review: aputure spotlight max

What’s up my fellow light lover! In today’s episode, I’ll review the Aputure spotlight max AND give you every tip and trick I know about using a spotlight on a film set. From throwing light, to raking backgrounds, to volumetric lighting, let’s shine a spotlight, on spotlights!

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spotlight overview

Spotlights are modifiers for our point source lights. Due to their design, they can be easily controlled and shaped, giving us technicians a lot of flexibility in how we use them.

Here’s how they work – light gets emitted from a primary focal point, in our case, light comes from the COB on a point source LED unit, it gets bounced off an ellipsoidal reflector, and ends up focused at a secondary focal point. Then, the light passes through the lens barrel and out through the front of the unit.

By focusing all the light into this one secondary focal point, the output can easily be controlled and shaped on the unit directly.

Each spotlight comes with a slot aligned as close as possible to the secondary focal point. This slot is where us technicians can insert gobos, which are small discs with patterns cut into them. Placing these into the gobo slot causes the unit to cast a shadow of our desired pattern. I will be covering how I use this feature later in the video to enhance our frames!

A nice thing about the new spotlight max is that if a gobo isn’t inserted in exactly the orientation I’d like it to be, I can just rotate this knob here to get it in position! I wished for this feature on their original spotlight and the spotlight mini, so it’s nice to finally see a rotatable gobo holder in this new one.

The gobo holder also clicks into place with a safety release switch so that it won’t fall out when the unit is inverted and rigged overhead.

Directly adjacent to the gobo slot on every spotlight will be these four shutter blades. These are the second way spotlight units can control and shape light. The shutter blades allow easy shaping of the light by just sliding in and out.

A “fun” thing about the shutter blades is that the top shutter controls the bottom cut, and vice versa. Same thing with the left and right ones. This is because they are placed slightly in front of the secondary focal point, so their effects are inverted!

In order to bring the gobo pattern or shutter blade cut into focus, the lens barrel position is adjustable. The distance between our light and the surface it’s casting onto isn’t always consistent, so the ability to focus gives us flexibility in where we position our light on set.

I don’t always use a hard cut though, softening the hard shadow by repositioning the barrel allows me to blend my shadow pattern more readily into existing soft lighting in the scene.

On most units, including the spotlight max, the lenses can be removed and swapped depending on how wide or narrow the beam needs to be.

For example, I’ll swap lenses when I need to throw a lot of light over a longer distance. I can switch to the 19 degree beam from the 36 to double the effective output on my 1200d and reduce the amount of light wasted due to cutting with the shutter blades!

One useful accessory for the Spotlight Max is the ETC adapter. This allows older, more inexpensive lenses to be adapted to the newer LED units. They’re not quite as optimized as the new aputure lenses for the spotlight max, but it does save some money if you’ve already got them old lenses laying around or can find them for cheap.

Another thing that I appreciate about the Spotlight Max over the original Aputure spotlight design is the double brake on the yoke. The yoke on the original one didn’t inspire a lot of confidence, but this one on the new Max is the burliest brake system Aputure has designed yet.

Even cooler, it’s a super quick release system. So for things like upside-down rigging, the tech can first get the yoke in place and secured properly, then worry about adding the additional weight of the unit itself.

One final note about using a spotlight: there’s always some light leakage around the front of the unit because spotlights are never truly perfect lensing systems. Because of this, I always place a flag in front of the unit to block unwanted spill towards set when necessary. This helps keep light rays from affecting the scene in unwanted ways. It can also shield your talent from accidentally looking directly into the unit!

Now that I’ve covered the basics of a spotlight, let’s talk about how we can actually use them to make some cinematic images!

bouncing

Sometimes the DP asks for a soft look to come from a direction that a large modifier won’t fit into. This oftentimes is a result of a wall being right where I’d need to place my light. One of my favorite ways to solve this dilemma is with a spotlight and a white bounce!

I’ll position the white bounce where I’d like my “source” to be for the talent. Depending on what the bounce is, a beadboard, rag, white card, etc., I’ll rig it into position with tape, clips, two stands, whatever. Then, I’ll place my spotlight in an out of the way location, point it at the bounce, turn it on, and control the shape of the output with the shutter blades. If I find that I’m cutting too much light, I will try to size down into a smaller lens so I’m not wasting so much light output.

Ideally, I’m also hitting the bounce as close to perpendicular to its face as I can. This is both because angle of incidence equals angle of reflection, so I’m bouncing directly towards my talent, and I’m also reducing light loss due to added inefficiency.

This style setup results in a large bounced source that’s the same size as my softbox would have been, without needing the physical space that a softbox would require!

The trade off with this setup is that because the light must first travel some distance before bouncing, the effective output of any light is going to be reduced compared to that same light going directly through a softbox.

One way to warm the color temperature of the light without needing a gel is to use unbleached muslin wrapped over the white bounce. This has another advantage of also not reducing the output intensity of the light like a gel would.

I can also use this same technique to bounce light off a wooden table from overhead, like in this reference frame from “hateful eight”, to create a warm key light that fills talent naturally.

This method also works great as a room fill in cramped spaces. Rake the light directly across the ceiling itself, or rig a bounce where you’d like the source to be and hit it with a spotlight!

One fun color temperature tidbit I’ll do in particular when I use a spotlight for a room fill is to add a bit of CTB to it. By coloring the room fill with a slight blue, I’m adding that to the shadows in the scene. Then I’ll warm up my key light to around 5,000K and get a subtle “cinematic” orange and blue look in frame.

lap rake

I also use a spotlight to add a little “je ne sai quoi” to an a-roll interview by setting up a spotlight to rake across my talent’s lap. I prefer my lap rake effect to be subtle, so I’ll usually set this one up with my Aputure 60x and spotlight mini rather than blast my talent with a 300-plus watt light.

I’ll place the spotlight and 60x combo so that the light is coming from the same direction as the key light. Then, I’ll shape the throw area so that the spotlight is only hitting the lap of the talent, usually from about half their chest down to their thighs. Once that’s in place, I’ll defocus the lens to blur the line between hard light and soft light from the key.

The subtle hard shadows from this setup help give off a “soft light streaming through a large window” look that feels very natural.

specialing

Spotlights don’t have to just be for people though, another great use for them is to highlight objects in frame.

The ease of shaping a spotlight means very specific objects can be targeted, and, similar to our lap rake, defocusing the lens helps smooth the transition between the highlighted object and its surrounding environment.

This technique can be great for a-roll interviews with a product on screen, making something pop for narrative purposes, or just lifting elements in the foreground to help separate them from the background.

wall scratch

If you’re really paying attention, you may have already caught onto another way I like to use spotlights while you’re watching these a-roll segments.

Spotlights are my favorite way to add visual interest to the background of a scene! They can either be used without the gobo pattern and shaped using just the shutters like I have done here, or a gobo can be inserted to cast shadow patterns like tree branches, blinds, windows, etc.

There’s two things I’ll consider when placing a scratch light. One, I’ll have the light come from the same direction as the key light. That way it feels more natural to the viewer. Since the hard light source is coming from the “window” in this direction, it makes logical sense that my key light would also be coming from this side!

The other consideration is to have the light rake across the background *towards* the camera. By positioning it this way, the shadows are visible to camera and help give the background added depth and visual interest. If we rake from the same direction the camera is facing, we get a much flatter look that doesn’t feel very “cinematic”.

volumetric lighting

The last technique is one of the funner ways to use lighting, and that’s to create what’s called “volumetric lighting”.

Volumetric lighting is these rays of light seen here in this hazy scene – and spotlights are the perfect tool for this.

Normal lights would require a significant amount of modification to have anything other than just one beam of light. If we want something with more visual interest, then a spotlight and gobo make it super easy.

Just place the spotlight onto your point source, insert the gobo, and voila! Instant multiple beams of light rather than one. Now it looks like the sunlight is streaming through tree branches into the room, changing the atmosphere entirely.

spotlight max thoughts

Alright, let’s wrap this up with my thoughts on the spotlight max unit by Aputure!

Firstly, the cuts are great, there’s minimal chromatic aberration with my daylight units, and I struggle to find anything wrong with how they’re built, or how they function with their designated lights.

Probably my most controversial opinion on the spotlight max is that even though it’s a phenomenal modifier, it’s not going to end up in a majority of Aputure users kits. Let’s walk through why I think this:

Using Aputure’s own spotlight max video as reference, I wasn’t that impressed with the difference between the original spotlight and the new spotlight max when used with the 600d. A doubling of intensity for 3x the price doesn’t quite feel worth it, especially if I’m not really having an issue exposing the 600d with the original spotlight properly when used as a background rake, the way I use it most often.

To me, this reads like a modifier that’s been optimized for use with a 1200d. And that means the gaffer will probably have multiple 1200d’s on set. So that kind of kit runs into at least a 1-ton grip truck territory, and probably even larger to really be used effectively.

The unit is also a tank. The weight alone of the 1200d head unit and spotlight max combined is 45 pounds! This means it ALSO requires the proper rigging and grip support to be used safely, which means it’s not really a one-man team item either.

The chonkiness of this unit continues with the size of this flight case, the thing is massive. Working out of my station wagon like I do, I had to take the spotlight max out of the flight case and buckle it into my front seat every time I brought it to set. I just couldn’t justify bringing it in the case because the flight case takes up the space of 3 lights, which would drastically reduce the amount of situations I could effectively cover in a day.

But! With a couple 1200d’s in the kit, the spotlight max opens up a lot of possibilities at higher light levels that weren’t possible before. And I’m digging this new trend of Aputure products that are built like beefy little tanks as we owner/operators begin to worry more and more about reliability.

So, if you’ve got a few 1200d’s laying around, this is the perfect spotlight you’ve been waiting for. If your kit is anything less, you’re probably better off saving some money and going with the original spotlight for now, or just hiring a gaffer when you need the new max!

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disclaimers

– Aputure provided the Spotlight Max

– Some of the links in Tyler’s blog posts are affiliate links, which means that qualifying purchases will help financially support Tyler at no extra cost to you. If you wanted to purchase something else but still support Tyler, please use the following link: https://amzn.to/3WdnsdM

– This blog post contains only Tyler’s opinions about G&E, gaffing, and LED lighting, and was not reviewed or paid for by outside persons or manufacturers

– Tyler Trepod is a freelance owner/operator gaffer of a 1-Ton Grip & Electric truck based in Denver, Colorado and serves the Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, & Fort Collins markets