Outset Island, New Lighting Equipment, and Preview of On the Beach of Dreams & Legendary Theme

Hello!  I hope you are all having a good 2019 so far.  Outset Island is now live on YouTube, and I’ve also prepared some previews of “On the Beach of Dreams” from Chrono Cross and “The Legendary Theme” from Gitaroo Man, which are part of an upcoming double update!  As usual, the links for those are down at the bottom, but first I wanted to show you some cool new lighting equipment that I purchased.

New Lighting Equipment

When I first joined Patreon and scrounged up a little bit of money, one of the first things I upgraded was my lighting equipment.  Since nearly anything would have been an improvement over my Home Depot clamp lights covered with shower caps, I just purchased the cheapest lighting kit I could find on Amazon, which was essentially just a pair of umbrellas and a few fluorescent bulbs.  As cheap as it was, the kit that I purchased was a significant improvement over my previous setup, and it has served me well over the past couple of years.

However, one thing that has always bothered me about my umbrella setup is how much space it takes up.  My studio is very tiny, and having to constantly duck under umbrellas during the filming process was making shooting videos a lot more difficult than it needed to be.  So now that I have the ability to afford new equipment, I decided to look for some sort of alternative to my umbrella setup, and I figured I might as well also research other types of lighting while I was at it.

So after spending several days watching videos about lighting on YouTube, I ended up purchasing a couple LED panels.  Check ‘em out!

This is a pair of YN600Ls, each of which came with a pretty nifty remote, which is capable of dimming the lights as well as powering them on and off.  The remote can be programmed to control both lights simultaneously, or it can control up to three lights individually.  I wasn’t expecting to be so enamored with the remote, but now that I’ve been playing around with it, I can see how it will be extremely useful for adjusting the exposure of the shot while I’m sitting in recording postion.

For diffusion, I purchased a pair of portable softboxes:

These softboxes come with little Velcro strips, which are used to fasten the softbox directly to the LED panel.  Here’s what everything looks like when it’s all assembled in comparison to my previous umbrella setup.

As you can see, this setup is a fair bit smaller than the previous one I was using.  I’m not sure how drastic the size difference looks in this picture, but this new setup makes a HUGE difference in terms of how easily I’m able to move around my room while I’m moving equipment around.  And since this new setup takes up less space, I can actually mess around with the placement and light my scene properly.  My old umbrellas were so large that I just had to place them wherever they fit without any real regard for where the light was going.

I was also curious about how bright the LEDs were in comparison to my old fluorescent bulbs, so I set up my camera so I could do a quick comparison.  I dialed in my usual settings for filming video and messed around with the ISO until I got a good exposure, and then I snapped a couple pictures using both lighting setups.  Here are the results!

This first picture is a comparison of both setups using the same camera settings:

This was such a huge difference in exposure that I thought that I had done something wrong, but after triple checking everything, I realized that the fluorescent bulbs were indeed that much dimmer than the new LED panels.  So I increased the ISO with the fluorescent setup to see how much higher it would need to be in order for the exposure to match what I was getting with the LED panels, and I had to go all the way up to ISO 1000 in order to get a similarly exposed image:

(For reference, a lower ISO is better as it results in less noise from the camera sensor.)

Overall I am extremely pleased with these new lights, and I’m very excited to start shooting some video with them.  I already had all my footage shot for my upcoming “On the Beach of Dreams” video, but I’m so excited about experimenting with these lights that I think I might re-shoot some of my footage to see if I can make it look better.

I ended up liking these LEDs so much that I’m probably going to buy one or two RGB versions at some point so that I can just ditch my entire collection of colored fluorescent bulbs and convert my entire lighting setup to LED panels.  But before I do that I’m gonna buy a $10 pack of colored lighting gels to see what I can accomplish with those, as it may not be necessary to spend a bunch of money on some RGB LEDs.

Preview of On the Beach of Dreams and The Legendary Theme

I’ve got another double update coming up!  Both of these projects were pretty simple, so I decided to just bundle them into one post.

The first preview is “On the Beach of Dreams” from Chrono Cross.  This was actually a collaboration that I started working on about five years ago with a talented violinist named Seda Baykara from YouTube.  We had originally agreed to develop our own separate versions of this track so that we could post our unique versions to each of our channels, but after she posted her version to her channel I kinda lost my motivation to finish mine since I was already satisfied with the way hers turned out.  But for whatever reason, I was recently able to muster up the motivation to dust off my version and finish it off.  I ended up re-recording a lot of the audio, and I might also re-record some of the video now that I have some new lighting equipment to play around with.

Here’s the preview for On the Beach of Dreams (work in progress):

https://soundcloud.com/user-789983357/otbod_premix/s-Zj2MX

The second preview is “The Legendary Theme” from Gitaroo Man.  This is yet another project that I started working on about five years ago and never finished.  I think I shelved it because:

• I felt like the arrangement was too simple to turn into an entertaining video
• The game it’s from is somewhat obscure, so I figured no one would watch it
• The original track is already an acoustic recording, so re-recording it would be pointless

But ultimately it’s an awesome track and it’s a lot of fun to play, so I decided to just record it.  Also, I really needed an excuse to finally be able to use my noseflute in an arrangment.

Here’s the preview for The Legendary Theme (work in progress):

https://soundcloud.com/user-789983357/lt-premix/s-w5nOR

And that’s all for now!  The next project I’ll be working on will most likely be Fear Factory from the Suggestion Box.  I actually wanted to have it ready as a preview for this post, but I was only just now able to find some time to sneak into a university to record the marimba parts, and I’m also still learning how to play the pBone that I bought.  And depending on how voting goes after I post this update, it looks like Forest Interlude might be the next track to enter my workflow.

As always, thank you for giving me the opportunity to improve my videos!  I truly appreciate your support.  Cheers!