Is this good?

Hi All,

Great forum! I'm wondering if someone could lead me in the right direction. I'm planning on creating some straight forward exercise videos in my personal training studio and I wanted to purchase a studio lighting kit because our current videos look "off."

Would something like this on ebay be adequate?

http://www.../studio-lights

I have flourescent lights in my studio and our videos look dark and off-color.

Thanks in advance!

Hey there. I moved this thread to the Video Forum. I think you'll get a better response here.

Flourescent lights do suck. Standard flourescent bbulbs aren't just off-color, they're missing part of the spectrum. So no matter what you do, that crappy color can't be corrected. That said, I don't think the lights are your real problem. Of course, better lights would help. But your real problem is white balance and exposure. You need to get those two things under control before you invest in expensive new gear only to discover you have the exact same problem.

So what kind of camera are you using? Does it have custom white balance and manual exposure controls?

Photo John is spot on with the white balance and exposure. If you do look into lighting kits, a two or three light kit with umbrellas is very nice, but you can get great results with builders flood lights that can be purchased cheaply from most hardware stores. The advantage of studio lighting is that you can buy all sorts of umbrella's diffusers snoots, grids and other light modifiers so you can control the properties of your light much more easily, however if you know what sort of look you are after (high key, low key, etc) you can usually make modifiers that will work with the construction lights.