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The Exciting Color Temperature of Remote Phosphor Lighting & Trucolor HS
When I ask our DPs what new equipment they bought, typically they boast about new cameras and rarely do they brag about new production lighting. In football terms, production lights are like the offensive line of production equipment, wherein a camera is the quarterback. Without the lights the image your camera produces isn’t worth much, just like a quarterback without an offensive line is just a frightened player with the ball.
Production Resource Group (PRG) is one of the industry leaders in stage and production lighting. Their newest line of lights, Trucolor lights, utilizes Remote Phosphor Technology (RPT). The RPT is disk or panel that is coated with phosphors that become excited by LED back lighting. The source of the lighting then becomes the panel of excited phosphors and not the LED lights. This allows for the production of predictable and efficient lighting with accurate coloring index because each panel is coated consistently. With LED lights color rendering and replication can be issues, and LED lights are susceptible to degradation due to heat. Remote phosphor lighting using panel or disk construction can offer a range of consistent light spectrum and is not subject to heat degradation. Compared to tungsten lights remote phosphor technology greatly reduces power output. A typical 125 watts tungsten fixture can be achieved with around 28w of power in a remote phosphor technology.
At the 2012 NAB show, PRG previewed their Trucolor HS softlight. The HS light utilizes phosphor coated soft panels in 56K and 32K. The Trucolor HS has 160 degrees of equal output which makes this light perfect for situations where a large area of light is needed. When shooting a two person interview you can easily light each person with a nice soft wrapped light with a single Trucolor HS. The HS light consists of two panels, and PRG guarantees the lighting characteristic consistency between panels. The Trucolor HS outputs more than 2K of incandescent lights utilizing only 450 watts of power. This wattage can be particularly useful when you have limited power access for location production. The Trucolor HS light is perfect for limited space situation because it is passively cooled so there is no fan noise and heat mostly eliminated in the illuminated area. As PRG releases different color temperatures for their Trucolor lights they are easily upgradeable. All you need to do is purchase the panel because they are easily removable within the fixture itself.
Would you like to boast about the PRG Trucolor HS? Feel free to share your experience, if your Chicago video crew has dealt with this.
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