Gems TV lighting

Is it me or when they do a wide shot of the presenter and the desk, the area where they show the jewellery appears to have a blinding White light concentrated on it? Seems to have got worse recently.


I also find it hard to believe when they claim that their studio lights don't do them justice and they are better in daylight. I maybe wrong but for me, I ow from stage work that modern lighting can recreate daylight very well so I am sure if it really was not as good as daylight they would be investing in better lighting.

Also why not go high definition? I know there is cost but the cameras they use are hd so I am sure it wouldn't be that costly. Maybe they know in hd there cloudy diamonds, emeralds and rubies that the presenters claim are amazing when you can see with your own eyes have loads of inclusions would look even worse in hd.

PJ

Hi PJ

We have changed a few aspects of the lighting recently in all the studios.

Lighting in the studios can be segmented into two areas. Fill and key lighting (lighting up the presenters and set) and close-up lighting (or jewellery lighting).

I recently requested that the fill and key lighting be changed recently to cold lamp technology (energy saving lamps). These provide a very different type of light that the incandescent lamps Gems TV / Snatch It have used over the past 10 years. More importantly they use a fraction of the energy to run them 24h a day 7 days a week - (You would not believe our old energy bills!).

I needed to make the decision on what colour temperature to use for the new lighting. I chose 3400K (Tungsten), as I decided to use "some" of the existing lamps in the studio and I wanted their colour to match.

The existing lamps were mainly the close-up lighting for the jewellery. This lighting colour is the same colour approx as a 60w light bulb (or similar in low energy). Now becuase the camera is zoomed in so far, getting as much light into the camera is very important as you need to see detail - especially nowadays when lots of people have 40"+ screens!.

Going HD in the near future would be more costly than you probably think. Unfortunately for us, its not a case of buying new cameras (at about £100k each including the lense). Vision mixers, cables, switches and encoders would push the figure into millions.

But this isn't to say that it might be possible in the future ;-)

Regards,


Barry Kirley
Gems TV

Hi Barry,

Many thanks for taking the time and trouble to answer.