Cinelude turns on the lights, too
Elgato, Neewer, Philips Hue, amaran: from the Studio screen, one scene relights the whole set in a single gesture, colours line up from one brand to another, and a 3D set shows you the lighting before you move a single stand.
2 min read
This is the screen that surprises creators most when they discover Cinelude. A pre-production tool that controls the studio lights? Yes, because light is part of the film. And because almost everyone still sets it lamp by lamp, app by app.
Every brand, one remote
The Studio screen brings together the lights on set, whatever their brand: Elgato Key Light panels, Neewer, Philips Hue bulbs and strips, amaran tubes and spotlights. A small bridge installed on the studio computer connects them to Cinelude over Bluetooth. From then on, everything is controlled from the browser, on a computer as on a phone: intensity, colour temperature in kelvins, colour wheel.
Scenes, one gesture
Interview, investigation mood, night stakeout, evening embers, broad daylight: a scene stores the full state of every lamp, and one tap recalls it. Moods lay colour palettes across your lamps, and the Motion setting slowly rotates colours around the room, fading from one lamp to the next. The animation lives in the bridge: it keeps running even when the page is closed.
The same red on every brand
Anyone who mixes brands knows the problem: the same red does not look the same from one lamp to another, because the LEDs differ. Cinelude offers a calibration with ten reference colours, eight hues and two shooting whites at 3,200 and 5,600 K. You align each brand with a reference, by eye or through the camera, once, in about ten minutes. After that, every command is corrected on the fly.
The set in 3D
And then there is the 3D Set. You scan your room with your phone, using Scaniverse or Polycam, and import it into Cinelude. You place your lamps and a mannequin, and Cinelude gives you each light's angle, height and distance to the face. The classic portrait lighting patterns, Rembrandt, Loop, Butterfly, are built before you move a single stand.
The set is prepared the day before, in the browser. On shoot day, one tap is enough.
Why it belongs in Cinelude
Because lighting a video is a writing decision. The mood of an episode about an unsolved case is planned when you break down the shots, not on the morning of the shoot, by trial and error. In Cinelude, the lighting scene lives in the same file as the script and the storyboard. On the day, all that is left is to press.
