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lighting Buying first film lights

sfoster

Staff Member
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How important is the angle of beam spread for a light?
Would softboxes and lanterns take care of all, or do I need to be specific in what i look for in the beam angle of a light?

GVM is having a christmas sale: https://gvmled.myshopify.com/collections/holiday-sale-2022

There this a BOGO deal and I'm considering these 150W daylight LED, two of them for $350.
The beam spread adjusts from "a tight 60 degrees to a wide 120 degrees"

And they have a 300W BI-COLOR LED for $379

Are there any opinions on this GVM brand of lights?

The other birghter lights I was considering were amaran 200D (250W), or a Godox VL300 or the apurture light storm 300x but the light storm is way more expensive.
This christmas sale from GVM seems pretty great, could get five lights (4x150W) for $1,100 and have a lot of options.

There are lantern attachments and softbox grid attachments for these things that you can buy, it seems pretty versatile.

That concludes my questions.

Since 2013 i've never owned a film light - only ever lit stuff using light bulbs and the sun. yikes.
It seems like first impressions are everything. and the look of your film is all people care about in a first impression.
 
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A C-stand w/ Hollywood arm, and a Quacker (or duckbill) clamp.





You can always punch it through a 4x4 (or 40”x40”) silk.


Or, use a bounce board or Ultrabounce opposite the key, eliminating the need for direct light source there.

Quaker clamp! Thanks, never heard of that before.

College Football GIF by ESPN



Shooting through a diffusion frame is nice but the light spills everywhere, grids on softbox are more my style
There are times though, I think I would just use the umbrella mount and a white umbrella.

That sounds so quick and easy, like an interview or something just push out the umbrella and bam youre setup.
 
Shooting through a diffusion frame is nice but the light spills everywhere, grids on softbox are more my style
There are times though, I think I would just use the umbrella mount and a white umbrella.

That sounds so quick and easy, like an interview or something just push out the umbrella and bam youre setup.

Using barn doors to cut the light down to the edges of the frame keeps light spill way down. Black wrap if you don’t have barn doors. Though, which Godox are you talking about? Do they not make a softbox for it?

Umbrellas are okay. Not my favorite, and they tend to spill a bit.
 
Using barn doors to cut the light down to the edges of the frame keeps light spill way down. Black wrap if you don’t have barn doors. Though, which Godox are you talking about? Do they not make a softbox for it?

Umbrellas are okay. Not my favorite, and they tend to spill a bit.

Godox has a medium size softbox.
I tried to use the LARGE soft box instead on the godox 150W silent - but it's too heavy.

This is the big 150 softbox, pretty cool for under $300.

It is what it is, I just wish that my dimmer light could have the bigger softbox, since sometimes the brightest light is only used as a sliver of the face.
 
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