Product Review

Comprehensive. Detailed. Practical. Set Lighting Technician's Handbook, Fourth Edition, is a friendly, hands-on manual covering the day-to-day practices, equipment, and tricks of the trade essential to anyone doing motion picture lighting, including the lamp operator, rigging crew, gaffer, best boy, or director of photography. This handbook offers a wealth of practical technical information, useful techniques, as well as aesthetic discussions.

The Set Lighting Technician's Handbook focuses on what is important when working on-set: trouble-shooting, teamwork, set protocol, and safety. It describes tricks and techniques for operating a vast array of lighting equipment including LEDs, xenons, camera synchronous strobes, black lights, underwater units, lighting effects units, and many others. Since its first edition, this handy on-set reference continues to be widely adopted as a training and reference manual by union training programs as well as top university film production programs.

New to the fourth edition:

* More coverage of the aesthetics of lighting
* Detailed information on LED technology and gear
* Material is harmonized with industry safety and skills training curriculum
* More coverage than ever before about setting up and running DMX512 networks and DMX512 enabled devices, including wireless DMX512 networks
* Completely revised and updated sections of HMIs, tungsten light fixtures, and fluorescent technologies
* Additional information on dealing with current harmonics, working with portable generators.
* New section on using 480V power
* In addition to previsualization software, new material provides a primer on creating professional light plots and using computer aided design software
* New additions to the arsenal of electrical distribution equipment that make our sets safer and easier to power
* More rigging tricks and techniques
* Written in the same friendly, easy-to-read style that has made this book so popular
* Companion Web site contains exclusive articles written by the author, illustrations, and an indispensable resource center with key industry links. Please visit