Gadgetory

hey guys how's it goin welcome to Paul's hardware today this video is a production video so I'm gonna be talking about my production techniques here specifically lighting I got my first lights to make youtube videos like 6 years ago now I actually back when I was still living in my apartment and I really haven't upgraded much from that I'm gonna show you real quickly what I'm using now and then we're gonna take a field trip down to Kyle's office because he has improved his lighting and that's not due to any magnificent knowledge that Kyle has it's because of Chris and Chris is Kyle's camera guy that some editing also does some lighting work so I'm gonna see if I can get some feedback some suggestions from him and how I can improve the lighting here in my garage so I've started this video with most of my lights off and please forgive the mess of rising to stuff that's still over there but right now I've got on is these orb these big orb lights that are up above and these are just using some China balls and just a single fluorescent light inside them they are I believe 5,000 K rated lights so it's kind of daylight I do try to go with daylight lighting in here as much as possible the biggest upgrade to my lighting that I've done recently if I can find where to turn it on is the addition of these background RGB LEDs I usually keep these blue just because it matches with the gray walls pretty well and this added background lighting so that gave me a little bit of depth you don't necessarily just want to have a single source of lights and this will also provide some bit of lighting in the back gun and when I added this I was like wow that really makes things look a lot nicer of course I'll usually have arctic Panther on in the background there too and that adds a bit more of lighting in the back but my main sources of light just switched on via those switches there are these big soft boxes so I've got two sets of these this is actually from the smaller set that I originally got back at the apartments these are by cowboy studio they've got five individual bulbs inside each one and because they're cheap and they're made to be collapsible and somewhat portable they're like starting to fall apart as far as the softbox is there in the corners but if you look inside you can see these are fluorescent see CFL bulbs I usually only keep maybe two or three of them on at a time and I try to rotate and switch between it so they don't burn out and on the plus side those bulbs there's still the original bulbs so those have lasted a long time but these are just there light and flimsy the stands down here don't always stay up and they tend to start to collapse and that kind of things so adding some C stands here that are actually real professional C stands I think would be cool I should still be able to use my ceiling mounted pole right here that I did in my my simple machines hardware blog that I did the pulley setup on this floor that's I should have been pretty convenient because I can raise it and lower it if I want to but other than a third softbox that I have over here that I switch on when I'm shooting stuff here on the main work table that's pretty much all the lights I have but ultimately my goal when setting this all up was just for there to be light enough lights for it to be daylight's and for it to be not too challenging to move around but I'd like to move on to something that's maybe a little bit prettier maybe gives me a little bit more flexibility maybe lets me add a little bit more color and as you can maybe see the lighting on my face right now I'm just sitting in my desk it's very uniform across the whole thing so making that a little bit more dynamic with like a key and a fill I think would be great there's your train coming right now but that doesn't matter I'm gonna go to Kyle's all right guys I've made my way to Kyle's office I've come here every couple weeks to do awesome Hardware of course and in here it's where the magic happens as you can see okay oh it's look it's Kyle and Heather they're working all right doing work okay yeah I came just for stack attack that's the only thing we're gonna do stack attack today I check out that on Kyle's channel and that's obviously the only reason I'm here yeah I know you guys stay here I'm gonna go talk to Chris and see what he's up to okay they're nice they're totally fooled taking advantage of them oh look Joe's here that's very convenient hey Joe can you be the camera person sure all right just cameraman now so here is where awesome Hardware happens we usually sit right over here and this is Chris hey Chris how's it going Chris does editing lighting what else do you do for Kyle camera can work everything else all the hard stuff like Heather does all of Kyle's arrangements for sponsorships and everything and like Chris does all the I don't know what Kyle doesn't care like this okay takes care of like the creative stuff you know all those creative ideas he can be pretty creative alright so Chris let me here's my issue here's my problem and Joe can probably relate to this I tend to get things set up so that they're functional so that they work and then I just leave them as it is because I'm like that works I don't want to touch of course and that's what I've been doing with my lighting for the past like five years so I have an understanding basic understanding of the simple three point lighting scheme that you typically learn about in film school that kind of thing you got your key where the bright light comes in you got to fill usually there's some balance between those that's my problem right now I have no balance adds a bit of a dynamic contrast to the face and that kind of thing and then there's a hair light which goes up and over the shoulder from behind so I would like some advice on perhaps some upgraded lighting itself okay maybe switching from florescent LEDs and then also just tips on positioning and how to make things pop I want this to pop alright let's get started we're sure these are lights these are indeed lights so I guess where I would start off is you know choosing the type of lights that you want okay right now we're using all pretty much all exclusively LEDs okay primarily because you know low wattage pool meaning you don't have to you can run a lot of lights you won't blow any circuits in your house or as if you like we're running tungsten lights they would not only get really hot they would pull a lot of power and you tend to blow your circuit breaker there's one thing that I liked about switching from tungsten to fluorescents was less power drop LEDs are even less than that yes and also of fluorescents in my experience they tend to have like a little bit of a green tint serene yes so you can fix that in post but it's not ideal right also with the fluorescents you have to be careful with if you're shooting any high frame rate or high speed shooting they sometimes tend to flicker sometimes with a with tungsten that's what they're known for is high frame rate capabilities okay but yeah right now we're using all LEDs what's really keying crucial is that they're bicolor okay so you can change them from a warm tungsten source to a cooler daylight kind of temperature color temperature okay right now they're kind of in the middle just because we have also some fluorescents in here too you know kind of try and match that when they're on but and and my my mo and my garage is everything's just daylight yeah that's pretty much what I do so that's adding a little a little more warmth I think would be nice there yeah yeah so these are gonna just him right you can they are a job well not only in in the dimming but you can also adjust the color temperature so kind of warm to a cooler daylight you know like you said nice so very very flexible and that idea this one in particular is a spotlight from hive lighting we got this primarily because these are by color but this is also RGB so just clarify for you guys we're not caring about the lighting in this video we're doing this video to make sure that the lighting in future videos is better alright so this one this is expensive right this is a this is like $1,000 it's for about a thousand they just came out with another one I believe it's like 2500 but it's a little bit stronger they also have another one that's cheaper I think half price I like that so but they are all RGB and they are all kind of fully customizable if you will you can change you can change your obviously dimming capabilities your color temperature whatever you know RGB value you want and however saturated you want it's very very flexible in that manner and it's LED so it's not gonna get hot at all and this one's like directional right so you're you're using this to throw some light on the background up against the wall so what I'm doing is kind of like a little I guess tip for you guys that you guys can use is what we're doing called a color contrast in this case we're kind of keen we're gonna be keying you and Kyle with just a normal kind of light frontal light and then we're gonna be coloring the background with a different light to kind of make you pop or stand out as you will okay from the background and that's a very common thing to do in lighting this kind of a color contrast you know cool and it definitely makes the background stand out a bit more and like you said contrast yeah my subject to add some life to the white walls you know and depth that's yeah I did I did learn a few things in film school you want depth and shot usually want something in the foreground mid-ground background that's that's how Scorsese does it from my understand he's a man so these are acting as hair lights this is your Phil over here key that's our Yuki yeah and then I wouldn't do it Phil I actually found it on the ceiling okay this isn't more like a room tone of light okay yeah so the fill the fill is really almost like incidental great yeah I mean the fill is basically all the light that's kind of bouncing around throughout the walls you know especially since they're white right now you're gonna get a lot of kind of fill coming from this wall from that wall from the ceiling okay and you know I like to attend early Phil from the from the top down just because it gives this kind of ambient what I call like room tone okay so if you were to do like I like I say a green color whatever bouncing it's gonna the whole rooms gonna feel like you're in a green like cavern or something where as opposed if you use like a fill light from the side it looks very directional very sorce so that's a very nice way to kind of hide your fill okay is by bouncing off of like a white roof or something even if you have like a white bounce card that you can just kind of hang there that that works too I moved back over here because the key the key light I think is something that has been improved greatly so we've got an LED behind a diffuser originally you guys had to set up with just like a sheet or a piece of plastic or something just bare bulb or like a little thing of silk okay but yeah this has been updated with actual Pig this is this gel gel that's the word I was looking for this and this sort of spreads the light out makes it soft good yeah because obviously we're not doing like film or anything like that right and it's also great for filming because it helps diffuse like reflections so you didn't don't get a nasty reflects a quite bolder so helps to bloom out the highlights specular highlights okay so if I wanted to set up something like this and let's say I wanted to have it suspended from the ceiling like what what what do you think I should do for that well what we recently have been doing I kind of recommend it to Kyle is to kind of upgrade the diffusion kind of idea and we went along with this 25 foot by I gosh I don't even know how long this is like maybe four feet there's same material price um extra heat right yeah maybe yeah uh I'll probably wouldn't miss this if I you know I just rolled off a sheet I mean I didn't see anything all right you guys didn't hear anything but we've essentially put this on a c-stand and we kind of roll it down to essentially give us the same effect with that what that light is doing right now it's kind of diffusing or softening the look and effectively what it does is you get a larger surface area which is very important in how soft the light can get is the surface area that the light takes up so the bigger the surface area the more diffused light will be the softer it will will be kind of wrap around corners that kind of thing exactly exactly so as you can see this thing is 25 feet long so I'm not gonna unroll the whole thing but I you it's a huge thing that you know like you said you if you wanted to suspend it from the ceiling you could do so we usually just put the actual arm just straight through okay and it suspends it you know you can do the same thing from the ceiling I would assume you know some string or whatnot and then just let it hang and just shoot your lights too right and it looks gorgeous right now this is a half diffusion so what we do is we double up on it when we need to do like any reflections with like tempered glass and and all that stuff and it's great with like monitor reflections as well because you don't get that really harsh little spot on the on the monitor okay I definitely need to get me some of that then yes so it's convenient that we're setting up we I didn't do any setup it's convenient that Chris and Kyle and Heather have set up four stack attack because here is a pretty unique use case scenario for setting up lighting two different subjects since Kyle and I are gonna be facing off and opposite sides over here so what have you done to set up the lighting here Chris well one quick fix on what you said this is actually for the intraspecific well this is the intro because the lighting is gonna change changing lighting between shots that's also something I should look into definitely so right now what we have is a couple of or actually I should say three LEDs from Dre cast they're very kind of inexpensive options to just get in general like light in there for our set and then obviously we have the hive wasp for that kind of color throw but right now we have what you just said is a I essentially it I prefer them a little bit better to just a normal back light although back lights are nice they just kind of like you said separate from the background and help you kind of get that depth and dimension in your shot we kind of illuminating the other person with an overhead just so that it's not in the shot it's just trying to hide the lighting be a little bit more subtle with it and then right here we have the key which is being diffused by a full diffusion a full white diffusion for the key right here that's gonna happen on the little intro area but other than that I mean it's pretty simple setup I say simple but you know what's key also in this is that we're using the C stands because you know they're able to boom out and kind of get overhead and you know you can put put these lights almost anywhere that you really want to I mean they extend really high they they extend outwards really far and they're able to support a lot of weight since they're you know either aluminum or steel sometimes and just very overall versatile so that's another huge thing to consider okay so I have a shopping list and I'm gonna do a follow-up video where I actually integrate this advice into my own setup so you get some of these Dre casts LEDs and I'm gonna find the specific models of these put the links in the description as well I gotta get one of those wasp hive wasp wasp 100 sea wasp 100 C that's probably gonna be the big spend but that's really cool because it can be used in so many different scenarios yeah I mean what I told Kyle is you know you can use a spotlight for a spotlight purpose but you can't use a you know soft light and spot it so but you can always make a hard light soft you can always make that spotlight soft okay it's more you can mate you can go from hard to soft but it's harder to go from soft to hard that's what we have learned today and then finally of course C stands I got to get some C stands I gotta replace those flimsy LED stands that I've got back at home so guys that's pretty much all for this video I was just coming over here of course theoretically to Snack Attack but wanted to get some advice from Chris I've been jealous of the lighting setup that Kyle's got going on over here and I can I can compare it I have the direct comparison from what stuff looks like in my garage which I thought was looking pretty good for a while let's go it's okay but again it's like it's functional but it could be better so I'm just looking to improve things Chris thank you very much for your help today thank you guys for watching this video hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed it again links to the products are gonna be in the description and I'll be back with more very soon and of course check out stack attack because don't tell Kyle that I actually used Chris for other other purposes what Chris Kyle alright well now I'm probably in for it for stack attack but I don't even know what the punishments are yet kind of kind of worried actually but guys if you enjoyed this video hit the thumbs up button of course links to more videos down in the description as well as products that we discussed today and again thanks for watching we'll see you next time on Paul's hardware