If you want professional looking video, you need to use professional lighting. And for decades, professional lighting meant light kits with halogen bulbs.
Halgoen has it’s benefits…the color of the light is consistent, it’s produces great light and the light housing is generally small. But as anyone who has worked with halogen lights knows, they also run VERY HOT, the bulbs don’t last long and they suck a lot of power.
Thankfully, over the past few years some new (and better) alternatives to halogen lighting have come about. The first was fluorescent lighting. When most people think of fluorescent lights, images of horrible, flickering office lights come to mind.
But this isn’t the case with fluorescent lights made for video. Their color temperature has been tweaked to suit video and multiple lights are banked into single housings…providing plenty of light. In fact, most television studios now use fluorescent lights for their newscasts. Why? Because they run cool, use little power, provide great light and the bulbs last for thousands of hours (compared to hundreds of hours with halogen bulbs). Added bonus…fluorescent lights are said to take years off of your face.
But the newest entry into the video lighting world is LED lights. Yes, those tiny little lights that used to be part of those Radio Shack “science kits” are now used for video lighting. And they may be the best choice of all. Anywhere between 500 to 1,000 of these lights are packed into a single housing and provide brilliant, color-temperature correct lighting for video.
But the real magic comes with the power they consume…which is almost none (by the way, they give off zero heat as well). That means LED lights can run off of batteries, making them completely portable. Need to shoot a video outside or in a remote location without power? No problem. Just charge a battery pack and take your LED lights with you.
The drawback to LED lights (and sometimes with fluorescents) is the cost. Generally, they are more expensive than their halogen counterparts. But with the extra cost, you gain thousands of hours in bulb life and can eliminate the energy-draining heat from your video shoots.
Where you can find fluorescent or LED lights suitable for video? Here are a few resources I recommend: