gas generator w/ him's?
by nick
on
Sep 15, 2007 at 2:27:08 pm
i'm planning on shooting a lot of exteriors in the woods in the middle of nowhere, with hmi's and daylight kino's. all i have for power is a 5000 watt coleman gas powered generator. i know hmi ballasts have a pretty low tolerance for voltage drops, and that a bad generator can even hurt or blow an hmi ballast. has anyone had experience with this? i've heard there are "voltage regulators" you can buy for this sort of thing, does anyone have any info. on those?
thanks,
nick
Re: gas generator w/ him's? by Tim Kolb on Sep 16, 2007 at 4:17:09 am
Honestly, i've never run into an issue running HMIs off of generators...
My impression of the function of the "ballast" in the first place would be to keep the power well regulated.
We've run out of gas on generators and had the lights go out as a result pretty regularly if the crew is a little stretched and have never had any damage issues with lights.
...so i guess either I'm almost inexplicably lucky or the cautionary tale that was passed on to you was perhaps over-dramatized a bit.
Maybe someone else's experience has proved different...