and look at the footage in a way that they would look at footage.
Then we got participants and these participants were from a wide variety of backgrounds and a wide variety of experience levels.
So we had some people who are just starting out in theater who came and looked.
We had some people who are in film. We had a couple of colorists, even.
And we set it up in three places. We set it up here in Wisconsin, and we also set it up in New York and Los Angeles.
Did one or the other look more natural? Did they prefer one or the other? And we had a list of questions that were very structured.
When we were done, we took all that data, and compiled it and analyzed it,
and tried to tease out what we could about how the light source might have impacted these results.
[Music]
Well we had done some experimenting with...various color combinations.
Part of that was doing some testing with you know, a real subject looking at the light - actually looking at the camera - with various lights,
and we found that different clientele had different opinions.
You know, people who were colorists had their opinion, and people who were directors had their opinion of what they did.
We found that there was a difference in how we asked the question.
If you asked a question: “which one looks correct?” you got one answer.
And if you asked a question: “which is looks better?” you got a different answer.
And those answers depended on who you talk to.
The colorist didn't care what the color was correct or not.
They just wanted the color that had the most content to it and they would fix it later.
Where the lighting director was doing a live show for example, wanted it to look perfect the first time on the camera,
and in particular they didn't care what looked like in real life, they cared about the camera.
And our goal over the whole project was to make it look good both in live and on the camera at the same time. Hopefully.
How could we manipulate the spectral content of the light source to help those users, and to get a better result.
[Music]
There is so much that can happen in post-production.
Maybe it doesn't have to?
If you could just have a more beautiful picture right from the beginning. That seems pretty great.
But how do you then create a light source that will serve everyone, that you can count on.
To give an idea of how complicated the interaction is between light, the camera,
and the display that you're actually observing the camera on,
an example is the 2016 election.
Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton appeared on stage wearing according to one camera, identically colored jackets,
and according to another camera they were different colors of jackets
and what the actual real color of the jackets were, I have no idea because I wasn't there.
But that kind of gives you an idea of the complexity of the interactions between camera display and your eye.
So Fred, and Wendy and a video camera got together one day,
and they noticed that if you illuminate a subject with deep red versus not having the deep red,
the appearance on the video display was so dramatic,
that Fred said, “We have to have this in our next fixtures, even if it costs us brightness.”
“We must have this deep red because we want to stake our claim to being the color quality leader in lighting.”
[Music]
With the industry moved to LED technology, one of the things that has been sacrificed up until now has been these long wavelength reds.
We haven't had them available in a usable way.
The red that we have today looks red because all color is relative.
And it was next to things that were more orange shorter wavelengths.
But we've still actually been missing all of these beautiful long wavelengths that we had with tungsten. Right?
We still have them with the sun but we're missing them in our LED light sources - until now.
And now we have this deep red.
So the red we've been using and that the industry uses, the sort of standard red is around 635 nanometers.
This new red is around 660 nanometers and twenty-five doesn't maybe seem like very many.
Nanometers are very teeny tiny; but it's huge.
And what it does on skin is huge.
Skin is translucent and you know, underneath are all of the functions of your body.
There's blood coursing through your veins and that is going to reflect these wavelengths differently.
And what this deep red does to your skin is beautiful.
You probably haven't noticed that it's been missing but some of it's going to come back with this deep red.
Even gel matches, some colors; there's you know, saturated greens that have red content in them.
So when we looked at the footage that we recorded for the subjective experiment,
we used the deep red in this experimentation.
And a part of the investigation was, is this deeper red meaningful,
and in fact it did make a make a big difference.
I say big - it was actually very subtle.
It was very subtle but very important because it was all about what it did to the skin tones.
When you see the two differences on the wall or something like that,
it's remarkable how orange the red looks when you see the deep red.
Same with the other end, when you get down to the indigos and the and the blues,
you realize how, you know, the indigo was really indigo, it's not blue you know
Gary Bewick: Well it makes your threshold for what is red much redder, if you wish.
As Flash points out, once you have a deep red and you look at the regular red that is typical in in fixtures; it's orange.
I mean it looks orange.
Bill Florac: It’s like Halloween.
Gary Bewick: Yeah, it looks orange compared to the deep red.
So you're - essentially by having more colors - you are, you're scrutinizing much more deeply what you actually have.
I'm not sure that anybody cares that much about color quality the way that we care about color quality.
What they're interested in is how many lumens can I get.
I think that might be the limit of how much they care.
[Music]
We don't only light white rooms.
If you are only lighting a fully neutral space, just pick your color point and head home - you're done.
But that's not what we do.
We light colorful environments. We light environments that have people in them,
that have animals in them, that have objects in them.
There's scenery, there's costumes, right? There are things that have life in them,
and the spectral content becomes very important in how you want these objects to look.
The deep red - what it does is widen the spectral content that we have available.
We have a little bit more, we're a little bit closer.
We don’t have all the long wavelengths yet, but we have more of them and it's awesome.
So why now? Why are we finally able to put deep red into the fixture?
LEDs have finally gotten bright enough,
that we as an industry can pay less attention to getting brighter, brighter, brighter.
"We need more, we need more!"
It's bright enough. We have enough. We can focus more on the quality,
and what are the nuances that we've given up for a while that we can bring back.
And deep red is finally at a place technologically that it's usable.
It is bright enough to offer a meaningful contribution in the light source.
It actually does make a difference that we can see,
whether recorded or a live image we can notice it now.
And we have the room in the array to trade out some emitters for the sake of filling out the spectral content.
So what really excited me about when ETC introduced lime in to the marketplace,
was that it has a depth and a richness to it.
It sort of pours over your skin, and your skin just drinks it in, and it has a richness to it.
And I think that that is at least in part because it has this long tail.
So it's a phosphor-converted chip and so it has a broad slopier spectrum than some other LEDs,
and that tail goes out into those long wavelengths that are so wonderful…
and the deep red is like a big hit of those long wavelengths.
It isn't all of them but it is a really good, really important chunk of some that we've been missing.
Gary Bewick: We have a little bit of an advantage in that we already have,
a lot of math and a lot of an installed base of fixtures,
that have more than RGB: red, green, blue, or red green, blue, and white LEDs.
We have seven color and the panel light in particular is eight colors.
and so we have a lot of experience in dealing with multicolor LEDs that other manufacturers may not.
[Music]
Gary Bewick: What what ARG really does is we wander around the company,
we try to identify problems that people are having primarily with lighting but perhaps other things,
and then we go back into our offices and we think, "How can we solve this problem?"
Bill Florac: We can pick solutions that are not necessarily economical just to see if it can be done,
And then prove out that it can be done and at some point maybe in the future,
if it becomes economical then we can implement it.
Gary Bewick: So we're basically the accumulation of blue-sky and not practical solutions to things,
that at some point in the future might be useful.
Bill Florac: My favorite features are yet to come.
A lot of things we're still working on that are in the hopper.
Hopefully, they will further enhance that.
Certainly we took the Best Spectral that we've had in the Eos for a long time,
and kind of moved that technology into the fixture moving it downstream a little more,
so you can get good color rendering right out of the fixture.
Which, in the past you could do from Eos,
but you had to A) know how to do it and B) it was tied to the console.
Now you got it built into the fixture and hopefully it'll be the default mode people use all the time.
[Music]
Gary Bewick: Between ourselves, we know just enough to be dangerous.
Bill Florac: I think so. No argument there.
Gary Bewick: Nobody knows what we're doing. We have no time constraint.
So yeah it is a pretty good, pretty good gig.
[Music]
Wendy Luedtke: I think it's a reasonable characterization to say that his dream for this [ARG] group,
was to make sure that ETC is forever improving the quality of light.
[ETC Logo SFX]
Red, red, red, red, red...
Give me all the red. Please. Now.
Red is so great :)