From the course: Video Gear

LED panel light: LiteMat

From the course: Video Gear

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LED panel light: LiteMat

- Alright, so we have a different light that I'd never seen before. We have our friend in DP, Jim Ball with us here. Hi Jim, how are you? - Hey. - And we're gonna talk about a light called the LiteMat, or this is from LiteMat. Jim, this is a pretty cool-looking panel. Tell us a little bit more about it. - It's by a company named LiteGear, and they specialized in a product called LiteRibbon, which was strands of small LED diodes that were custom-made for putting directly into sets, to integrate lighting at the sets, or to custom-make a light of any size you want. - So if I had, like, the Starship Enterprise or something, and I wanted to have that light come up from, like, the console or something. - They just cut a little bit, bunch of strands, they lay 'em in there, hook 'em up to dimmers, and that would go to a dimmer board, and you'd have complete control and integrated lighting. - So like a lot of people, they said this is a good idea, why don't we put it into a kit, and start selling it to people? - Exactly. So they decided to make a kit, a series of panels called LiteMat. There's a LiteMat 1, 2, 3, and 4. The small one is about 9.5 by 19 inches, and the biggest one is the LiteMat 4, which I have. - Cool. So right now, you have the LiteMat 4 mounted just on a C-stand, and the thing that struck me about this before we started recording, is how incredibly light this panel is, even for being pretty big. I mean, I think of a 1-by-1 being pretty light, but this is much larger, and it's what, about four or five pounds, somewhere in that range? - Yeah, I really can hold it up with one hand. It's extremely light-weight, and that's great for, you know, walking around with it. I can put batteries on this thing. - Easy to hang from the ceiling if you needed to. - Hang it from the ceiling like an overhead, and I use it for a nice, soft interview light, and it's a fraction of the price and weight of some of the comparable models, in terms of output. - Now, right now, obviously, we're plugged into power, but this can also be battery-operated as well. - Yeah, they make cables that have these little phoenix connectors that can plug directly into a D-Tap series of two D-Tap ports for two Dionic Anton Bauer batteries, and I can run it almost almost an hour off those. - Okay, so that's some of the base features. What about, sort of, the light that it puts out. Does it put out quite a bit of light? - It puts out a ton of light and very efficient. It actually has two settings, a normal, and then an alternate. The normal one is pretty much enough of whatever you would need. It gets pretty bright, and it also is a hybrid, so I can infinitely - Adjust the color temperature. - Change the color temperature. - That's great. - Okay, and now if I really wanna blast ya, I'll go to the alternate. - Oh wow. That's bright. (laughing) - The thing is, you can make a nice big source, which always makes for a natural lighting. Bigger source, farther away, and doesn't take a lot of power-- - So right now, obviously, you're diffusing this a little bit from the front. What does the actual panel look like, itself? I mean, I'm interested in this idea of sort of the mat part of it. - Right. So the kit comes with, you know, these great little barn doors, and all kinds of diffusion to soften it, not that it's not soft already. But there's the alternating diodes, and if I turn it off, you can sorta see, it's nothing much. It's not fancy. It's just a board that you know-- - [Robbie] You can almost see those strips that you're talking about, yup. - So it's very, very unassuming. Just, this is about as customized as it gets. I've seen them be much rougher in appearance when they're making things tailored for specific uses. I mean, I'll stick strands of these inside of cars. I'll ring the driver up, up in the ceiling, and I can put it everywhere just outside of my frame, and then put it on one of these dimmers, and just watch the sun. - Dial it right in, yup. - And you know, dial it to my needs. - So what are we looking at, in terms of a price point? Is this, what, a thousand dollars? Two thousand dollars? Where does it kinda fall in line? - They start, with the small one, for around 350, 375 dollars. And this one, with the full kit, is about $1,800. - That's not bad. - And you get a nice bag, you get a Kino-Flo mount so you can mount it onto a stand. You get all the cables you need, you get the dimmer, and you get four of these diffusion pieces, and a grid. - Very cool. So that is the LiteMat from LiteGear, and I think it's a pretty exceptional instrument. I mean, it gives you a lot of variety, in terms of what you can do with it. It's light-weight. It can take batteries or be, you know, plugged in directly. And it seems like, it's, you know, based on its size, there's, you know, a lot of different things that you could do with it, from, you know, interviews, to kind of just, you know, a general fill with it. And for the price point, it seems like it's a pretty good option. So Jim, thanks for taking the time to explain that to us, and for Video Gear Weekly, and speaking for Rich Harrington, I'm Robbie Carman. Thanks for watching.

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