 Welcome to The Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today we are going to talk about every cinematographer's worst nightmare. You arrive at location and the space is very large and is lit by a variety of different lights. Some are green, some are purple, some are daylight, some are tungsten, and you have to make the people that exist in the space look beautiful, natural and cinematic. How do you do that? Well, today we're looking at the Syconic Spectrumaster C800U, the solution to many of your color problems. LEDs have come a long way in the last couple of years. Newer ones like this Lupo Superpanel 60 are very nicely color balanced. This means you can match it to daylight pretty easily. But what about the other lights that exist out in the world? Those mysterious metal halide, the incandescent bulbs, the fluorescent bulbs that were installed in the 70s in offices all around the world. How do you get those to match the colors that you're shooting? When I arrive at a location that has odd colored or strangely colored or mixed temperature lights, the first thing that I try and do if I can is bring everything back to daylight. If I can buy or rent new LED bulbs or even daylight fluorescent bulbs and replace the ones that are in the ceiling, that's always a great solution. If I can't, I will have to get the key light that I want to bring in, the lights that I want to light my talent with to match the existing lights. Now, I went to Home Depot and tried to find a nasty green fluorescent bulb, but they don't actually sell them anymore. The closest I could find was these T8 bulbs in a shop light fitting, and I went and added a quarter green filter to approximate what older fluorescent bulbs look like. Now, as you can see, that absolutely kills the vibe of the shot, not just because of the brightness, but because of the off color temperatures. And the green of the overhead is saying to bleed into the skin tones and makes me look a little off or sick. This is not what you want for your talent. So the first thing I'll do is increase the exposure on my key light and decrease the exposure on the camera so that I'm getting a better match. By increasing the exposure on the key light and adding two stops of ND to the camera, I've now got exposure where I want it and the overhead is no longer overpowering the key light. This is where my second comes into play. What I can do now is meter the temperature and the brightness of the backlight. It's telling me here that I need to add a eighth minus green for the tint and a half CTB and an eighth CTB for the color temperature. I'm recreating a scenario where we can't change the overhead lights because there are too many of them. So what I'll do instead is add a eighth plus green to the key and compensate for that in the camera exposure. Now I can meter my key light. It'll tell me that it's the same color temperature as the background and that it has the same amount of green on it. Now to adjust the camera, I need to do something a little bit different. I need to get myself a white card and add green to the exposure of the camera in order to take out the green that's in the scene. So now my depressing green cast has been totally banished from the negative. I won't actually need to color correct this in post at all, but if I do I have that white card reference. So to recap what we've done is to use the color meter to match the exposure, color temperature and plus minus green of the key light to an existing fluorescent setup. We can use the settings of our key light for all our other lights and the entire scene will be correctly white balanced. If we want to add more blue or more orange for effect now we know what our starting point is thanks to the color meter and we can adjust accordingly. That's how to use the Sikonic C800 kilometer to solve the most common and difficult problem on set as far as mixed color temperatures of lights. If you don't have RGB LEDs like the Lupo you're able to do this with gels. In fact the quarter eighth or half minus plus green that the Sikonic gives you you can buy in two by two foot panels for about $809 or you can buy a roll for about a hundred bucks. It's big enough to gel windows. It's big enough to cover the largest LED or HMI sources you want. You just have to be careful using gels on hot lights. You have to make sure that they're far enough away from the filament that they won't burn or melt. So that's color correcting in camera and with lights. Next time we're going to look at creative uses for color meter and how you can use the information that the Sikonic C800 gives you to make creative decisions and recreate infrared. Thanks very much for watching. I will see you next time.