Over 100 Industry Experts Gather For Kino Flo Seminar At BSC Expo

Over 100 industry experts have gathered for Kino Flo Lighting Systems' Colour Science seminar at the British Society of Cinematographers (BSC) expo in London.

Attendees included directors of photography and students of cinematography, gaffers and production lighting technicians.

The half-hour event saw Kino Flo president and founder, Frieder Hochheim detail recent advances in LED lighting technology for cinema production, with special focus on gamut control and new camera lookup tables programmed into LED fixtures. He also tied together the art and technology of LED colorimetry for HD image capture.

"The colour science of LED lighting is to cinematographers what natural pigments were to the old world art masters like Rembrandt and Vermeer," according to Hochheim. "With new features like camera look-up tables and advanced gama controls, cinematographers can mix their own LED 'dye, colour and shading' to control the look of the final image."

Understanding Color Gamut
Hochheim guided the audience members on tour through some of our industry's ongoing challenges to the making artificial light sources render colour naturally on HD cinema cameras.

Points of interest along the way included a discussion about the tools for measuring spectral indexes and how they relate to the reproduction of true white light for modern motion picture and television production. This section dove into a comparative report on the Colour Rendering Index (CRI), the Television Lighting Consistency Index (TLCI), IES TM-30-15, and the Spectral Similarity Index (SSI).

Kino Flo's development of a high-end bias spectrometer for measuring the response of lighting sources and camera light sensors has long been the company's basis for a tight design and manufacturing control over the quality of white light, he said. To explain how HD camera technologies "see" white light and the colour gamut, Hochheim walked the audience though critical challenges such as "balancing" on the high wire that is the Plankian Locus, and a section covering Response Curves—phototopic curves and HD camera spectral distributions.

Camera Lookup Tables for LEDs
Like other innovations over the years, Kino Flo's new LUT's and gamut control features represent another step in pioneering a new generation of broad spectrum LED softlights and pushing the colour space to new artistic levels, according to John Daly, BSC, who attended the seminar.

"It was a great presentation by Frieder…on colour science, and how the Kino Flo range of LED fixtures can be fine-tuned with camera LUT's," Daly said. "The colour can be dialled in to match the sensors of all major digital cinema cameras, thus ensuring natural looking skin tones."

The Kino Flo True Match® firmware 4.0 comes loaded with camera look-up tables for the following four cinema cameras:

• Arri Alexa
• Panavision DXL
• Sony Venice
• Panasonic Varicam

More camera manufacturer's will be added to the LUT's in upcoming firmware releases, Hochheim said.

Colour Science History
Since developing a colour science department for its True Match® tubes in the 1980's, Kino Flo has been at the forefront of LED design and manufacturing, creating a colour correct, colour stable line of tungsten and daylight LED emitters, according Hochheim. The company has maintained colour quality for more than three decades of fluorescent and LED design, across all product models.

From film to digital cinema cameras, to other colour critical industries such as smart phone calibration and art restoration studios, Kino Flo is recognised for unrivalled colour management.

Gaffers and set lighting technicians enjoy a growing collection of premium softlight "brushes", like the new FreeStyle LED Tubes, to paint spaces and faces with white light, colour and effects.

Kino Flo has been expanding its wireless DMX production lighting, moving beyond its legacy fixtures with new FreeStyle LED portable systems, adding new designs for the Celeb LED's, debuting a value line of Image LED studio fixtures, and expanding options for video lighting with new Diva-Lite LED's.

Kino Flo has been invited to present the colour science seminars at a number of industry events through June. Next up is a series planned for Australia starting 20 March and running through 23 March in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.