first Lights – then Action

Chris McKenzie from PLS has been around a long time and I’m sure there would be a lot of people in the industry who would agree with me, that Chris is pretty much “Mr Lighting” in New Zealand. If you have a curly question about lighting or any lighting problem, then Chris is the oracle you consult.



Ed: Would you agree with that Chris?
Chris: Well I’m very flattered, thank you Grant. It’s better than being “Expert – a drip under pressure” – but, yes, I’ve done it for a long time and been in a lot of situations, so I’ve seen solutions to a lot of things. Still, there are always new challenges popping up.
Ed: That’s it, I mean you do get calls from people to come and sort out their problems?
Chris: Absolutely – I looked at a situation the other day with one of our boutique broadcasters who was working in a small front room doing interviews. Hopefully I was able to sort out some of his problems. Further down the track, he’ll be a customer and that’s what we’re about. We’re in business because we’re all working professionals, or have been, and we got where we are because someone took the time to tell us how to do things, or point things out, or pass on knowledge. So I think it’s incumbent on all of us in the business to pass on what we know, and given the levels of some of the training around …



Ed: What …. training? Do you know where there’s training going on?
Chris: I see there’s a lot of training institutions out there, but other than that I couldn’t possibly comment!
Ed: Because that’s it … technology has for a long time been fairly static in the lighting area. It was pretty much incandescent and that was it; neon wasn’t an option. Now, within a few years, we’ve had neon appear and now we’ve got LED so really things are changing. Can you see it going totally LED?
Chris: No. LED will be a phase. There are some developments coming down the track which will supersede LED in the general lighting market. LED will be an interim thing I think. There are some plasma technologies coming which will go into general lighting. That said, LED will be with us for quite a while, but it’s not the panacea that everybody thinks it is at the moment; it’s probably got another 3 or 4 years before it’s generally very usable in the film/video area. Its efficiency is not up there yet.



Ed: You mean it’s very low power consumption but it just doesn’t have the output?
Chris: It doesn’t have the output, and to get absolutely technical, you know you measure the conversion of energy in lumens per Watt, and typically a good tungsten halogen lamp is 25 lumens per Watt; an HMI lamp, metal halide lamp is 95 lumens per Watt; a fluoro is in the 120-140 lumens per Watt – a good LED at the moment is 50. So we’re still not there. The manufacturers are saying 100, 120 “on the bench”, but “on the bench” doesn’t necessarily change into “on the camera” or “on the stand” for 2 or 3 years; and what is really driving LED at the moment is commercial lighting. LEDs are also very monochromatic and we in the film/video industry need broad spectrum lighting.
Ed: Because it’s like sunlight?



Chris: Yes – we’ve got to match the sun or we’ve got to match tungsten and both the RIs and also for the receptors in the cameras, we need broad spectrum. Video cameras are very unforgiving if there’s spectrum missing. We’ve looked at some of the cheaper LED sources out there, and even the good LED sources are still low in their colour rendering, which is the measure of how much of the spectrum you’re actually getting. Typically the colour rendering of an LED source at the moment is in the mid-80s, and for good colour rendering on video you need 95 plus.
Ed: You’re not shooting yourself in the foot here with your Zylight agency are you?



Chris: No, because I will admit to people that it’s not a perfect light source. It’s a very good light source and it’s like fluoro – you trade off a high efficiency light source for a slightly lower colour rendering. The Zylight is in the high 80s, possible 90 …
Ed: And if you know what you’re doing, and you use it properly, you shouldn’t have a problem?
Chris: Yes. I mean with those things … the acid test of all of those units is to put them on a waveform monitor on a Vectorscope and have a look at what the result is. That’s one of the things that I think people are not doing, is the electronic measurement of what their exposure is and what their colour imagery is. There are a lot of good tools around now to give you that electronic measurement in what we used to call “waveform monitors”. You know, just about every piece of software now has got that function built into it, and I think it’s very important that people learn to read it and learn to use it, because at the end of the day you can tweak the hell out of a monitor and tie yourself completely and utterly in knots! I know I’ve done it and I know I’ve seen it done on set, where you tweak a monitor up to make it look good for the client, and then you get it back into a controlled environment and you go “what the hell did we shoot”. Unless you actually look at it in a clinical, electronic fashion, you don’t know what you’ve got.
Ed: Because now some of the cameras, even the smaller cameras, are coming out with software driven waveform capability in the viewfinder?
Chris: Yes, and I think that’s very good, because we’ve been through this whole raft where people have sort of flown blind I suppose, to the point of either just using zebras to get an exposure, which was always very good, provided they were calibrated, up to full-blown waveform monitoring. Now you can get it back in the camera, I think that’s good; and also post production, but also helping you with things like chromakeys. In my experience, people tend to over-light chromakey, either green or blue, and push it way, way too hard, which causes too many problems of wrapping colours around subjects.
Ed: In one line, would you say that you try and balance the exposure of the chromakey with the exposure of the subject?
Chris: I tend to run both blue and green about two stops below face tones. There has been a rule of thumb saying expose your background to face. I would run it lower than that. I just redid TV3’s News and their Weather set-up. I think we’ve got the blue on that about 2½ stops under face and it’s very solid, very saturated, because most keyers are looking for the saturation and the chroma separation; they’re not looking for luminance. Luminance is what tends to push through hair and reflective costumes and wrap around. Keeping the size of the backgrounds down helps, but also keeping the brightness of the background down, while keeping the chroma in it … and, again, waveform monitoring is the key. If you’ve got a Vectorscope, or some sort of chroma monitoring check that you’ve got the chroma right, so that the key is working. Then use a light meter, it’s really easy. Measure the subject, measure the background and if you’ve got your own set-up, do some tests, put it into the keyer, see what works, see what doesn’t work and then stick with those values. You know keying these days is so easy – it’s too easy in a lot of ways.
Ed: On that studio set-up, obviously fluoro lights are a big help these days because of the heat. Have they sorted the spectrum issue with them now?
Chris: Fluoros most definitely, yes. There is a very good range of high colour rendering fluoros out there. Most commercial fluoros are quite good; we are getting a lot of horrific compact fluoros … I’m very disappointed in the talk of energy saving with compact fluoros, because I think that’s all snake oil – you know New Zealand has been sold a bill of goods by a couple of very clever marketing people and unfortunately the government got sucked into that. But that’s another story.
Ed: That’s the previous government though?
Chris: Oh sorry, yes, the previous government. But, yes, there are a lot of fluoro sources out there in terms of energy saving and talent saving. I was quoting to someone yesterday that 90% of the energy that you put into a tungsten light comes out as heat; in a fluoro about 4% of that energy comes out as heat, so the bulk of it comes out as light. So the 2 advantages are 1) not heating up the atmosphere that you’re working in; and 2) also just the direct radiant heat on the talent. If you’re dealing with a CEO sitting in a boardroom in a three-piece dark suit, the last thing you want is to toast him and make him uncomfortable in your 1½ hour video session.
Ed: Or make the sweat drip off his brow as if in a nervous way?
Chris: Absolutely – particularly if you haven’t got the makeup girl there to rub him down!
Ed: So that begs the question, why would anyone use tungsten?
Chris: Most of the reason for using tungsten is cost – cheap fittings, cheap lamps. In the long-term though, the operating cost of fluoro is way down; your capital expenditure is high, but in a long-term operation, the payback on fluoro is around 18 months to 2 years. In a studio situation where you’re burning lamps 4-5 hours a day, your payback is very, very quick. I did an exercise for Shortland Street a number of years ago, where we calculated a payback of 14 months for them – and when you’re building a studio you save on air conditioning; you save on having to insulate so much, move so much air through the space. The first serious fluoro installation I did was at TV3 about 10 years ago. We dropped the lighting load so dramatically in the studio they couldn’t actually bring the air conditioning down far enough, to the point where the crew ended up having to wear down jackets because the studio was like a fridge, until they could actually change the chillers out on the air conditioning, because it had been built for high load.
Ed: Was it still the air conditioning from the butter factory days?
Chris: No, it was air conditioning that had been put in for a TV studio, but it had been properly specified for an old-style TV studio where, if you put 100 kilo Watt of light in, you’re removing 75 kilo Watt of heat. But we dropped the lighting load from 75 kilo Watt to 17 and the air-con was still pumping in 75 kilo Watt of cold. So something’s got to give and it was the air temperature.
Ed: Now you mentioned before that you see the future as plasma – has this plasma been developed out of the fluoro side, or is it a totally new concept?
Chris: It’s a mixture of both. In essence, what kills all lamps is the fact that you need to stick a piece of tungsten somewhere into the lamp to either light it up (in the case of a classic tungsten filament lamp), or in a discharge lamp (like a fluoro or a metal halide lamp) it is the electrodes. So every time you start, you burn off a bit of tungsten; or when you burn a tungsten filament, you burn off tungsten all the time. Eventually you run out of tungsten and it dies. The new plasma-type lamps are electrode-less and they’re generally a sealed chamber with some form of external excitation.
Ed: So you haven’t got wire going through glass and differential heating and all that sort of thing either?
Chris: No, so you’ve got a simple physical construction of the lamp envelope – something that can be built strongly, and then you fire microwaves or high frequency radiation at it, which stimulates the gases inside the tube – and that’s essentially what a fluoro is, but by doing that from the outside. There’s been electrode-less lamps round for probably 10 or 12 years. There was a thing called “sulphur lamp” which was a very strange colour, because it was like the old sulphurous sodium lamps in the streets – it was a monochromatic yellow, not good colour rendering.
Ed: I once did a shoot in a Pak ’N Save store and hated it – especially the result!
Chris: And Pak ‘N Save are still very ugly to go into. I don’t know who lights those stores but they should be awarded “no points!” So those lamps will be coming down the track. LED will certainly grow and there’s going to be a big market, I think, out there for LED, but people don’t need to rush into it quite as quickly … there are higher efficiency incandescent lamps out there and fluoro sources. But then the fluoro is not the be all and end all – you know fluoro is a soft light source; it’s not a hard light source, so if you need to throw it a long way or if you need to focus it and control it, you still either need a compact source like a tungsten light or a discharge source like an HMI or a small metal halide. But those things cost money and these days people are very, very budget conscious and when they’ve spent ten grand on a camera they’re not going to spend eight grand on a lamp – unfortunately! Having said that, we still do have customers out there who will spend $30-40,000 on a lamp, but those that can’t, can always hire them.
Ed: That’s it – there are lamps for all situations and there are lamps for all sorts of budgets and it’s a case of well, what’s your workload, how often are you going to use it, what are you going to use it for, and can your budget cope with the expense; or is the production value there that means that it’s worthwhile?
Chris: Absolutely and that’s the decision that each individual makes.
Ed: But it needs to be an educated decision doesn’t it Chris?
Chris: It does, but it’s difficult in this business because most of the people in this industry are “gear freaks” and I think the reason that I recognise in myself and other colleagues is that we “must have” because we really like it, and if we weren’t doing this, we’d have a hardware shop. But at the end of the day, you have to evaluate a piece of kit and go “am I going to use that” or, if I’ve bought it “am I still using it well enough and efficiently enough, or do I flick it”. It’s one of the good things about the growth of the market here … if you make a mistake and buy a piece of kit that’s not working hard enough, there will generally be someone out there who wants to buy a second-hand piece of kit – and lighting certainly goes on and on, only the shapes change and the boxes change. There’s a not a lot of variation in performance over the years, so stuff tends to retain its value better. So, going back to your original question, you do need to think long and hard in a business sense about whether 1) it makes you more efficient at doing your job, and 2) it makes your client happy or more comfortable; it gets you more work because of those 2 reasons … or whether you want to hire it, because it you’re going to use it once a month, then it’s probably not worth owning, if you’re close to a source of hire equipment, or own it co-operatively with, you know, 1, 2, 3 other people, and share it around, I think we forget about those sorts of things. Hireage is really sort of a non-socialist version of co-operative ownership. But you know, we can still be co-operative and it’s something I tried to encourage in the early days with some of my film colleagues. They didn’t quite see the concept of that and I’m still frustrated whenever I try to put a large package of gear together and I see all these individual pieces of kit around, that I can never collect up and put into one big heap when I need it … it goes back to the “gear freak” comment!
Ed: Oh well, it’s better than spending your money on booze and hookers! Now, I know you have advice for people when they are hiring gear – what should they look for?
Chris: They need to check that the gear has been tested and it has a tag on it to say it’s been tested, because under the law in New Zealand for the last 10 years, every portable appliance has been required to have a tag saying that it has complied with the Electrical Safety Standards and, as a hire company under the law, we have to test everything prior to every hire; and that applies to every portable appliance, which is defined as anything with a flexible lead on it.
Ed: But is that testing just sort of plug it in and make sure it goes?
Chris: No – that’s the first one, but you also have to do an insulation test on it and record the values of that test and do a load test on it. So you’re basically checking the electrical safety and proving the electrical safety of every device, so you don’t electrocute customers.
Ed: That’s a bad look!
Chris: That is a bad look, killing the customers, yes.
Ed: Now, on a totally different topic, you’ve obviously read my article in the November issue, and the interview with the lovely lady from New York trying to sell Rescue Tape to the Europeans, and Chris, what have you got to tell us?
Chris: Well we have a stock of Rescue Tape. Coincidentally to Grant falling in love in Amsterdam, one of my colleagues was in London and fell in love at the same time with a different person. So we identified Rescue Tape as a good looking product, and we now have it available. It’s there to fix everything from your cable to your hydraulic hose, to your fuel line on your boat – we suggest a minimum of six rolls per customer, because you should have one everywhere that you need them!
Ed: That’s it, I still haven’t figured out where I’m putting my sample roll, because it seems to be so versatile; do I have it in my camera kit, or do I have it in my car, or what do I do with it? It’s something, as you say, you need six rolls of.
Chris: I think six rolls minimum. It really depends on how many devices … I don’t know where you’d actually draw the line. I think camera kit’s definitely No 1; car’s No 2; if you own a boat definitely No 3 because you’re going to be out the back of beyond somewhere …
Ed: And one in the bedroom?
Chris: I haven’t seen any recommendations for that – I’m not sure.
Ed: Well we’ll wait for a follow-up article?
Chris: Yes, that’s right. I suppose it depends on … yes, plastic ladies!


For stock of everything “lighting”
(excluding illuminated plastic ladies)
go and see Chris and the team at
Professional Lighting Services ltd
Phone : (09) 302 4100 (Auckland)
Email : <[url]info@kelpls.co.nz[/url]>
Website : <http://www.kelpls.co.nz>

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