 Hey, what is up? My name is Rebedium. Today we're trying to answer the question, is KinoFlow still king? If you've been on a film set or you're shooting regularly in the last 10 years, you almost certainly came across this light, the KinoFlow 4x4. It was first one on sale quite some time ago and very quickly became the standard of cool, large, soft light. Film studios and television stations and newspapers bought hundreds and hundreds of these things because at first you could switch the bulb on and off to get your exposure, then you could eventually dim them. They were light, they were cheap compared to the other alternatives which were buying an expensive tungsten or HMI and having it far from talent and then shooting it through some kind of diffusion that had to be gripped and secured and all those things. With KinoFlow you could get the light right up close to the talent, get a beautiful soft source that didn't interrupt, that wasn't hot or dangerous, didn't make them sweat. You could take the bulbs out and do all kinds of cool things with them and like I said it very quickly became an industry standard. LED revolution happened maybe four or five years ago, kind of parallel with the DSLR revolution with cameras where you had a whole new technology of lighting that suddenly that came out almost by accident first, was kind of nasty and green and expensive and then got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to the point where now very few people use these fluorescent tubes anymore just because LED is kind of ubiquitous, it has so many more advantages. LED is cheaper, it's less brittle, you can't break an LED in the same way that you could break fluorescent tubes. LEDs are often either daylight to tungsten dimmable or RGB dimmable and you know to do this with old 4x4 KinoFlows you had to carry two sets of bulbs, just take out the daylight and put in the tungsten. KinoFlow have not been sitting idly by while the LED revolution took place, they've been developing their own LEDs, they came up with a whole range of lights that use a similar form factor to their old fluorescent lights but now work with LED. So there's been a lot of kind of shuffling and renaming of the KinoFlow kind of lines but right now they have the diva light which is the entry LED panel which comes assembled and it stays assembled, then they have the celeb which is the slightly brighter slightly bigger and heavier upper end sort of studio lighting and then they have this guy the freestyle which is so called because it has the LED panel on the front which is RGB and then has the ballast and the controller which is DMX enabled but it's able to detach from the base itself and you can unplug the cable, they give you a longer second cable so if this unit itself is too heavy you can put it up in the ceiling or up on a stand run the ballast somewhere else so you can get to it if you're not using DMX and then you can also put on head crate or the louvers to stop spill falling on the floor on the ceiling you know this is KinoFlow's kind of default filmmaker solution right now but is it enough to kind of usurp the new kind of king of the soft light which is the RS SkyPanel the C60 came out a couple years ago and very quickly became a default LED light source they also released the 180 and the 360 super bright RGB had all these great effects built into them like police cars and you know how often you use that I'm not really sure but it was cool for gaffers that didn't have to carry around trucks full of gels they could just dial in the gel that they wanted I mean this the freestyle range is sort of you know Kino's answer to the SkyPanel and it has a lot of advantages over the SkyPanel it's much much lighter than a SkyPanel it's around the same brightness as a SkyPanel and yes with the new firmware upgrade in the freestyle you now have police car paparazzi a whole bunch of interesting cool effects that will continue to be upgraded as KinoFlow upgrades the the firmware of the ballast and controllers this is the 20 the freestyle 20 I also have a few freestyle 30 which is the three foot light I think there's a three freestyle 40 or 41 that's the four foot light so the question is is KinoFlow still king is this still the best light out there well it really depends on what you mean by best it's not it's not the lightest light even with the even with the ballast off and you have just just the bare light itself it's pretty light it's enough to hold you know very easily with one hand it's enough to put up above your talent on a c-stand arm without having to worry about fall down so I think they succeeded in that sense it's not the lightest light though there are plenty of like the IntelliTech LC 120 or the falcon eyes lights that like roll up that you can you can sticky tape them you can gaffer tape them to the ceiling you would not want to gaffer tape this to the ceiling unless you're gonna use a whole roll of gaffer tape so it's light but not the lightest it is very bright you know I'd say that you know judging by the size of the the controller the ballast this thing puts out a great deal of light even in the RGB version the pure red or pure blue is still almost too bright to look at it's bright but it's not as bright as the sky panel sky panel is huge it takes two people to lift it has its own fan in it it is a super bright light I think it's around 18,000 lux it's actually not as bright as my very cool Lupo super panels you know one thing that one thing that the Freestyles really come into their own is the accessories available for them because Kino is a industry leader almost everyone that makes accessories makes them for this light or this range of lights so you have you know Diopito snap bags you have Chimera softboxes you have all kinds of cool grids and crates and things you can fit with them Matthews even makes a thing called the Kino stacker where if you want to do a whole wall you can put four of these things on top of one another to create like a whole wall of light which is cool they've also upgraded well since my last Kino upgraded the little lollipop stand it has this handle on the back it has like a butterfly attachment and you're able to like manipulate this to you know almost 360 degrees in order to get the light where you want it cost wise these are comparative to what the two by four banks used to be so the unit itself so the light itself is about $1,200 the ballast is like six or $700 and when you get the whole kit it ends up being around three grand to sum up I would say that this light is a really great all-rounder for solo shooters or small production companies that have a great deal of different things that they do it's really hard to beat Kino yes it's not the cheapest but it is cheap for what it does it's not the lightest but it is pretty light for the power it has it's not the highest output but for those other two things price and weight it is really high output probably a combination of those three the the best one there plus it has heaps of accessories its manufacturing is like here in the States it's actually just up the road here in Burbank you can you know visit the Kino flow factory and watch Californians like wiring everything together their product support is awesome their R&D is awesome their lineage in the film industry is something that pretty much only Ari has as well so I feel like if you're gonna go out there and start investing money in a light kit that you're gonna have for five or ten years it's a pretty good place to start you know it's not the kind of thing that if you're just starting out you've just bought your camera you want to go drop $5,000 on lights if you're gonna be using your lights day in day out putting them on and off trucks flying with them you know getting them beat around and you really need something that's solidly constructed that's not gonna fail on you I would go with Kino flow I think you know is when you take into all the factors collectively I think you know is still king that's my look at and review of the Kino flow freestyle line thanks very much for watching I will see you next time