Reddit mentions of CanadianStudio 1600 W Video Photo Studio Lighting Softbox Light kit with 2 Light Stands, 8 5500K Light Bulbs, 2 softboxes and Carrying case from Canada

My dental work is finally done. Complete. Finished. I'm not going back for a while. Good riddance.

So, my church has been trying to get into streaming for the last year. Just a basic type of stream with a single camera pointing at a couch, with some live music and a reading of that week's sermon. The church board allocated $3000 to the project, their blessing, and then nothing happened for months.

A couple weeks ago, they tried their first stream. The camera "broke" so they streamed on a cellphone with a bitrate resembling pre-2000 internet videos. The next week was the same thing. Then, they got the camera "working" but the framerate was low, the image was stuttery and it was blurry like it was zoomed in and not in HD. The audio was also really echoy, and the lighting was just light coming from the pastor's office window.

I'm a media guy, and while my specialty is mostly in radio/audio tech, I've done work with streaming and video production in the past. Knowing that the budget would be tight, I came in with a list of recommendations to vastly improve the quality of the streams and to teach basic broadcasting procedures. What I walked into was a bit of a trainwreck.

The church administrator was tasked with acquiring the streaming equipment. After a false start with a video camera that couldn't stream video, he ended up getting a DSLR camera. The image quality is actually quite nice, but it has to be fully charged before the stream, whatever. He bought a USB 3.0 video link cable for the camera, which actually works brilliantly, but nobody involved knew that a USB 3.0 cable goes into a USB 3.0 slot. They were putting it into USB 2.0 slots and wondering why the video was absolutely terrible.

My church has an absolute wealth of microphones of all different styles for many different purposes. Instead of buying a cheap XLR interface or splurging on a USB soundboard, the admin bought a Blue Yeti. Aside from being useless as a room mic, it not only cost more, but the audio quality is vastly worse than even the cheapest stage mics we have on hand. I'm sure one of the pastors can find a use for this (I know that they record stuff for people), it has no place anywhere near someone's streaming setup. I have to lend/give my current XLR-interface from home to rectify this.

Speaking of audio, the office they chose to stream in has a reverb problem. I get that they don't want to spend a lot of money or convert the room into a studio (I mean, it is a pastor's office), but the echo is too distracting for the average person. If the audio sucks, nobody is going to want to watch this thing. I get to talk with the property team this Sunday to get some hooks installed along the walls to hang some old, heavy blankets from. They can hide them away when they're not filming, and it will make a massive difference to the echo issue. If we somehow don't have blankets on hand, that's probably the easiest donation to ever ask for.

When the blankets go up, I need the office window covered, because the natural lighting is absolutely terrible. It makes everyone look flat, kinda washed out, and casts shadows on people's faces. I'm gonna try to wrangle up the ~$150 required to get a basic 2-box lighting kit that can be stored when not streaming.

So, they decided to stream with OBS, which gets my approval, but there are issues. They're using a 4-year-old laptop, which surprisingly isn't the limiting factor here. Nobody knew what they were doing with settings, so they were streaming in 733p and outputting at an even worse resolution. They also couldn't figure out how to remove the camera overlay that showed up on the screen, so they had zoomed in to crop that out, and tried streaming like that. Despite using the USB mic, they were only taking in laptop microphone audio. They turned the program on, figured out how to get the camera to feed, and then hit stream. I have no other explanation.

Simply said, I am taking over this project. Everything I said here is fundamental to basic broadcasting, and is the cheapest professional-quality setup I can currently imagine that won't be total jank. I hope there's budget left, but I think the entire $3000 was spent on the streaming couch, camera, usb mic, the camera cable and other nonsense.

I've got a lot of work to do. I told people involved in the project that I'm experienced with streaming and broadcasting production and offered insight throughout, which was ignored. I can't believe how out of hand this whole thing got.

I'm a woodworker who makes bowls and smaller pieces and such. I need to upgrade my lighting and background. (I have access to a pretty good camera/ use my iphone when in a pinch)

The way I see it, these are my 3 options:

1. This lightbox and lamp kit from amazon. I had made my own light box but wasnt happy with its performance.
   
   
2. These softboxes from amazon, plus a roll of background paper. The more expensive option and much more robust, but I can see this will give better lighting.
   
   
3. another possibility I haven't considered

In last week's 'ask anything' thread there was a discussion about studio lighting for film in which I mentioned picking up a cheap 5500k CFL continuous setup -- this one -- and there was a question of how well the florescents would play with film. I said I'd post some shots from my first test roll, so here are a couple of frames:

one, two

Thoughts/notes:

• Portra 160, no colour correction.
  
• Definitely quite a bit warmer than I expected.
  
• I don't find the cast disagreeable, although I am admittedly a bit colour blind sometimes.
  
• I didn't really follow the 1/60th rule that you're supposed to when shooting with florescents. I shot as fast as 1/250 on this roll and as far as I can tell there isn't any noticeable deviation in lighting quality across the shots. Possibly I am just a lucky guy?
  
• I have next to zero experience with artificial lighting, so I hope no one takes offense to the oddball setup I've got going on here. Two CFL clusters, one front-right-side at about eye level, and another in back (as you can see), pointed toward the subject/camera. No other light sources in the room - this was at night.
  
• She's not sad, she just good at pretending.
  
  Hopefully this is of interest to some!
  
  
  

Now we're entering the realm of studio lighting!

1600w in CFLs is about 88,000 lumens :)