Kino Flo

Kino Flo is a manufacturer of lighting equipment for use in motion pictures, television and photography. Located in Burbank, California, Kino Flo is best known for its fluorescent tube-based systems that are optimized for the color temperature of film and digital video. These lights provide a relatively compact and efficient way of providing soft lighting. Compared to the original workhorse of motion picture lighting, incandescent lights (and, more recently, HMI lights), Kino Flo tubes produce less heat and fit into smaller spaces, two significant advantages that have made them popular with professionals.

History

The first Kino Flo unit was created in 1987, during the filming of the movie "Barfly". Director of photography Robby Mueller was filming in a cramped interior, and couldn't fit traditional lights into the location. In order to work around the problem, the film's gaffer Frieder Hochheim and best boy Gary Swink designed a high-output fluorescent light that had a remote ballast, allowing the lamp unit to become small and lightweight enough to be taped to the wall. [Brown, Blain. "Cinematography: Theory and Practice", p. 151. Focal Press, 2002.] Hochheim and Swink subsequently created a company, Kino Flo Incorporated, to manufacture and market their innovation to the film industry. The new lights were quickly embraced by cinematographers, and now are considered a staple of a standard motion picture lighting package. [Salt, Barry. "Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis", 2nd edition, p. 287. Starword, 1992.]

Technology

The two major innovations of the unit were the high-frequency ballast, which gave the lights greater intensity and eliminated flicker commonly found in off-the-shelf fluorescent tubes, and the Kino Flo tubes, which contained a number of special phosphors designed to eliminate the characteristic tints in the magenta-green spectrum which are present in most domestic fluorescent lights. [Salt, Barry. "Moving Into Pictures", "Film Style and Technology in the Nineties", p. 303. Starword, 2006.] Since the type of tube determines the color temperature, any Kino Flo lamphead can be quickly converted between daylight and tungsten balances by simply changing out the tubes. Mid-range color temperature can also be created by mixing tubes of both color temperatures. Kino Flo have also expanded their tube line in recent years, creating visual effects tubes optimized for bluescreen and greenscreen spectra, as well as a variety of other shades for general color effects. [ [http://www.kinoflo.com/Kino%20Flo%20lamps/Visual%20Effects%20and%20Designer%20Colors/Visual%20Effects%20and%20Designer%20Colors.htm Kino Flo lamps] ]

References

External links

* [http://www.kinoflo.com Kinoflo Company Website]