By Iain Blair
At the busy Litegear booth Paul Royalty, global head of sales for Litegear and Kino Flo, reports that “On the Kino Flo side we’re finally shipping the Diva Lux 4 product and the new Celeb IKON6, and we’re very excited to have customers here playing with them and learning about them. And on the Litegear side we’re showing the new LiteTile Spectrum line with the new Ultra Engine which has an advanced RGBACL colour mix and a higher density pixilation.” On the sales front, Royalty notes that “the business is still challenging here in the States, but we’re seeing a definite pickup in the European and UK markets where we’re doing a lot of support work. The year ahead will remain challenging, but there are some things on the horizon and we hear production is going to be picking up here in the States. Meanwhile, we’ll be warehousing product in the UK and Europe, so by year end you’ll be able to buy our products shipped directly from our base in Europe, so it’s very exciting.”
Over at Aputure’s booth, Mitch Gross, global director of product marketing, showed me their new STORM XT52, an impressive 5,200W tunable white high intensity point source lamp that he called “the brightest LED light fixture in the world, with both tunable white and color capabilities. It also has the BLAIR light engine – Blue, Lime Amber, Indigo, Red – and that means we can adjust those colours individually, and it has more than twice the output of any other colour-adjusting light on the market. But even though it’s hugely powerful, we designed it so it’s fairly compact and very lightweight, so that just one person can deal with setting it up and moving it around. Other systems need multiple crew members, which means more time and money.” Gross reports that their new STORM XT52 has already been used on “major movie productions, TV shows and some commercials, so it’s been accepted very quickly.” He also reports that Aputure’s “very diversified product line means that business has been very good over a wide range of productions, from the biggest movies to corporate, and also on alternative formats such as TikTok and YouTube where creators are doing very high-end work now and we try to cater to all those markets.”
At Blackmagic Design’s crowded booth the big draw was in-person demos on cameras including the URSA Cine Immersive and DaVinci Resolve 20/Blackmagic Cloud. “I think we’re at an inflection point,” Blackmagic Design Inc. president Dan May told me. “We’ve been more of a volume-based game in the past, and we’re still doing very well at that, but our new technologies have really gotten the attention of the Hollywood market space now. We always did well with the DaVinci Resolve and other products, but now with our URSA Cine 17K 65 we have that ‘premium brand’ product with its IMAX-style resolution, that’s also reasonably priced. The weird thing is, when times get hard, we actually do better, as people know they get reliable, affordable products.”
Blackmagic Design also presented two seminars; first, “The Immersive Workflow” where Blackmagic’s Mike Smollin and Dave Hoffman discussed production through post for workflows for immersive filming. Building off their experience with the new URSA Cine Immersive camera, they walked the audience through how to take advantage of shooting 8160 x 7200 resolution per eye with pixel level synchronization at 16 stops of dynamic range and discussed the immersive post production process and how to show and work with immersive footage on and off set. Second, they presented “Shooting with the Blackmagic URSA Cine 17K 65,” with cinematographers Blake McClure, ASC and John Brawley, ACS discussing shooting large-format imagery with the URSA Cine cameras. McClure is currently shooting HBO’s new untitled Steve Carell series with the URSA Cine 17K 65, while Brawley is filming season three of Shrinking with the URSA Cine 12K LF. And the URSA Cine 17K 65 has just been added to the Netflix Approved Camera List, a list that already includes the Blackmagic URSA Cine 12K LF, Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12K OLPF and URSA Mini Pro 4.6K G2.
The Sony booth was a zoo with people checking out the new Crystal LED VERONA display featuring scenes from the Brad Pitt blockbuster F1 as well as the impressive Spatial Reality display, and the Fujifilm booth was buzzing with anticipation of their new GFX Eterna camera set for release later this year. Sunbelt Rentals, Carl Zeiss, RED Digital Cinema and Sumolight were all crowded and Leica Geosystems, already the global leader in LiDAR scanners and the top choice for surveying, construction (and discovering the odd lost civilization), were stressing how they are being used more and more in entertainment and how LiDAR is being used to reshape digital productions. The possibilities include VFX artists being able to create and manipulate realistic scanned environments, filmmakers having photorealistic models for previz, and VR teams building realistic worlds based on actual locations and more. Leica also unveiled a new piece of software that uses AI to identify, remove and store real-world objects for later use as digital assets, directly from a LiDAR scan.
At China-based Godox, Overseas Sales manager Freddy Fu told me that “business is going well. Through major industry events like Cine Gear and NAB, we’ve seen growing recognition and familiarity with the Godox KNOWLED series. As a relatively new player in the cinema lighting space, we’ve made rapid strides—launching a wide range of products and building a comprehensive ecosystem of lighting accessories within just four years. This pace of innovation and development has allowed us to quickly earn trust among users seeking reliable, high-performance lighting solutions.” In terms of working with productions and rental houses in the US, Fu reports that, “given the slower market in the film industry recently in the US, we only work with a few and are focused on building long-term relationships based on product performance and value. While we’re still in the early stages in some areas, we’re steadily expanding our presence and reputation in the market of professional lighting rental houses. The year ahead is very promising. We remain focused on product innovation—designing and refining our lights based on evolving industry needs and user feedback. We also see strong momentum in our U.S. expansion efforts, and with new releases planned and increasing engagement from professionals, we’re confident it will be a year of meaningful growth.”
At Power Gems, co-owner and director of sales Patrick McGuane reports that after 30 years in the business “where we focused on the traditional HMI market,” the company is now focused on the LED market. “We don’t feel the need to compete with the fixture manufacturers, as we focus on the control side and dimmers,” he notes. “Business has been a bit of a struggle over the past few years, as it has been for a lot of companies, but we’re seeing a healthy growth in the UK, the European market, Australia, the Middle East, and now also in North America. We’ve always had good relationships and a good base of steady clients with the larger studios and rental houses, and with the new LED fixtures it’s now more about catering to the end users – all the DPs and gaffers. Our biggest job over the past few years was supplying all the LED controls for both Wicked films, which was a very big deal.”
At Dedolight California, Sean Boyriven reports that the company is “somewhere in the middle of an industry that’s ebbing and flowing. Some vendors are sinking, while others are swimming, and some are soaring, and everyone’s still dealing with the aftermath of the strikes and a challenging economy.”
Every year Cine Gear offers a large number of informative and educational seminars, panels and Q&A sessions, and one of the big highlights for me this year was a Q&A session with two top DPs – Alice Brooks ASC and Larry Sher ASC, who took to the stage set up in the Nanlux/Nanlite space at the back of the cavernous Stage 30/31. There was some confusion as the event had originally been scheduled for Stage 34, and there was very limited seating – just 200 seats, but I managed to score one and it was both entertaining and fascinating to hear the two DPs discuss their art and craft at length, followed by a lively Q&A with audience members. Brooks talked about shooting the blockbuster hit “Wicked,” her goal to make it “the greatest, most beautiful love story ever told,” and detailed the problems of lighting star Cynthia Erivo in her bright green make-up. “It took a lot of tests to get it right,” she told me when I caught up with her after the Q&A session. She talked about shooting on the Alexa 65 and using “two different lenses for close ups – a 65mm for Cynthia and a 75mm for Ariana.” And while “Joker 2” was a surprise flop, Sher’s insights into how the ambitious film was made were very revealing. Like Brooks, he shot mainly with the Alexa 65s and did extensive lens tests before settling on a package that included lenses from Nikon, Canon, Leica, and Arri, along with a new set of Hasselblad lenses that were rehoused by rental house Otto Nemenz.
I also had the honour of being invited to moderate two events held at Creamsource’s very hip HQ in Burbank; first up was “Roadmapping the Future,” which featured panelists Ryan Sloat from Shadowbox Studios, Wes Bailey from 4Wall, Gary Paz from Cinelease, and Creamsource CEO Tama Berkeljon, discussing everything from investment challenges and the LED revolution to rental house support, technology integration, production budgets and strategic planning. Berkeljon noted that “our vision is ensuring that we are the support for the rental houses and the productions and ultimately the art that we all make. So we try to make ourselves the bridge for that technology, so that it can be in the right place at the right time.” All four agreed that while it’s obviously been a bumpy few years, the year ahead looks better. “We have to be optimistic,” said Paz. “We’ve got to get this industry back to where it belongs, and for us Texas is happening, we just opened in Winnipeg, and along with Toronto and Vancouver, all those markets are pretty steady right now, and they’re growing.” For Bailey, “we’ve been very busy in New York. That’s a strong market for us, and I think there’s a lot more going on there than in Atlanta or LA. So we’re focusing on those markets and saying, the reality is, that’s where the opportunity is right now, and we’ve got to adjust to that.” When I asked how the shift from traditional Tungsten lighting to LED is changing the way rental houses operate today, Sloat noted that while tungsten “is slowly starting to get phased out, rental houses still need to have that legacy equipment for period pieces like Apple’s Fly Me To The Moon we did here in Atlanta. They’re still being ordered, so we have to be prepared.”
The second event was hosting a “Lunch with David Klein” Q&A that featured the DP, whose credits include “The Mandalorian,” “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew,” and “Clerks,” in a wide-ranging discussion of everything from virtual production and lens choice (he’s a huge fan of Caldwell Chameleons) to virtual depth of field and digital content. When I asked him about the major changes he’s seen in the business since he began, he noted that, “It’s still the same job. We still do the same thing, but the tools are always changing and the technology is always changing. So I think the biggest change for DPs is that we really have to adapt. You know, I was hanging on to film as long as I could. And I remember having a conversation with a good friend of mine, and I said something stupid, like, I don’t want to shoot digital even if it’s as good as film. And he just said, if it’s just as good, why wouldn’t you want to shoot it? And that was kind of an ‘aha’ moment for me, because I was like, you’re right! That’s the moment when it all changed for me, but let’s be honest – when digital started to take over, it was pretty terrible. But then RED comes out, and it got all the other manufacturers off their ass, so shortly after that, Sony started making these better sensors, and the Alexa comes out and now we have all these viable options.”
Creamsource also hosted a seminar with Fuse-TG demoing their new Fuse Iris system which showcased a seamless four-camera shoot of a sunset shot on a beach in Big Sur. “It offers precision stitching,” reports Joseph White, Virtual Production Producer. “You can see seabirds flying in the distance, seamlessly across all four joined panels. The market is primarily Virtual Production, in camera visual effects, or green screen. We rent it at our stages or we can provide the service and/or build the stages anywhere to any spec.”
And, somewhat amazingly, after two long, jam-packed days, most people still had enough energy to party into the night at the annual ASC BBQ fueled by great barbecue and endless beer – the perfect end to a very successful Cine Gear 2025.
