How to Light a White Cyc

The Power of Colour Mixing LED Panels

Published in

Aputure

7 min readJun 16, 2021

Our cinematography guru, Valentina Vee, is back! Today we’re covering a special episode of 4MFS at EVS Studios in Los Angeles and outfitting their white cyc with not just a few, but five Aputure Nova P300cs to do the job. Let’s look at the practicality of setting up these lights for a white cyclorama yourself and how versatile they can really be.

The Location

While at the studio, Toby Fulp, the rentals and operation manager of EVS, let us know that versatility is critical in a location like this.

Whether that’s being able to quickly switch lights from tungsten to daylight or even full-color control, you need to cater to as many productions as possible on a soundstage.

To demonstrate the practicality of using soft LED panels on a white cyc, we’re going to run through two setups. The classic, clean-cut infinite white background and a colorful music video background.

Starting with the first, I’m sure you’re familiar with a white infinity backdrop. They’re frequently used within beauty commercials, as demonstrated below.

For the second look, we’re also going to test how quickly we can transition into a music video setup. As the Nova is an RGBWW LED, we can create many colorful backgrounds within seconds on the white cyc — long gone are the days of constantly needing to change color backdrops. Therefore, we’re going to approach the music video setup playfully and have the background and foreground operate on different color cycles, but more on that in touch.

The studio already had three Arri Skypanel S-60Cs set up for the white cyc. And although the light output of the Nova P300cs is similar to that of the S-60cs, we agreed it would be better served to completely replace the S-60cs because of the slightly higher color reproduction from the Novas and their accessibility with Sidus Link.

Before rigging the Novas, it was essential to take a meter reading of the current setup to ensure that when the Novas are added, the lights at every part of the 26' curved wall was reading evenly throughout to match the previous setup (at an f/5.6).

But what if you don’t have a light meter in this circumstance? Well, you could instead turn on false color on a monitor or camera LCD. This would show where the hot spots are in the space or where there’s a discrepancy with the exposure (use your system’s IRE levels to read the exposure value).

This will significantly help you achieve balanced exposure when filming against a white cyc. As when filming against a completely white background, it’s often be challenging to identify an area with slightly different exposure values to the rest of the backdrop.

As an additional note, with monitors viewable and clients on set, you want to make sure your monitors have LUTs installed to give the client a near accurate depiction of what the image may look like. Too often, you will find clients may fall in love with the flat LOG look. And while it’s of their choice, you ideally want to move them away from that path.

Finally, before rigging the lights, you want to program them beforehand if you have network-compatible lights. We made sure to connect them with Sidus Link first. That way, we can control the intensity, color, and saturation of the lights remotely with an iPad or other device, making lighting adjustments quicker to manage.

Importantly, we can also name each of the lights within the app corresponding to their stage position. That way, we can quickly adjust the correct light when needed.

Rigging Lights Overhead

With those elements covered, we can now approach rigging the lights to the stage.

We are clamping our main lights with junior pipe clamps. Aptly named, these are clamps with a junior receiver built into the framework and specifically designed to sit and rest on a pipe safely and securely.

With the teeth and angle of the clamp, it’s not going to sway; it sits firmly in place. Peyton Skelton, our Chief Lighting Technician on the shoot, suggests that you only want to tighten the wrench until you feel contact with the pipe, opposed to aggressively tightening the wrench, which may damage the pipe itself.

Likewise, the safety chain installed into the junior clamp will be fastened to the pipe. Therefore, if the overly built junior clamp were ever to fail, the chain is there.

With the lights positioned, we took readings to see if the lights matched the default exposure value previously. By eye, Valentina’s judgment was spot on! We only had to reduce one light at 10% to get the desired exposure.

We added two more Novas with modifiers to the scene to make it look more attractive — one as a backlight and the other as a key light.

This is the new general layout of the white cyc setup at EVS studios. In this setup, with just turning the lights on to 10% (and 5% for the center Nova), you’re going to obtain an infinite white background instantly.

For the backlight, EVS has c-clamps that have junior receivers built into them, so it’s as easy as attaching the c-clamp to the wood already built into the structure of the studio and then attaching the Nova.

At this point, we were able to make a few quick adjustments for our first commercial shoot. We added barn doors to the Nova back light to eliminate light spill to the rest of the wall, and the key light was softened using a DoPchoice Snapbag Octa 5'. This creates a more flattering light that wraps around our female talent and avoids adding additional exposure to the wall.

Here’s the result:

The Music Video

Next, we jumped into the music video setup, and here’s the great thing about filming in this environment with lights like the Nova; all we had to do was swap out the modifier for our key light, and we were ready to shoot. All five lights were good to go for an entirely different setup.

We wanted to do a couple of effects for the second setup, with lights coming on and off, different colors, and various speeds. Again, there is no need to worry about getting crew members to do this individually with the lights; we can program our setup to just that with Magic Program inside the Sidus Pro FX suite.

Magic Program allows you to create nuanced sequences of lighting effects with compatible Aputure and Amaran lights, including color chases and lighting cues.

And if DMX programming is your preference, the Nova P300c has 5-Pin DMX512 Ports on its control box.

We brought the key slightly off-center, and because the key light is angled downward, we also positioned a bounce board towards the talent to raise the shadows with the slightest touch.