Rambly August Supporter Updates
Added 2020-08-31 20:57:14 +0000 UTCI kind of just wanted to do one of these because it had been a while and needed to reassemble a keyboard. So I put two and two together and this is the result!
I had the lights a bit too close to me when I was filming this and it was the first "video" I've edited after a few changes that I mention in the video. Now that I'm looking at it again I think I over corrected myself in color grading and made everything else too dark. Well, practice makes perfect.
Oh also in this I kind of rant a bit about Bi-color LED panels and how its annoying that's all there is. Well, after looking around more at what's available it's looking like when I do eventually make and upgrade it will probably be those. The fixed daylight/5600k LED panels cost almost 2X what bi-color ones do. So $/LED wise, even if you only ever use the 5600k lights on a bi-color panel it's not saving any money to buy a fixed color light.
Comments
I can confirm you’re not the only person who wants a single colour LED panel, I also take all my photos and video at a single temperature (either 5000K or 6500K) and many other (non-aesthetic) channels solely use ~5600K. That and this bi-colour LED trend has pissed me off for a while especially with large companies that should know better making stupid and false claims about them. However, the dual colour temperature LED panels are perfectly fine for people just making artistic vlogs and if you use them at either one or the other temperature it’s perfectly fine as well. But the way they’re designed really misleads people into thinking the in-between colour temperatures are an accurate representation of that colour temperature’s real spectrum (the ones that have a “colour temperature” readout really annoy me), reality is you will always get a bad CRI no matter what when mixing colour temperatures (note it won’t necessarily look bad, just not truly accurate). Also, I will say that the gel based tinted panels aren’t any better if not give a worse CRI than most modern high CRI LEDs, I see them as just left over from the age before LEDs but they do prevent you from doing the sin of mixing colour temperature. I also recommend you check your panels once you buy them, many panels are advertised as 5500K but can actually be 5000K or 5700K, some manufactures seem to think it’s close enough and likely buy whatever’s cheapest that day. That and most cheap bi-colour LED panels that advertise a CRI of 95 or 98 are just lying as the panel would be much more expensive and less efficient if this were true. I ended up designing my own LED lights (https://github.com/WizardTim/AR0004-R1) and got to choose the exact ANSI colour bin of high CRI LEDs I wanted, although I question if this was a good idea especially considering I screwed up the thermal design and will likely have to remake them in future, the form factor and diffusor are also something to be desired. That and the fact it was a worthless endeavour for my videos as the only option my smartphone lets me change for video is the white balance ‘preset’ so it still bounces all over the place, however at least my photos are now much better as I can change all the settings for still on my smartphone and shot 10-bit RAW so it was worth it for me in my books. You might also want to invest in a colour calibration target although they are rather expensive (the cheap ones that are just CMYK printed don’t really work), they take the guess work out of most of the colour grading process vs using someone else’s LUT if you’re looking for an accurate representation of the scene rather than grading to an artistic look. If you end up doing a video about your filming setup I would also be interested in a quick mention about how you position your camera for shots, especially over things on tables, many creators either don’t need to do that sort of shot or tend to focus on other things (I use a selfie-stick in a vice, works better than anything else I’ve tried but it’s still a pain). “It draws 500 W!” *laughs in 240 V*
WizardTim
2020-09-01 03:38:24 +0000 UTCSomething about red with this camera is a little "extra", I've worked on toning it down a few times but it's an ongoing thing. The gear stuff has been a big thing for me for the last few months. I've been really trying to rethink how I work on stuff and trying to make it easier. I didn't fully explain the software situation on linux. The drivers for capturing video as v4l devices work fine for both cards. But the configuration software for the cards doesn't work on newer linux distros. So I can capture video, but I can't adjust the settings. The configuration options are similar to VGA on an LCD monitor, so missing those is a big problem. The both cards have a universal driver for linux I believe, so going for the newer card wont really help. I'll keep you in mind, I'm really bad about selling things, so I'm not going to commit to that, but I remember that you are interested.
Tech Tangents
2020-09-01 01:16:26 +0000 UTCThe color is looking better, especially since you filmed the Mail Call video where I sent you the Red Hat Linux 5 big box. The red coloring back then leaned a bit toward "hot orange". It may be my eyes, but as I was watching this video, I kept staring up at the Lego games on the shelf and the red seems to be a little hot, but nothing to really worry about. It's really cool that you let us know what's going on with the equipment behind the scenes. I did look up the Epiphan cards and if you ever get the funds to do it (as you probably know, it is as expensive as all get out), why not check out the "DVI2PCIe Duo". It has drivers from last December for Linux. Also, whenever you get done with the SK-88 project , hit me up if you do want to part with one of them, would you?
Jeramy Breckles
2020-09-01 00:45:52 +0000 UTC
