BTS: Studio update #2 (Cleaner / Brighter)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72QrA3Dvjhk

Strides made in the categories of lighting and organization; also, we nearly had an entire rack of computers collapse; also, we found mysterious imported print goods in the rafters; also, I give a short treatise on hopefully-defunct business internet; also, Gibbs; things continue apace.

One thing I forgot to mention: Comcast Business (only damn thing I could get, ugh) lights up tomorrow. Expect a stream from the studio on Sunday, if things go well.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that I gave up on the idea of the ordinary overhead lighting in the studio being adequate for fill light and just ordered another goddamn Godox SL60W because I need this problem to go away.

I'm not sure now if I actually complained about this, but: In my basement studio at home, I have adjustable-temp overhead canless LEDs that have been doing *just fine* so far for fill, and I figured I'd just do the same thing at the new studio, but the first light I bought was a 9000 lumen monster that made me look like I was being abducted.

I planned on going back to home depot and picking up the high-bay variant with a diffuser, but that one was 18,000 lumens and wanted a 0-10V dimmer. Have you heard about these? I mean, it's, uh, "goodbad."

The way we've dimmed lights for 150 years was by decreasing the voltage fed to them, but LEDs really don't play well with that - even when they're "designed" to be dimmed that way, they really hate it, tend to die quickly, and have a really hard time interpreting where the dimmer is set based on the line voltage, so they can be hard to carefully adjust, among other things.

Apparently when I wasn't looking the industry switched to a completely new, bad thing called 0-10V - yes, it's always called "0-10V", verbatim, not like "10V dimmer" or "ten volt system" or anything, it's called the least convenient thing. And fixtures that support this have additional wires, to which you apply a zero to ten volt DC signal to choose your desired brightness.

This is cool except that, admittedly without having utterly deep-dived it, I can tell they screwed it up and made it a total mess.

The dimmer circuit *could* have been a simple 10V signal produced by the fixture which you could then attenuate with something as simple as a potentiometer, but it seems like what you're actually supposed to do is to use a dimmer that generates it's own 10V, meaning, it has to have a 110V supply to generate the DC from. So, if you're thinking "cool! finally! we can just wire the light into 110, then run only a low-voltage feed to the switchbox", uh, well, no, you still have to run the 110 "through" the dimmer, it just gets joined by a wire pair with 10V on it now. So that's... kind of just worse?

It also looks like you sometimes have to wire a relay in with the dimmer if you want to shut the fixture off completely. I don't know. I lost interest.

There are wireless ones out there it seems, which dulls the pain in concept - ziptie a wireless transceiver to the back of a light fixture, then splice into the 110 feeding the fixture to run the dimmer power supply, then control it remotely... okay, I guess. Except you can't buy those locally, you have to get them from some supply house online.

Assuming I could have gotten a dimmable fixture and the color temp matched OK, I still would have had to order and wait for a wireless dimmer. So I bought a couple $40 strip lights to just illuminate the room and then bought a Godox on amazon which I'll get tomorrow. Problem solved, ugh.