Hi, John Hess from Filmmaker IQ - in this little IQ BiTs video I wanted to talk about
using these relatively inexpensive DJ lights to light a set.
This year I decided to redo the lighting on our set from these old bulky PAR Lights, these
incandescent to these smaller, more efficient LED lighting.
There were a number of reasons why - first I was I encountering a power issue.
I had about 5 Parlights each running these 500 watts bulbs - with all of them running
at full blast that’s just over 20 amps - enough to blow the fuse.
Now with my set being quite small, I rarely ran them at full power, closer to 10-25% of
full power which meant they ran very warm color balance wise - somewhere in the 2500-2700K
range.
And they were warm not just in the color temperature sense either and since my studio isn’t temperature
controlled, with the oncoming Southern California summer - I wasn’t looking forward to shooting
under these lights.
Now I had stayed away from LED because I had always thought they were more expensive per
fixture.
But I began seeing more LED pars on the market on Amazon and decided to pick up a few just
to experiment with . I was also afraid that the dimming mechanism might use cheap PWM
dimming and create weird camera effects but it apparently they don't and it looks just
fine on camera.
After some quick initial tests I was pretty happy with the fixtures and ended up redoing
the entire set.
So let me break down the set up and hopefully give you some ideas on how to use these lights
in your own small studio for vlogging or live streaming.
Primarily we use two kinds of DJ lighting - the first I got were these smaller DJ lights
- they're called Lixada, it’s a brand I’ve never heard of before, I’ll put a link in
the description.
If you pick up 10 of them, you can get them as cheap as $18 a unit.
They’re only 15 watts, have a 25 degree coverage - which is really quite small and
they are really best used as accent lighting from relatively close up.
If you’re in a very confined and small space, they could definitely be used for key lighting.
On our stage, I use them for accent the columns behind me and as hair lighting.
For key lighting, I needed something with a little bit more punch.
So I went with these Coidak, again a name I’ve never heard of, 60 watt fixtures.
These are also 25 degree angle but because they have much more power, these will throw
much farther than the 15 watt light.
But 25 degrees is still relatively narrow - if you want to wash the set with light you
may be better off using a fluorescent box - here I set up a couple Limostudio fluorescent
I had lying around the studio that I didn’t particularly care for for using on location.
They work better here as a general wash light if I wanted to give the studio a lower contrast
day look like we're in right now.
Let’s talk about how all these are wired up because that’s probably the biggest leap
when going from traditional incandescent lighting grid to a LED DJ LED lighting set up.
With the traditional incandescent lighting setup, we have these dimmer packs that are
controlled by a dimmer board.
Each channel on the dimmer board can be assigned to a pair of outlets on this dimmer pack:
so DMX channel one on the dimmer board would be this set of outlets her, channel two could
be set to this set of outlets, three and four.
This way each channel controls how much voltage flows from the outlet thereby controlling
how bright the light are that are connected to that outlet.
We can daisy chain these dimmer packs and then assign a starting DMX number, say this
second dimmer pack we assign to channel 5 so the first pair of outlets is addressed
to channel 5 and the second is addressed to channel 6 and so on.
Well the DMX setup with these LED DJ lights is a bit different.
Instead of one DMX channel controlling a light, each light is controlled by 8 channels - we’ll
go over what the different channels are in a second.
Instead of one of these sliders controlling the brightness of the light - these eight
control different aspects of a single light.
So to address different lights we need to be able to switch between different groupings
of channels.
And on this mixboard those groupings are selected using fixtures buttons on the left.
Each fixture is a set of 16 DMX channels - so fixture one is channels 1-16, channels 1 through
16, fixture two is 17-32 and so on.
This mixboard communicates with the lights using a wireless DMX transmitter and a wireless
DMX receiver.
Then the DMX signal is daisy-chained across all the lights.
Now to assign the lights to a specific fixture number we set the light’s DMX to the starting
DMX channel number of the fixture number.
Say I want this light to be operated when I press fixture 12 on my mixboard - so I need
to assign this light to DMX 177 because that’s the grouping that fixture twelve covers: 177-192.
We can assign more than one light to a fixture setting - in fact that’s usually a good
idea to group lights together depending on their function.
Actually if we really wanted to, since each light only uses 8 channels and each fixture
has 16 available channels, we could double up the number of lights we could independently
control by simply adding 8 to the DMX channel we assign to the light and use the Page A/Page
B function of the mixboard… but frankly 12 lights, 12 fixtures is enough for me.
Anyhow let’s get back what the channels actually do.
The first channel will control the mode - there are preset modes from static colo...
there's jump color, there's fade, there's a sound activated version and then there's
strobe.
But for our lighting a set, I will put it at zero which is the DIY color setting.
Channel 2 controls preset colors - again since I want full control we want this at zero.
There's an idea of the all the preset colors that it comes with right there.
Channel 3 sets the speed of the strobe and that's not important to me because I'm never
going to use strobe or the fade.
Channel 4 is the master dimmer and Channels 5, 6, 7 and 8 control the red, green, blue
and white . With all four channels, let me get this shining into my face... with all
four channels going, I think the color looks a little too bluish for 5600K - so I bring
down the blue a little bit, and sometimes I just have to kind of tweak the green just
a tad bit to get what I think looks like a neutral 5600K looking white.
And of course should I ever feel like it I can always go crazy and create all kinds of
crazy colors for my shot.
Now one thing I had to realize was this DIY coloring only works when Channel 1 and 2 were
set to zero - otherwise the preset colors kick in and you can’t control the colors
individually.
And there you have it, that's a basic rundown on how these DJ LED lights work in a studio
production setting.
I'm still learning, I'm still experimenting and seeing what works for me and what doesn't.
And you know what, It is pretty warm in here but at least I’m not dying of heatstroke
under these lights and I shouldn’t be blowing any fuses.
I hope you got something useful out of this little behind the scenes.
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Well until next time, I’m John Hess and I’ll see you at FilmmakerIQ.com