**Upgrading My Studio Lighting Setup with Cytus**

As a content creator, I'm always on the lookout for ways to improve my workflow and achieve better results. Recently, I upgraded my studio lighting setup using the Cytus Link app, which has made a significant difference in the quality of my videos. At first glance, it may seem like just another lighting change, but trust me, it's been a game-changer.

I started by reading off the gray card, which matched at 4,500 kelvin. This meant that, from the camera's perspective, the light output matched the color temperature I had set in the Cytus Link app. This is pretty cool, as it ensures that my skin tone will be a little more natural. The higher position of the lights also allowed more light to hit my face, resulting in a more evenly exposed image with less harsh shadows.

Next, I flipped on the kicker and adjusted its settings to complement the warmer color temperature of the key light. This resulted in a nicely separated kicker light that didn't cast too harsh shadows on me or the background. The kicker also took up less space overall, which was a welcome improvement.

One of the benefits of using the Cytus Link app is the ability to tweak and adjust settings with ease. I experimented with different effects, including a firework effect, but ultimately settled back into my previous setup. However, it's worth noting that this upgrade wasn't drastic; rather, it was a lateral move forward.

The real value of this lighting change lies in the workflow improvements it brings. In the past, I had been using similar gear for years, and while it worked fine, it was causing me headaches and limiting my creative freedom. This new setup has streamlined my process and reduced the time spent on camera preparation. Time is money, after all, and every minute counts when creating content.

**The Importance of Workflow**

As a content creator, I've learned that gear doesn't matter as much as workflow does. A good setup can make all the difference in achieving the desired results, but it's not just about having the right equipment – it's also about how you use it. This lighting change has made my life easier, and I'm confident that it will lead to better video quality and increased productivity.

**A Note on Kicker Lighting**

One thing that still bugs me about my current kicker light setup is its placement. Ideally, a kicker light should be positioned over the subject's right shoulder, but in my case, it was facing the same plane as the main light. I originally set this up to experiment with pivoting the s30 camera between different setups and using my desk as a backdrop for that specific project. However, it didn't quite work out, and I may end up installing another kicker light or tweaking the existing one further.

**Conclusion**

Upgrading my studio lighting setup has been a game-changer, and I'm excited to continue experimenting with new techniques and effects. If you're looking to improve your own workflow or simply want to see what's possible with studio lighting, I encourage you to check out the Cytus Link app and explore its features. Who knows? You may just find yourself upgrading your gear and workflow as well.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enof course my ac starts going literally as soon as i get my sync there it is today's video is going to be a weird one it's kind of about lights and also why gear kind of matters in terms of workflow and making changes that you may not even realize have ever been made on camera because that's how it goes as a creator sometimes is you make a lot of tweaks for yourself that the viewer doesn't necessarily notice so in this video we're going to be going from this to this and if you're looking at it and thinking that's the same image you know like pam halpert not exactly we're going to be talking about kicker lights and changing from this beastly godox s30 to the an led panel and lots of key lights from aperture lots of stuff stick with me i'm eposvox the stream professor and i just posted a studio tour if you missed that go check out the link in the description below but my motivation for going on and knocking out the studio tour before i finish things is i want to start evolving it already there are workflow frustrations that i've run into and when we talk about gear not mattering or whatever everyone focuses on this weird obsession with quality and whether it improves the quality of your video and that's not really how these things work a lot of it is workflow based and when i originally set up my desk lighting and camera setup here although it evolved a couple times before i really finalized it i had objectives in mind that i ended up not pursuing and i didn't do things exactly how i want and so i want to tweak it to get better results for me better results for you all but an easier workflow for myself as well so we're going to be upgrading our key light and the light dome the modifier attached to it uh key light being the main light source here and then we're also going to be upgrading our kicker light now a kicker light or a rim light is just a light that goes behind your subject to cast a little bit of light around the back of them and on the head it's often called a hair light as well to provide some background separation because without it you get kind of dark back there and you start to blend in and this makes things look a little bit more pleasing to the eye to isolate your subject and the like previously i've been using this beast uh the godox s30 they sent this for a review forever ago i never really got to do a whole lot with it uh but it's a nice little light it is a smaller light rather than the big bowens mount lights that i use for everything else this is a much smaller one they sent a ton of accessories so i have little modifiers i've got big old lenses on the front of it here so i attached it with a baby plate to my ceiling and cast it down with the goal of being to cast a rim light on me at this setup as well as if i use my desk as a backdrop on my main camera setup so i can just spin it around and then i have the power strip or power cable running to an outlet i actually have on the ceiling that we set up when we built the studio this hasn't been doing exactly what i want and frankly i end up leaving it off a lot of the times because it can cause negative side effects so instead we are upgrading to a different solution that was right in front of me with a dazny led panel that they sent forever ago just a basic led panel i'll have it linked in the video description but it's bi-color it's dimmable it can run off wall power and i can mount it and the results are quite pleasing first let's take a look at what things originally looked like with the aputure 120d the light dome 2 and the goldx s30 as my kicker so this is with the godox s30 up above me you can see if i roll my chair back you actually get the circle on it so i don't think it's really like there's some degree of light hitting my head but there's not much but the issue is the angle so if i go angle it more so this is with the godox s30 actually hitting the back of my head you can see i have a little bit more light on my head separating me from the backdrop the chair is nicely lit but i have these harsh shadows on my shoulders and moving my hands around starts creating some weird shadows and in some of the videos i had originally recorded it starts actually hitting my face and causing some shadows there which i don't like i don't think it is at the moment so this will be my point of reference with the godox enabled let's turn it off now and this is with no kicker light at all so i have much less separation from my background but it's perhaps a little bit more pleasing of an image just because it doesn't look like i have this really awkward light here my goal is to have that kicker light but despite the fact that everything i thought i had understood up to this point told me that you want a really harsh light i honestly don't know that i felt it was soft enough so we're gonna try an led panel here and see if it looks any better i don't know now this is with the led panel overhead you can see here i still have that separation i've got nice clean light on the back of me on the back of my head and on the chair but i don't have quite as much of those harsh shadows on me or my face as far as i can tell there's no real impact on my face and i have that set to super cold light so it's very white which once i get this light swapped out to a warmer tone that i'm going to run with is going to be more of a contrast on the back of my head i do think i like this a lot i i wasn't expecting it quite as much it's such an obvious solution sitting in front of me for a light i already had sitting around ah but yeah it's looking pretty good i might add some diffusion material to it later it has a diffusion sheet in front of it but i can just wrap some extra diffusion cloth around it at some point but yeah i just need to find the power supply and actually run it to my outlet on the ceiling so this got briefly mentioned during the studio tour but this is how my main key light for my main desktop webcam setup looks i have the aputure 120d and this is the og original one not the mark ii because this is what i purchased in 2018 2017 or 2018 to get better lighting and produce my obs master class i have this mounted in the light dome 2 the full size light dome 2 here it's basically a big old soft box pointed at where i sit and if i sit down in this spot you can see that it is effectively doing its job the only issue is this light dome is huge the average 120d is restricted to a single color temperature and i have found at least in my testing that switching to a in between of tungsten and daylight of 4500 kelvin may actually produce better skin tones for me this is just huge and you can see here the angle is awkward this is a big giant soft light dome and no matter how great the mounting that i get for it is and actually a big problem with this is actually the yoke or the yoke on the actual light itself doesn't hold up very well for these big light domes this was fixed with the mark ii but the mark one had the slippage problem and also i have it mounted on these impact super clamp friction arm things and eventually like it was actually pointed up much more you know parallel to or perpendicular to the ground parallel to me so that i had more light casting on me and over time it just slumps more and more due to the weight and so my goal here is to use a couple new products to try to alleviate both of these issues and fix my overall mounting scenario for something that may not look different at all for you let's swap it out i i i spent forever getting this system together so i'm terrified of like tearing it apart but it's time also for those this was briefly mentioned during the studio tour but this and the aperture tri-hc up there are both clamped with these friction clamps to a variable which is a big brush basically pressure fit bar that goes from the ceiling to the floor and just pushes up and down to hold everything in place which is awesome the only issue is mounting this giant light dome has always been a pain i have the light dome and light dome 2 and both of them has caused these same issues on the aperture 120d mark 1. so i'm hoping this new stuff will alleviate that so what new stuff do we have first and foremost we have the newish light dome se this is their newer light dome that they released that's meant to be kind of a follow-up to the light dome 2 to be ever so slightly smaller but it is still effectively the same concept just a little bit of smaller diameter and hopefully a little bit easier to work with here we get this spread hopefully this has the same easy install as the light dome too because the original light dome was absolutely hell to build and tear down this is still a big light dome but it is notably smaller because this is about the same size you know distance we have a few inches bigger here so this should be nice so now we have to tear down the old setup you can see here as a side by side of sorts that the light dome 2 is quite a bit bigger than the light dome sc and yet the light dome sc is still plenty of a big diffuser and light source like that's still more than good enough especially for the sitting talking head section that i'm doing so i think obviously the benefits are that it weighs less it's going to put less forward strain on the yoke of the light and gonna take up a little bit less room space up there hopefully be easier to work with so part two we gotta swap the actual light this video is brought to you by my merch you want desk mats we got them you want stickers we got them you want pins we got them they're pretty cool they're in the classic blink vhs style design if i actually sell the front part on camera they are awesome high quality premium feel made really awesome and you get a free trial to nebula eposvox gg merge so i wasn't just content uh upgrading light domes i actually am upgrading lights now full disclosure aperture did send this out however i have purchased my other light domes that i've had in the past as well as my original 120d for myself but they had offered to send this out this is their new amaran 200x so this is from their cheaper line the amaran is slightly cheaper than the the light storm cob line of their lights that the 120d came in but i believe this is supposed to be a little bit brighter and it's by color which may take away from some of the brightness a little bit here but that means that i can go between daylight and tungsten uh color temperatures which is helpful for that color temperature issue i talked about where i actually want to be in between daylight and tungsten and not locked to one or the other and so i am excited to test this out this also uses their new uh sidus link technology which is basically bluetooth that all the lights can connect to i think it uses other frequencies too but you know you connect to it through bluetooth on your phone and can control pretty much all of their lights now through your phone which is really powerful they had a remote system which was all right but i was never a huge fan of but doing this is pretty cool and then they did send out their bridge so i can actually connect my older 120d to the cytus link network and still control it from my phone now too which is pretty neat all right i include some stickers in the box the usual so they include in the box a basic uh cone modifier here which we're not gonna use for now this is still standard bowen's mount stuff so it's what i've been using for the rest of my lights already so that's good ecosystem is already there this is the light itself it's always nice getting a new piece of kit like this that actually you know it's new in the box looks pretty nice and clean yeah i'm digging this so far so fairly standard setup similar to the 120d if we get the bracket over here so this is supposed to be a little bit more of a rigid yoke obviously the uh the 120d mark ii and the 300 mark ii and stuff uh would be better for this uh the 300x would probably be more ideal overall but i'm excited to try this out a basic power switch here color temperature and intensity styles on the back with a little screen readout same quiet fan and the rest of them and we do have the led element on the front there i got some b-roll of all this as well power cord and then you have a control brick just like the actually this is just a power brick you don't have a control brick like the 120d the 120d has a control brick that you control everything through 200x has it on the back of the light let's get some b-roll shot and then we will get it hung up and take a look at it out of the box this is what the 200x and the light dome se looks like this thing is intense this is at 100 intensity just like i had the 120d nothing has changed in camera yet i am completely overexposed as evidenced by the zebras on my atomos monitor here so we are going to crank this down a bit until i'm not so overexposed not getting hot spots on me you can see and this is the whole diffusion thing i do still have a little bit of harshness over here even though i'm technically not overexposed now this test right now we are looking at if i put the light back to where i had my other one there we go we are looking at 5600 kelvin and then 57.8 intensity to get roughly even exposure without over exposing and mostly matching where the 120d was i guess if i turn it down a little this is probably about where it is but these hot spots are due to the lack of fusion so currently i have the internal disk that i showed me velcroing on and then the first layer of diffusion but it did come with two so i'm gonna strap that second one on and we're gonna see how it looks okay i've changed nothing else this is with both layer or all three now layers of diffusion going we can crank up the intensity a little bit we were at 52 this is all the way back at 100 i am overexposed again if i turn it down there i want to make sure if i get close to it i don't overexpose hands yikes there we go so maybe about there if i turn on some monitoring in my camera here that's probably about good we are back at 52 but it is going to be a little bit of a smoother roll-off we do not have the grid on the grid control spill which means lighting the backdrop and stuff and i found in my original testing at least with the previous setup the grid would keep the light on me but the background would get so dark that it wasn't worth it so we're not using the grid for now but i do think this looks alright so the next step is actually tuning the color temperature because the whole point of this for me was so i could use the 4 500 kelvin color temperature so i'm gonna crank that down we're at 4500k now but now i need to set color balance in my camera so one moment all right so i went in my camera's menus which i can't really show because it's mounted behind the teleprompter use my gray card and set a custom white balance based on the light it's reading off the gray card which it matched at 4 500 kelvin which means at least as far as the camera is concerned the light output matches the color temperature that i have set in the cytus link app here which is pretty cool so my skin tone should be a little bit more natural now as i have found the 4500 kelvin range to produce that a little bit better i have the light higher up so more light is actually able to hit my face which is going to help me get a little bit more evenly exposed image where i don't have quite as harsh as a shadow going on over here and now we can flip on our kicker and because we're using a warmer color temperature for our key light here our kicker light is actually a little bit wider now it's almost a little too white at the moment it almost looks like a bad office fluorescent light so we're going to tweak that a tiny bit and there we have it we have a nice evenly separating kicker light here that doesn't seem to cast quite as harsh shadows on me but still separates me from the background i am evenly lit by a light that doesn't smash into my teleprompter setup takes up a little bit less overall space which i absolutely like and a light that can get apparently significantly brighter and well not significantly but quite a bit brighter and give me the color temperature that i want and there is a ton of settings here in the cytus link app for setting up different gel stuff effects all sorts of weird stuff like i can try a firework effect here it's actually pretty clever uh if i wanted that uh but we can just come back here to where we were this is one of those things like i said at the start of the video that is an upgrade or at least a lateral grade sideways grade side grade lateral move uh that may not make a whole lot of sense if you're not regularly creating videos but this is one of those things where we talk about gear doesn't matter all the time and yada yada and if it's not improving the quality of your videos or making you more money it's not worth it but workflow is super important and there was a lot of things where i was using this gear that i had bought four years ago now that was working just fine but was slowly causing me some headache and some issues and allowing me to not get the results that i want without a lot more work and this allows me to get the results that i want with a lot less work and time is money i got to make a video out of it too and there is always something to be changed and tweaked in terms of workflow that doesn't necessarily require you know you to go buy a new expensive camera or anything in fact lighting and light positioning matters a lot more i did want to point something out that there is still one thing that bugs me about my current uh kicker light is that so my main light is facing this way right next to the camera my kicker light is only just over here behind me behind me is fine however it's on the same kind of plane here my left side as my key light which is not really how the kicker light is supposed to go theoretically it would be more optimal to have the kicker light over here over my right shoulder to give me more natural looking background separation however i originally set this up because i wanted the s30 here to be able to pivot uh between this set and then me using my desk as a backdrop on my main camera and use that as a kicker like there i've never done this ended up not working out for that purpose yeah i may keep this here or i may end up installing another i don't think i have a spare other than for a separate project i'm working on but i may end up installing another baby plate over on this corner somewhere and experimenting with the same led panel or maybe putting this back up here and trying to see if i can get a better kicker light situation going over this shoulder but for now i think i'm happy with these results so this is weird but i kind of wanted to walk you through some of the mindset and some of the gear shifts that can happen with a studio setup like this that you don't often see because realistically i'm gonna go shoot videos again and you may never realize that i had changed anything at all and that's perfectly fine and ideal like i don't want this to be a drastic setup or change but it is still work and thoughts that has to go on in order to make things better and easier for me so thank you so much for watching and also i in my studio tour if you missed that link below i covered that i wanted you all to watch as it evolves and this was one of the changes i was waiting on shooting the studio tour before i made hit the like button subscribe join us on discord and we'll meet againof course my ac starts going literally as soon as i get my sync there it is today's video is going to be a weird one it's kind of about lights and also why gear kind of matters in terms of workflow and making changes that you may not even realize have ever been made on camera because that's how it goes as a creator sometimes is you make a lot of tweaks for yourself that the viewer doesn't necessarily notice so in this video we're going to be going from this to this and if you're looking at it and thinking that's the same image you know like pam halpert not exactly we're going to be talking about kicker lights and changing from this beastly godox s30 to the an led panel and lots of key lights from aperture lots of stuff stick with me i'm eposvox the stream professor and i just posted a studio tour if you missed that go check out the link in the description below but my motivation for going on and knocking out the studio tour before i finish things is i want to start evolving it already there are workflow frustrations that i've run into and when we talk about gear not mattering or whatever everyone focuses on this weird obsession with quality and whether it improves the quality of your video and that's not really how these things work a lot of it is workflow based and when i originally set up my desk lighting and camera setup here although it evolved a couple times before i really finalized it i had objectives in mind that i ended up not pursuing and i didn't do things exactly how i want and so i want to tweak it to get better results for me better results for you all but an easier workflow for myself as well so we're going to be upgrading our key light and the light dome the modifier attached to it uh key light being the main light source here and then we're also going to be upgrading our kicker light now a kicker light or a rim light is just a light that goes behind your subject to cast a little bit of light around the back of them and on the head it's often called a hair light as well to provide some background separation because without it you get kind of dark back there and you start to blend in and this makes things look a little bit more pleasing to the eye to isolate your subject and the like previously i've been using this beast uh the godox s30 they sent this for a review forever ago i never really got to do a whole lot with it uh but it's a nice little light it is a smaller light rather than the big bowens mount lights that i use for everything else this is a much smaller one they sent a ton of accessories so i have little modifiers i've got big old lenses on the front of it here so i attached it with a baby plate to my ceiling and cast it down with the goal of being to cast a rim light on me at this setup as well as if i use my desk as a backdrop on my main camera setup so i can just spin it around and then i have the power strip or power cable running to an outlet i actually have on the ceiling that we set up when we built the studio this hasn't been doing exactly what i want and frankly i end up leaving it off a lot of the times because it can cause negative side effects so instead we are upgrading to a different solution that was right in front of me with a dazny led panel that they sent forever ago just a basic led panel i'll have it linked in the video description but it's bi-color it's dimmable it can run off wall power and i can mount it and the results are quite pleasing first let's take a look at what things originally looked like with the aputure 120d the light dome 2 and the goldx s30 as my kicker so this is with the godox s30 up above me you can see if i roll my chair back you actually get the circle on it so i don't think it's really like there's some degree of light hitting my head but there's not much but the issue is the angle so if i go angle it more so this is with the godox s30 actually hitting the back of my head you can see i have a little bit more light on my head separating me from the backdrop the chair is nicely lit but i have these harsh shadows on my shoulders and moving my hands around starts creating some weird shadows and in some of the videos i had originally recorded it starts actually hitting my face and causing some shadows there which i don't like i don't think it is at the moment so this will be my point of reference with the godox enabled let's turn it off now and this is with no kicker light at all so i have much less separation from my background but it's perhaps a little bit more pleasing of an image just because it doesn't look like i have this really awkward light here my goal is to have that kicker light but despite the fact that everything i thought i had understood up to this point told me that you want a really harsh light i honestly don't know that i felt it was soft enough so we're gonna try an led panel here and see if it looks any better i don't know now this is with the led panel overhead you can see here i still have that separation i've got nice clean light on the back of me on the back of my head and on the chair but i don't have quite as much of those harsh shadows on me or my face as far as i can tell there's no real impact on my face and i have that set to super cold light so it's very white which once i get this light swapped out to a warmer tone that i'm going to run with is going to be more of a contrast on the back of my head i do think i like this a lot i i wasn't expecting it quite as much it's such an obvious solution sitting in front of me for a light i already had sitting around ah but yeah it's looking pretty good i might add some diffusion material to it later it has a diffusion sheet in front of it but i can just wrap some extra diffusion cloth around it at some point but yeah i just need to find the power supply and actually run it to my outlet on the ceiling so this got briefly mentioned during the studio tour but this is how my main key light for my main desktop webcam setup looks i have the aputure 120d and this is the og original one not the mark ii because this is what i purchased in 2018 2017 or 2018 to get better lighting and produce my obs master class i have this mounted in the light dome 2 the full size light dome 2 here it's basically a big old soft box pointed at where i sit and if i sit down in this spot you can see that it is effectively doing its job the only issue is this light dome is huge the average 120d is restricted to a single color temperature and i have found at least in my testing that switching to a in between of tungsten and daylight of 4500 kelvin may actually produce better skin tones for me this is just huge and you can see here the angle is awkward this is a big giant soft light dome and no matter how great the mounting that i get for it is and actually a big problem with this is actually the yoke or the yoke on the actual light itself doesn't hold up very well for these big light domes this was fixed with the mark ii but the mark one had the slippage problem and also i have it mounted on these impact super clamp friction arm things and eventually like it was actually pointed up much more you know parallel to or perpendicular to the ground parallel to me so that i had more light casting on me and over time it just slumps more and more due to the weight and so my goal here is to use a couple new products to try to alleviate both of these issues and fix my overall mounting scenario for something that may not look different at all for you let's swap it out i i i spent forever getting this system together so i'm terrified of like tearing it apart but it's time also for those this was briefly mentioned during the studio tour but this and the aperture tri-hc up there are both clamped with these friction clamps to a variable which is a big brush basically pressure fit bar that goes from the ceiling to the floor and just pushes up and down to hold everything in place which is awesome the only issue is mounting this giant light dome has always been a pain i have the light dome and light dome 2 and both of them has caused these same issues on the aperture 120d mark 1. so i'm hoping this new stuff will alleviate that so what new stuff do we have first and foremost we have the newish light dome se this is their newer light dome that they released that's meant to be kind of a follow-up to the light dome 2 to be ever so slightly smaller but it is still effectively the same concept just a little bit of smaller diameter and hopefully a little bit easier to work with here we get this spread hopefully this has the same easy install as the light dome too because the original light dome was absolutely hell to build and tear down this is still a big light dome but it is notably smaller because this is about the same size you know distance we have a few inches bigger here so this should be nice so now we have to tear down the old setup you can see here as a side by side of sorts that the light dome 2 is quite a bit bigger than the light dome sc and yet the light dome sc is still plenty of a big diffuser and light source like that's still more than good enough especially for the sitting talking head section that i'm doing so i think obviously the benefits are that it weighs less it's going to put less forward strain on the yoke of the light and gonna take up a little bit less room space up there hopefully be easier to work with so part two we gotta swap the actual light this video is brought to you by my merch you want desk mats we got them you want stickers we got them you want pins we got them they're pretty cool they're in the classic blink vhs style design if i actually sell the front part on camera they are awesome high quality premium feel made really awesome and you get a free trial to nebula eposvox gg merge so i wasn't just content uh upgrading light domes i actually am upgrading lights now full disclosure aperture did send this out however i have purchased my other light domes that i've had in the past as well as my original 120d for myself but they had offered to send this out this is their new amaran 200x so this is from their cheaper line the amaran is slightly cheaper than the the light storm cob line of their lights that the 120d came in but i believe this is supposed to be a little bit brighter and it's by color which may take away from some of the brightness a little bit here but that means that i can go between daylight and tungsten uh color temperatures which is helpful for that color temperature issue i talked about where i actually want to be in between daylight and tungsten and not locked to one or the other and so i am excited to test this out this also uses their new uh sidus link technology which is basically bluetooth that all the lights can connect to i think it uses other frequencies too but you know you connect to it through bluetooth on your phone and can control pretty much all of their lights now through your phone which is really powerful they had a remote system which was all right but i was never a huge fan of but doing this is pretty cool and then they did send out their bridge so i can actually connect my older 120d to the cytus link network and still control it from my phone now too which is pretty neat all right i include some stickers in the box the usual so they include in the box a basic uh cone modifier here which we're not gonna use for now this is still standard bowen's mount stuff so it's what i've been using for the rest of my lights already so that's good ecosystem is already there this is the light itself it's always nice getting a new piece of kit like this that actually you know it's new in the box looks pretty nice and clean yeah i'm digging this so far so fairly standard setup similar to the 120d if we get the bracket over here so this is supposed to be a little bit more of a rigid yoke obviously the uh the 120d mark ii and the 300 mark ii and stuff uh would be better for this uh the 300x would probably be more ideal overall but i'm excited to try this out a basic power switch here color temperature and intensity styles on the back with a little screen readout same quiet fan and the rest of them and we do have the led element on the front there i got some b-roll of all this as well power cord and then you have a control brick just like the actually this is just a power brick you don't have a control brick like the 120d the 120d has a control brick that you control everything through 200x has it on the back of the light let's get some b-roll shot and then we will get it hung up and take a look at it out of the box this is what the 200x and the light dome se looks like this thing is intense this is at 100 intensity just like i had the 120d nothing has changed in camera yet i am completely overexposed as evidenced by the zebras on my atomos monitor here so we are going to crank this down a bit until i'm not so overexposed not getting hot spots on me you can see and this is the whole diffusion thing i do still have a little bit of harshness over here even though i'm technically not overexposed now this test right now we are looking at if i put the light back to where i had my other one there we go we are looking at 5600 kelvin and then 57.8 intensity to get roughly even exposure without over exposing and mostly matching where the 120d was i guess if i turn it down a little this is probably about where it is but these hot spots are due to the lack of fusion so currently i have the internal disk that i showed me velcroing on and then the first layer of diffusion but it did come with two so i'm gonna strap that second one on and we're gonna see how it looks okay i've changed nothing else this is with both layer or all three now layers of diffusion going we can crank up the intensity a little bit we were at 52 this is all the way back at 100 i am overexposed again if i turn it down there i want to make sure if i get close to it i don't overexpose hands yikes there we go so maybe about there if i turn on some monitoring in my camera here that's probably about good we are back at 52 but it is going to be a little bit of a smoother roll-off we do not have the grid on the grid control spill which means lighting the backdrop and stuff and i found in my original testing at least with the previous setup the grid would keep the light on me but the background would get so dark that it wasn't worth it so we're not using the grid for now but i do think this looks alright so the next step is actually tuning the color temperature because the whole point of this for me was so i could use the 4 500 kelvin color temperature so i'm gonna crank that down we're at 4500k now but now i need to set color balance in my camera so one moment all right so i went in my camera's menus which i can't really show because it's mounted behind the teleprompter use my gray card and set a custom white balance based on the light it's reading off the gray card which it matched at 4 500 kelvin which means at least as far as the camera is concerned the light output matches the color temperature that i have set in the cytus link app here which is pretty cool so my skin tone should be a little bit more natural now as i have found the 4500 kelvin range to produce that a little bit better i have the light higher up so more light is actually able to hit my face which is going to help me get a little bit more evenly exposed image where i don't have quite as harsh as a shadow going on over here and now we can flip on our kicker and because we're using a warmer color temperature for our key light here our kicker light is actually a little bit wider now it's almost a little too white at the moment it almost looks like a bad office fluorescent light so we're going to tweak that a tiny bit and there we have it we have a nice evenly separating kicker light here that doesn't seem to cast quite as harsh shadows on me but still separates me from the background i am evenly lit by a light that doesn't smash into my teleprompter setup takes up a little bit less overall space which i absolutely like and a light that can get apparently significantly brighter and well not significantly but quite a bit brighter and give me the color temperature that i want and there is a ton of settings here in the cytus link app for setting up different gel stuff effects all sorts of weird stuff like i can try a firework effect here it's actually pretty clever uh if i wanted that uh but we can just come back here to where we were this is one of those things like i said at the start of the video that is an upgrade or at least a lateral grade sideways grade side grade lateral move uh that may not make a whole lot of sense if you're not regularly creating videos but this is one of those things where we talk about gear doesn't matter all the time and yada yada and if it's not improving the quality of your videos or making you more money it's not worth it but workflow is super important and there was a lot of things where i was using this gear that i had bought four years ago now that was working just fine but was slowly causing me some headache and some issues and allowing me to not get the results that i want without a lot more work and this allows me to get the results that i want with a lot less work and time is money i got to make a video out of it too and there is always something to be changed and tweaked in terms of workflow that doesn't necessarily require you know you to go buy a new expensive camera or anything in fact lighting and light positioning matters a lot more i did want to point something out that there is still one thing that bugs me about my current uh kicker light is that so my main light is facing this way right next to the camera my kicker light is only just over here behind me behind me is fine however it's on the same kind of plane here my left side as my key light which is not really how the kicker light is supposed to go theoretically it would be more optimal to have the kicker light over here over my right shoulder to give me more natural looking background separation however i originally set this up because i wanted the s30 here to be able to pivot uh between this set and then me using my desk as a backdrop on my main camera and use that as a kicker like there i've never done this ended up not working out for that purpose yeah i may keep this here or i may end up installing another i don't think i have a spare other than for a separate project i'm working on but i may end up installing another baby plate over on this corner somewhere and experimenting with the same led panel or maybe putting this back up here and trying to see if i can get a better kicker light situation going over this shoulder but for now i think i'm happy with these results so this is weird but i kind of wanted to walk you through some of the mindset and some of the gear shifts that can happen with a studio setup like this that you don't often see because realistically i'm gonna go shoot videos again and you may never realize that i had changed anything at all and that's perfectly fine and ideal like i don't want this to be a drastic setup or change but it is still work and thoughts that has to go on in order to make things better and easier for me so thank you so much for watching and also i in my studio tour if you missed that link below i covered that i wanted you all to watch as it evolves and this was one of the changes i was waiting on shooting the studio tour before i made hit the like button subscribe join us on discord and we'll meet again\n"