 LED lighting. Many of you may use it in your PC to illuminate your sick build or give it a cool color effect that matches the rest of it. However, today I'll be talking about LED lighting for video production and why we decided to adapt it to light the majority of the videos we make here at Linus Media Group. Intel has brought DDR4 to the mainstream with their Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K processors. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. So to understand how we came to where we are today, we have to go back to the lights I started with. Starting with one of the classics, this is the standard Lowell tungsten fixture. It's a floodlight which utilizes an incandescent bulb that draws a rather high 1000W from the wall. It packs quite a bit of punch, but your power bill will start to rack up using several of these for too long. Not to mention how hot the light itself gets after only a couple of minutes of use, making it much more difficult to operate. Tungsten lights have long been the staple of lighting for anyone doing video work for decades, but because of their high power draw and heat output, they can be a less attractive option to work with when you need lots of lights set up at once and are tight on power distribution. This brings me to the next solution that we had, fluorescent lights, and in this context specifically compact fluorescent lights, or CFLs like this Impact Softbox which can take a total of 4 CFL bulbs. The benefit to a light like this is that they are generally a much lower power draw to the previous tungsten. The main problem with them for our use is that the bulbs that can typically be used in a fixture like this are not of the highest quality when it comes to color. CFLs specifically also do not lend themselves well to dimming, so the control you have over the output on these types of lights is a bit lacking overall. While we did end up using the CFL softboxes for a long time here on Linus Tech Tips, I had been continually looking for a better solution since the color from the CFLs, even when properly white balanced, left something to be desired. This brings me to our main fixtures of choice, and what I use to shoot over 80% of what we do here at Linus Media Group, high output LED lights, and in this case Westcott's Flex LED kit. For a long time LEDs had a very bad reputation when it came to using them for video or photography work. This attitude towards them mainly stemmed from the vast majority of LEDs available in the first few years being garbage in terms of build quality, features, and particularly color. This was the main reason I had held back from using them since I had not found any LEDs that were better than our overall setup. LEDs in the beginning tend to have nasty green or magenta color spikes, not unlike poorly made CFLs. Now however, LEDs have been refined to be of a much higher quality. The Westcott Flex have become one of my favorite lights to use around the office simply because of how fast they are to adapt to any situation, as well as their excellent rendering of skin tones compared to LEDs I've used in the past. With LED lights like the Flex, I can travel to any location that has any wall power and not worry about blowing a circuit with any of the lights that I want to use, thanks to LEDs' far more efficient power draw. The opposite is true if I ever wanted to utilize lights like our Lowell Incandescent since blowing a circuit even in the studio is a constant concern if I'm not careful with power distribution. The Flex system like other LEDs can also utilize a portable battery system allowing us to use the lights in places where we cannot draw from the wall like in a car or on location outdoors. An example of how I'm currently using one of our Flex lights is in our Workshop set. I'm utilizing one of our mid-sized Flex lights as a fill light for both sides of the set in this inexpensive 30-inch China Ball, and because of the flexibility of the design, I've simply folded the light into a cylinder and clipped it to the inside of the China Ball. Super simple. On the recent video that Luke did on the SteamVR performance test, which you can watch here, I used Flexes to set up each location we shot the video in. I had a fairly limited amount of time and I hate doing math, so instead of calculating if I could blow a circuit running all of our tungsten lights, and instead of using the fluorescents, which can take a while to turn on, using the LEDs made sense and helped me speed through the setup process. So in conclusion, I, like many others, had my reservations for utilizing LED lighting for video production, but since Linus would kill me if I accidentally kept leaving lights that drew a thousand watts of power constantly, LED lights like the Flex light have become a good solution to simplify the way that I work, and for the curious, I would highly recommend seeing if LED lights would fit your workflow and needs. And on that subject, Rackspace! Rackspace is the top-tier managed cloud computing company, and they've got dedicated storage options to meet the performance, security, network capacity, and compliance needs of pretty much anybody. I mean, if they don't have it, then it's probably not there. They're backed by their fanatical 24x7 365 support, and they're inviting all of you to their interactive deep dive sessions. They take an hour out of every week or two to discuss the benefits of dedicated solutions and their place in a cloud-enabled world. They have upcoming events and recorded Google Hangouts available on topics from security to compliance to performance and cost. They will provide you with downloads to reference architectures, e-books, and white papers on the session's landing pages, and it's a live and active participation, so you can go and ask real questions to real people and interact with them. Their next sessions are on moving to the cloud and leaving your VMware deployment behind, and performance requirements, improving operational efficiency. Check out the details in the video description below. So thank you guys for watching. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon, buying a cool t-shirt like this one, or with a direct monthly contribution through the forum. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. So in the top right hand corner, click that little button where Luke cooks a pizza on a computer made of cardboard. Yeah, it's pretty awesome.