Philips Hue Bulbs for Filmmaking?

[michael zaletel]

Have there been any threads or discussions on RedUser about the Philips Hue? I just received 6 of these bad boys and I'm just beginning to imagine the possibilities on set and in studio...

http://www.meethue.com/en-US

REVIEW

Philips advertises the fact that the bulbs output 600 lumens — the same as a traditional 50 watt bulb – supporting up to 50 bulbs. The bulbs integrate with both iOS and Android devices and offer up to 80 percent less power than a traditional bulb (lasting as long as 15 years or 15,000 burning hours).

-Michael Zaletel

 

[Max M.]

I have them, and they are pretty awesome! comes alot of light out it for a led bulb, they claim of philips is quite true. and would be great as practical bulbs, but the biggest problem will be to setup a wifi network on every location. You need to connect a little box to the router and set it up, setup takes 5-10 minutes and it really straightforward. The only thing is, because it's led, even the warmest whit balance settings feels a bit cold, real tungsten is hard to emulate, it has this warmth these lights can't reproduce

 

[michael zaletel]

I have them, and they are pretty awesome! comes alot of light out it for a led bulb, they claim of philips is quite true. and would be great as practical bulbs, but the biggest problem will be to setup a wifi network on every location. You need to connect a little box to the router and set it up, setup takes 5-10 minutes and it really straightforward. The only thing is, because it's led, even the warmest whit balance settings feels a bit cold, real tungsten is hard to emulate, it has this warmth these lights can't reproduce

I was thinking more in terms of building a custom 8-16 bulb lite panel for these bulbs with the WiFi Router and Philips Hub built-in. Just power it up.

 

[Mike P.]

I don't understand; if LEDs are supposed to be completely lacking in key (but essential) areas of the colour spectrum, how are the philips (and other dynamic-hue LED bulbs) able to create essentially every colour? Would you not end up with the same problem as every other LED when it comes to colour reproduction/CRI/skin-tones? Are the philips not phosphorus LEDs or whatever the standard is?

 

[Dave Blackham]

I don't understand; if LEDs are supposed to be completely lacking in key (but essential) areas of the colour spectrum, how are the philips (and other dynamic-hue LED bulbs) able to create essentially every colour? Would you not end up with the same problem as every other LED when it comes to colour reproduction/CRI/skin-tones? Are the philips not phosphorus LEDs or whatever the standard is?

My guess is the spectrum may have holes or spike in it. I believe CRI is measured at 6 points, you need to look for a continuous spectrum. Id be interested to know more about these LED's though.

 

[Alex Kiritz]

I don't understand; if LEDs are supposed to be completely lacking in key (but essential) areas of the colour spectrum, how are the philips (and other dynamic-hue LED bulbs) able to create essentially every colour? Would you not end up with the same problem as every other LED when it comes to colour reproduction/CRI/skin-tones? Are the philips not phosphorus LEDs or whatever the standard is?

They use lime-green, orange-red and blue-violet leds to achieve a higher CRI. They are quite amazing. I wouldn't go out and buy some to make a lite panel though. The bulbs are almost completely omni directional and they are supposed to be coming out with more form factors in the future.

 

[Dave Digby]

Can the Philips Hue bulbs be programmed for interactive lighting effects?

In the Oblivion article in the May issue of AC, it's mentioned that Claudio Miranda used Philips iW Blast TR LEDs for interactive lighting in the dogfight sequence.

http://www.colorkinetics.com/ls/rgb/colorblast12tr/

They used 150 fixtures to create three programmable 40'x60' walls of light.

This made me wonder if the Hue bulbs could be used for a poor man's version. I don't know if the software is capable, but it seems like the potential for interactivity is there.

 

[Jens Rosengren]

I seriously love Hue. Not sure about how it would be to use them for work, but if they gave me a box of Hues I wouldn't say no haha.
If they weren't so damn expensive every single bulb in my apartment would be a Philip Hue!

 

[Alex Kiritz]

Can the Philips Hue bulbs be programmed for interactive lighting effects?

In the Oblivion article in the May issue of AC, it's mentioned that Claudio Miranda used Philips iW Blast TR LEDs for interactive lighting in the dogfight sequence.

http://www.colorkinetics.com/ls/rgb/colorblast12tr/

They used 150 fixtures to create three programmable 40'x60' walls of light.

This made me wonder if the Hue bulbs could be used for a poor man's version. I don't know if the software is capable, but it seems like the potential for interactivity is there.

No, not really. They're only controllable over a zigbee mesh network. Commands cascade out over the network so they don't change color in unison. They are getting getting better though. With an update they released a week or two ago they now consistently update in under a second whereas they used to frequently not even all change color.

 

[christopher witzke]

I love hue too!

The router does not have to be connected to the internet... just has to be a network. I use an airport extreme and my iPhone... there is an SDK to write apps for the hue... fun stuff I would imagine!

 

[michael zaletel]

I believe it could be suitably programmed to mimic ambient environmental lighting such as required in car interior scenes driving at night, motel, bar or Vegas lights scenes, sunrise and sunset matching for green screen, etc.

 

[Alex Kiritz]

I believe it could be suitably programmed to mimic ambient environmental lighting such as required in car interior scenes driving at night, motel, bar or Vegas lights scenes, sunrise and sunset matching for green screen, etc.

Definitely. The only problem is that the light goes literally everywhere. For most situations you would have to install them in a softbox and lose a good portion of the light.

 

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

Can the Philips Hue bulbs be programmed for interactive lighting effects?

In the Oblivion article in the May issue of AC, it's mentioned that Claudio Miranda used Philips iW Blast TR LEDs for interactive lighting in the dogfight sequence.

http://www.colorkinetics.com/ls/rgb/colorblast12tr/

They used 150 fixtures to create three programmable 40'x60' walls of light.

This made me wonder if the Hue bulbs could be used for a poor man's version. I don't know if the software is capable, but it seems like the potential for interactivity is there.

That issue isn't out yet is it?

I doubt hue would be a good poor mans version since it costs $200 for 3x 8.5w LED bulbs that would be terribly low output for bouncing or projecting/diffusing because they have no lens or reflector to collect and direct the light onto whatever surface you want to be the wall of light... I would think the most effective poor mans version would be using high powered RGB LED PARs or washlights like this:
http://www.blizzardlighting.com/index.php/rokbox-rgbw
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lucslite-18...age_Lighting_Single_Units&hash=item43b6ed0dc2
http://www.ebay.com/itm/2pcs-18x10W...age_Lighting_Single_Units&hash=item416f509d37
http://www.ebay.com/itm/HOT-36x4in1...age_Lighting_Single_Units&hash=item3a7fc70244

These put out RGBW (red green blue white/daylight, they essentially have 4 emmiters under each lens) light that can be mixed to create any color and are DMXable so you could run them through a board or portable controller or even a programmable DMX interface to do pretty much anything you want. They put out about 7x more light for the same price as hue and would require less DIY and since they have lenses and much narrower beam angles and hue does not, which would easily help these get to 10-20x more light than hue for bouncing/diffusing purposes.

There are also bigger versions of lights similar to those RGB LED panel wash lights used on oblivion, I've seen them come in configurations of up to 96x10w (960W) wash lights which is 20x more power than the lights you linked, so you could potentially get 7 of them and match the output they got from the 150 lights they used in oblivion.

http://ledstagelight.en.alibaba.com...0W_High_Power_rgbw_4_in_1_LED_City_Color.html (there are also 72x10w versions, but neither seem to be available in the US or on ebay, probably would have to order from china)

That's a ton of LED light, should be at least as much light as 4k of tungsten, not counting the lens efficiency advantage of the leds.

I've been watching this sort of DJ and achitechural RGB LED light fixture market for a while since I imagine these lights might be an interesting addition to my light kit. Just have to be careful to make sure you get one that is flicker free since the super cheap RGB LED controllers (like the couple $20 5m RGB ribbon kits I have) seem to use 100hz PWM dimming which isn't good enough for shooting on camera unless you don't mind being stuck to 1/25th. 1/50th or 1/100th sec shutter. Looks like most of the pars seem to be 400hz, and I've seen some that advertise 7+khz PWM.

Oh, and watch out for ones with loud cooling fans...

 

[Scott Crawley]

Definitely. The only problem is that the light goes literally everywhere. For most situations you would have to install them in a softbox and lose a good portion of the light.

Try the other existing controls, like a parabolic reflector and a fresnel to focus them. I am curious to try one installed in the modeling light of one of my strobes (Alien Bees use tungsten lamps for modeling lights.) and see if any of my reflectors are useful but I don't have Hue. Can any of you try that out?

50W isn't much but for a relatively inexpensive accent it may prove of use. @$60 each I don't expect to see too many home brew arrays of these things. OTOH it could be around 40% less expensive than an L7-C but at about 3x bigger. At that size a fresnel would be out. ;-)

 

[Caleb Heymann]

Here's a writeup on using the Phillips Hue lights on set:

http://blog.theimagehunter.com/using-the-philips-hue-led-bulbs-on-set/

Confirms what Noah says about the flicker issues - Eric says you can't go above 24fps.

Still an interesting option. It's cool that they opened up their software kit to developers, resulting in apps like this:

http://getambify.com

Would like to try this on a music video.

 

[Scott Crawley]

Here's a writeup on using the Phillips Hue lights on set:

http://blog.theimagehunter.com/using-the-philips-hue-led-bulbs-on-set/

Confirms what Noah says about the flicker issues - Eric says you can't go above 24fps.

Still an interesting option. It's cool that they opened up their software kit to developers, resulting in apps like this:

http://getambify.com

Would like to try this on a music video.

The output seems higher than I expected. Thanks for the link.

 

[michael zaletel]

Here's a writeup on using the Phillips Hue lights on set:

http://blog.theimagehunter.com/using-the-philips-hue-led-bulbs-on-set/

Confirms what Noah says about the flicker issues - Eric says you can't go above 24fps.

Still an interesting option. It's cool that they opened up their software kit to developers, resulting in apps like this:

http://getambify.com

Would like to try this on a music video.

Excellent. Thanks for Sharing. I'll keep this in mind.

-Michael Zaletel

P.S. That Ambify App needs some work. It shuts down one lamp completely for 5-10 seconds quite often.

 

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

Btw these might be a nice low cost alternative...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/4W-9W-10W-E...32?pt=US_Light_Bulbs&var=&hash=item3f1a299e2c (particularly looking at the 9W RGB or WB E27 bulbs)

1/4 the price and come in RGB or daylight/tungsten. The remote control LED's I've used usually all use the same remote so one remote would instantaneously change all bulbs in line of sight so no delay. RGB looks to have higher output and can be dialed in to any color and save colors in memory slots. These are also much simpler than hue since each light has its own controller and remote receiver and no separate wireless bridge and wifi access point are needed to operate the bulbs. I would wonder whether the IR remotes are effective for controlling a bulb that is inside of a practical since line of sight might not be so good with a lampshade on...

I haven't used these myself, but this thread got me thinking maybe I should get some for putting in practicals so I can dial in whatever color and brightness I want. The 100hz thing might still be a bit of an issue though.

Regarding the flicker, usually PWM dimmed LEDs are totally flicker free when not running at full brightness since the pulse width modulation is not engaged at all, but as soon as you adjust even one color or dim at all they suddenly cannot work at shutter speeds other than 1/100th, 1/50, /25 etc.

 

[Eric Haase]

i see flicker with the Hue bulbs at 23.98 and 180 shutter. Also, they have green in them like most LEDs. Unless using for a saturated color I wouldnt use them. And the flicker issue is a dealbreaker.

 

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

i see flicker with the Hue bulbs at 23.98 and 180 shutter. Also, they have green in them like most LEDs. Unless using for a saturated color I wouldnt use them. And the flicker issue is a dealbreaker.

Yes you probably have to use 1/100th, 1/50th, or 1/25th to avoid flicker. As for the green, they are RGB, so can't you just pick a color that is less green?