looking for truly portable lighting?
 

Hello all, starting to do more corporate type video work and mostly are at clients location. I purchased a 3 light softbox setup, but I find it quite a battle to setup. Removing 12 bulbs and keeping them in their boxes and fighting the rods with softbox is getting old fast. Anyone recommend any other setup that could be much more easily transported from job to job?

Re: looking for truly portable lighting?
 

Lowel Rifa softbox. Perhaps Alzo CFL boxes. Or go with Kino type flo lights.

Re: looking for truly portable lighting?
 

The Rifa's are nice for portability and setup speed, although I find myself using them less and less and preferring to work with the coollights 600 LED panels + softbox. Similar price range, setup speed and portability, but also more rugged, variable intensity and daylight balanced (nice if you need to work in mixed lighting situations). You can also run them on batteries pretty easily if you're shooting somewhere without power.

Re: looking for truly portable lighting?
 

Not dissimilar to Evan, but I use Dedo Fellonis LED panels and LEDzillas for backlights and other highlights.

Along with a bunch of Westcott diffusers and reflectors, as well as black panels for negative fill - which are just as useful as the lights themselves.

The lights are daylight and carry gels to correct if needed. Everything battery powered. Really quick and neat.

My Kino now gathers dust. The Redheads......

Re: looking for truly portable lighting?
 

Purchased a set of two Socanland 1' x 1' panel lights last year. Chinese made (what isn't) but decent quality. Barn doors on four sides, dim-able and color temp adjustable. AB battery mount on the back and a switchable 120/240 power supply. Each has it's own soft carrying case. Runs two hours on a 14.4 battery.

At 50 watts they may not sound like much but they are actually rather intense. Also work well outdoors for daylight fill. That twin Red/Blue LED system pays for itself in no time not having to futz around with gels or changing out lamps to match room color.

I took a piece of 1/8" Lexan and sandblasted each side. That stays in the front gel slot to take the edge off the LED's. I carry cut sections of vinyl shower curtain from Bed and Bath. Really softens out the light to use it for a key. Also ideal for use on Kino's to kill the harshness. Make sure to get the whiter ones. Cost around $9.

Re: looking for truly portable lighting?
 

A company by the name or F&V makes a really great line of LED panels. a wide range of sizes. I have found that they are using a very good grade of LED's. which in turn means you dont have to add minus green gel to the fixture in order to get a good white light. the smaller fixtures are linkable. so you can gang several smaller units up to make bigger panels and control them with one dimmer. I prefer spot fixtures over floods. You can always diffuse a spot, you cannot concentrate a flood. and I prefer fixed daylight over bi color because the greater output is more useful than the ease of dialing in a temp. This saves time and space if your moving quickly, and dont have a lot of room to pack stuff.

Re: looking for truly portable lighting?
 

I'll second the endorsement for the f&v z96. The color rendering is better than any other panel i've seen... and they are dirt dirt cheap. However, this is the company that litepanels is suing, so it may be harder to get the z96 these days. I bought 4 of them off ebay with knockoff sony f970 batteries and chargers. I assumed the batteries would be crap and the fixtures would be emergency/super guerilla fixtures but I was wrong on both counts. My knockoff batteries have run the z96 at full power for 7+ hours (i've actually never had one run out on a shoot, so i have no idea when it would die.) and because the color is so good and the dimming so handy, they have become defacto eye lights/fill lights for basically every shoot i'm on. My HMI and kinos come out when there is a need, but the z96 has been on everything from zombie features to studio commercials. I've even used them as keys in a pinch and they did an amazing job.

f&v has come out with a z180 which is supposedly more than twice the brightness... but at like 4x the price. I'd way rather have 4 z96 than 1 z180.

Oh, i used them as a fill on a 240fps red epic shoot and they looked great and had zero flicker even when dimmed. Amazing.