LEDs - with Tim S. Kang

Team Deakins

James Ellis Deakins

Tv & Film, Filmlighting, Deakins, Movies, Filmmaking, Production, Film, Cinematography, Film Interviews

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

SEASON 2 - EPISODE 165 - LEDs - with Tim S. Kang

In this episode of the Team Deakins Podcast, we learn about LED lighting. LEDs are now commonplace in productions, and we thought an episode about the technology and its applications could be helpful for anyone with as many questions as us. Our guest is Tim S. Kang, a cinematographer and the principal engineer for imaging applications at Aputure, and we start by learning how Tim came to work on this side of the business. He also helps us understand a number of topics, including: the history of lighting in cinema, the definition of spectrum, the evolution of LEDs, and the possibilities of lighting in post. We also discuss the efforts to institute a standard among LED fixtures, and we reflect on the historical problem cinematographers have always faced: inconsistencies with light sources.

This episode is sponsored by Aputure & Sandstorm

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi and welcome to Season 2 of the Team Deacons podcast,
0:07.0	a collection of informal conversations between Roger and James Deacons and a guest.
0:13.0	We never know where the conversation will take us, so listen in and see where it goes.
0:21.9	This episode is sponsored by Aperture and its new Storm XT-52, the industry's most
0:29.5	powerful LED point source light. Brighter than a 6K HMI and powered by Aperture's revolutionary
0:36.8	Blair light engine, the Storm XT-52 is both a tunable
0:41.9	white light and also the brightest ever adjustable color LED. Storm XT-52, unrivaled output, only from
0:52.2	aperture.
1:04.1	This episode is sponsored by Sandstorm, the Technodali specialist now based at Ealing Studios in London.
1:13.3	The Technodali is a fully repeatable camera crane and motion control in one, allowing cinematographers to hand craft a shot and then repeat it instantly and frame accurately for visual effects.
1:19.7	Find them on Instagram and YouTube at Sandstorm underscore films.
1:33.6	Today we're looking into a lighting technology, the technology of LED lighting.
1:41.4	LED stands for light emitting diode and was first created in 1927 by Russian inventor Oleg Losseth.
1:43.3	But it was much later that it became the LEDs that we know today.
1:48.0	To help us dive into the world of LED lights, we have cinematographer Tim Kang,
1:53.5	who is the principal engineer for imaging applications at Aperture.
1:57.8	He also serves as the chair for the lighting committee on the ASC motion imaging
2:03.8	technology council. Tim, thank you for doing this. Thanks for having me. Let's start, though,
2:10.3	with our regular question, which is, how did you get to where you are today? Were you born with
2:15.9	just a lot of knowledge about lighting? Or how did you
2:19.6	find it? Did you want to be something else first? What's your story? Actually, my dad's a pastor,
2:27.2	so I had zero connection to the film industry. Wow. And he was a past, you know, I'm Korean-, my parents are the ones that immigrated. And I grew up, you know, always being an outsider. I grew up in New Jersey in the New York area of the United States. And well, what happened was that I was always a visual kid and always loved art, but as an immigrant kid, you have to please the parents or feel a pressure to kind of fit into that mold. So I went into engineering
	...

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