DIY 100 watt LED conversion project overview

This is one of my latest projects, moving more and more into movie making has brought with it the need for bigger and better lights!

LED's are all the rage being super bright and cheap to run! they also don't get hot like traditional tungsten lights :)

Typical 'Red Heads' run with 800 watt bulbs making them a nightmare to use, they need so much power to run and the heat is something else, they also don't last very long as the bulbs only have around a 80 hour lifespan!

Make way for the new boy on the block!  the LED lights are all the rage but they come in a few different types,  Light panels which contain multiple small LEDs and more traditional looking Single LED clip lights.

The beauty with the panels are they are portable (most of which can run on batteries) but they do have there down side, that being they are a large light source which can be good but makes it very hard if not impossible to make the light very directional, this is highlighted when trying to use barndoors to direct the light from a panel... it is almost impossible.

This is where Single Chip LED's come in.  Being more compact than a LED panel the LED Chip acts more like a traditional bulb making the light from them very hard.  Hard light is easy to make soft by bouncing or diffusing it so the options with the single chip led are greater.

Having a couple of 'Hot Lights' which i no longer use i plan to 'modify' them to use this new LED technology.

The donor lights are Elinchrom Minilite's which have a maximum light rating of 250 watts making them pretty much useless.

In part 2 i will go through the work i have done to convert these lights and part three will be the final tests.