Kino Flo is a manufacturer of lighting equipment for use in motion pictures, television and photography. Located in Burbank

Burbank, California

Burbank is a city in Los Angeles County in Southern California, United States, north of downtown Los Angeles. The estimated population in 2010 was 103,340....

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

, Kino Flo is best known for its fluorescent tube

Fluorescent lamp

A fluorescent lamp or fluorescent tube is a gas-discharge lamp that uses electricity to excite mercury vapor. The excited mercury atoms produce short-wave ultraviolet light that then causes a phosphor to fluoresce, producing visible light. A fluorescent lamp converts electrical power into useful...

-based systems that are optimized for the color temperature

Color temperature

Color temperature is a characteristic of visible light that has important applications in lighting, photography, videography, publishing, manufacturing, astrophysics, and other fields. The color temperature of a light source is the temperature of an ideal black-body radiator that radiates light of...

 of film

Film stock

Film stock is photographic film on which filmmaking of motion pictures are shot and reproduced. The equivalent in television production is video tape.-1889–1899:...

 and digital video

Digital video

Digital video is a type of digital recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal.The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article.- History :...

. These lights provide a relatively compact and efficient way of providing soft lighting. Compared to the original workhorse of motion picture lighting, incandescent lights

Incandescent light bulb

The incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe makes light by heating a metal filament wire to a high temperature until it glows. The hot filament is protected from air by a glass bulb that is filled with inert gas or evacuated. In a halogen lamp, a chemical process...

 (and, more recently, HMI

Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide

Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide, or HMI, is a Osram brand metal-halide gas discharge medium arc-length lamp manufactured for the film and entertainment industry. Hydrargyrum is Latin for mercury...

 lights), Kino Flo tubes produce less heat and fit into smaller spaces, two significant advantages that have made them popular with professionals.

Uses

Soft light use is popular in cinematography and film. Various hollywood production companies along with independent film makers are known for their use of soft lights.

History

The first Kino Flo unit was created in 1987, during the filming of the movie Barfly

Barfly (film)

Barfly is a 1987 American film which is a semi-autobiography of poet/author Charles Bukowski during the time he spent drinking heavily in Los Angeles. The screenplay by Bukowski was commissioned by the French film director Barbet Schroeder – it was published, with illustrations by the author, in...

. Director of photography Robby Mueller was filming in a cramped interior, and couldn't fit traditional lights into the location. In order to work around the problem, the film's gaffer

Gaffer (filmmaking)

A gaffer in the motion picture industry and on a television crew is an electrician that can be head of the electrical department, responsible for the execution of the lighting plan for a production. Gaffer, outside of the motion picture industry, is a traditional British English word for an older...

 Frieder Hochheim and best boy

Best boy

In a film crew there are two kinds of best boy: best boy electric and best boy grip. They are assistants to their department heads, the gaffer and the key grip, respectively.- Job responsibilities :...

 Gary Swink designed a high-output fluorescent light that had a remote ballast

Electrical ballast

An electrical ballast is a device intended to limit the amount of current in an electric circuit. A familiar and widely used example is the inductive ballast used in fluorescent lamps, to limit the current through the tube, which would otherwise rise to destructive levels due to the tube's...

, allowing the lamp unit to become small and lightweight enough to be taped to the wall. Hochheim and Swink subsequently created a company, Kino Flo Incorporated, to manufacture and market their innovation to the film industry. The new lights were quickly embraced by cinematographers, and now are considered a staple of a standard motion picture lighting package.

Technology

The two major innovations of the unit were the high-frequency ballast, which gave the lights greater intensity and eliminated flicker commonly found in off-the-shelf fluorescent tubes, and the Kino Flo tubes, which contained a number of special phosphors designed to eliminate the characteristic tints in the magenta-green spectrum which are present in most domestic fluorescent lights. Since the type of tube determines the color temperature, any Kino Flo lamphead can be quickly converted between daylight and tungsten balances by simply changing out the tubes. Mid-range color temperature can also be created by mixing tubes of both color temperatures. Kino Flo have also expanded their tube line in recent years, creating visual effects tubes optimized for bluescreen and greenscreen spectra, as well as a variety of other shades for general color effects.