foreign [Music] pt1 2 and 4C tube lights well they're

Pixel Tube lights which is a little bit different as you can see behind me right here we have one that is generating a sort of a rainbow pattern so instead of just producing a single RGB or cool white or warm white color they can actually produce multiple colors along their length making them pixel tubes so that's the idea here they have internal batteries and they're especially useful for effects lighting as you can see here we're also using one as a rim light so we've got the 4C just off camera back here and that's what's casting this color on my side of my head here making this Rim light they come in one two and four foot lengths we have the two and the four here this one right back here is the two foot and then the four foot is what is casting the rim light on me so why tube lights what's interesting about tube lights I think to me they're very interesting because they produce soft light but because of their unique shape you can actually hide them a little bit easier than you could a traditional soft light traditionally soft lights are either like the flexible matte lights or something in a big soft box or shooting through a 4x4 those are a little bit more difficult to hide or conceal in relatively tight spaces so that's one thing that makes a tube light interesting but also once you have the pixelation and being able to produce multiple colors along their length then they become even more interesting as effects lights these each have independently controlled lighting zones with four pixels per foot what that allows them to do is of course they can produce a number of effects so they have the traditional effects that you've seen on a lot of aperture lights and actually a lot of other lights as well

Paparazzi fireworks faulty bulb lightning TV pulsing fire cop car party lights which is essentially a color Chase so all of those of course are available but also interesting things like rainbow which is what you're seeing here there's a color Fade with up to eight colors chasing each other with the speed and direction adjustable there's a color cycle also with eight colors blinking in sequence across equal sized pixel portions of the light there's a pixel fire where you get these fiery pixels up and down the light a one pixel Chase that's one pixel moving continuously down the tube two pixel Chase and a three pixel Chase in addition to that they also have some interesting white presets white light presets so if you want to match other lights so for example day white overcast sky blue sky tungsten Studio lamps

Studio CP light HMI at 5600 HMI at 6000 daylight Warm White halogen natural white metal halide Xenon short Arc lamp

Moonlight horizontal daylight they're just a whole bunch of different options and those are nice because it makes it easy to quickly create the type of light that you're looking for or perhaps match another light that is already operating at one of those color temperatures we did film a comparison shot with one lit by an actual tungsten light

I know those are pretty rare these days and then one with the pt4c and we set them both obviously the tungsten light was actually tungsten and then we also set the pt4c to tungsten and they weren't a perfect match so the color quality here is not bad but it's interesting and we'll talk about this more in another episode LED lights are still not producing exactly the same spectral output that you're seeing from the traditional lights like a halogen or a Tungsten that being said the color quality metrics did come in pretty well here for an LED light at 3200 Kelvin we got a CRI of 95 a tlci of 98 tm30 of 94 and a Tungsten SSI of 85. we put the full color metrics up here on the screen so you can take a look at those in more detail if you want to pause here they all have inbuilt batteries to power them you can also power them while they're plugged in with their included AC to DC adapter with a USBC connector on one side and actually I really like that for my live streams because then I don't have to worry about the battery running out I can just keep that one plugged in and because it's a single light and it is happens in my case to be positioned fairly close to an outlet it works perfectly but if you do need to power on battery they also have that capability and the two and the four foot models have 38.5 watt hour and 77 watt hour internal batteries respectively and those both ran almost exactly right around three hours so for the two foot we got 167 minutes of power time and with a four foot we had 176 minutes at full power on both of those so came in right around the specs that were cited by aperture right around three hours just barely under three hours you can control the lights with a built-in screen and buttons fairly intuitive not too hard to figure out and also it is cytuslink compatible so just like all of the other aperture lights there is a cytuslink app makes it super nice to control remotely and you can control tens of Lights at the same time so if you have really complex lighting designs with lots of different aperture lights or anything else that's compatible with cytus you can control them all right from the same app mounting and rigging the light there are a couple of options here so it does have these kind of interesting five-sided end caps and it's sort of rounded on one Edge and then you have five discrete places where you can actually if you were to set it on the floor for example you can angle it from 0 to 45 to 90 to 135 to 180 degrees and it also comes with these magnetic brackets which allow you to stick the lights on to anything that's metallic uh and that makes it a little bit easier to rig as well in addition it does come with an eye hook that has a 3 8 inch thread on one side and both ends of the light have 3 8 inch Taps so you can attach that on either end and suspend it in whatever way makes sense for your particular lighting design so overall rigging not too bad got some options there and then finally you can actually

DMX control them with an add-on adapter so it doesn't come with the adapter but you can get an adapter sold by amran and it has a USBC to DMX adapter on it so if you do have a DMX setup you can integrate that as well now what are these lights useful for I see them largely as effects lights but they can do quite a bit of stuff you could even use them as a key light in fact in our test shot that's exactly what we did we used the four foot version and got some pretty nice soft light for a key light so if you're really kind of trying to travel light this is one way to do that and then if you want to do something fun there are lots of options here in these lights as well for plenty of really kind of colorful effects if that's your jam in terms of pricing the one foot model come comes in at 139 dollars the two foot model at two hundred and ninety nine dollars and the four foot model at four hundred and twenty nine dollars at the time of this review the overall kit includes the AC adapter mounting brackets eye hook and a soft carrying case and that's a pretty nice soft carrying case in terms of build quality the end caps are metal and then the rest of the tube itself is a plastic you're going to need to be careful with these they are plastic except for the end caps so be careful we somehow managed to crack the part of the pt2c on one end we contacted aperture they said that my copy must have been defective and they sent a new one the crack didn't seem to affect the operation or structural

Integrity of the tube which is good nevertheless the tube is plastic so handle it really carefully let's run through a couple of cons they're inbuilt batteries as far as I can tell they're not user replaceable and I didn't see anything on aperture's website for any sort of battery replacement program so hopefully they do have a battery of replacement program of some sort we did notice one sort of odd thing and that was that when we were doing the battery test when we came back and looked at them were like oh wow they're still at 100 after two and a half hours and we were astonished and then once we pressed one of the buttons on the light itself then the screen updated and the battery status went to where it actually was which was one bar left which was near you know near depletion so I don't know if that's something that could be fixed in a firmware update it does look like there's a firmware on here that'd be really nice to see a fix for that overall there's a look at the amaran

Pixel Tube lights pretty nice lights if you want to do fun effects but also very practical if you want to use them as a key light for example if you're trying to keep your kit that you take on set with you small as possible this could be a good option for that as well hope you found that helpful if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below and if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your Lighting and Sound for video talk to you soon [Music]