LEDs For Small Studio Scenario

It's all about the trade off between time and money.
The short answer is buy some dimable units. If you aren't into electronics and aren't doing it to learn you will waste time and money and gain no pleasure.
A little story if I might...
When I first started out playing with electronics I was selling Hi-Fi and components in Soho London. A regular customer from a theatre wanted to dim some lights... I sold him some high power variable resistors (having done a quick 'back of an envelope' calculation). He came back a few days later with them all burn out. The manager refunded his cash and gave me a ticking off.
Electronics is easy in theory, but much trickier in practice.
Take my advice and save yourself a lot of grief.
Anyhow the kit you buy will get used again and again...and again
Del
(BTW, the claymation project sounds sooo much fun, my fave toy as a kid was Plasticine)

Agree with Del, unless you're talking very small scale stuff.

Can you give us an idea of the scale? How much lighting would you expect to need if you were using, say, low voltage halogen lamps (wattage and no. of lamps)?

http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&safe=off&&sa=X&ei=jno-TKHHJIPlnAfruM3zBA&ved=0CBgQBSgA&q=claymation+%2Bled+%2Blighting&spell=1&fp=1589e085a4a8df03

Sounds like a cool project. Offhand, I agree with Del. If you don't know anything about electronics and LEDs you could waste a lot of your time, energy and money. It would be best to get some off the shelf assemblies that are ready to use.

Having said that, I'd caution you that you may have trouble finding what you need. You can get Red, Green and Blue LEDs, but they won't give you quite the same lighting as traditional Red, Green and Blue incandescent lamps used in theaters. You'll probably need to supplement their lighting with phosphor-type 'cool white' LEDs and Yellow LEDs. You'll also need to keep the LEDs cool (with fans) because as LEDs get hot, the output intensity of the Red and Yellow ones will drop off compared to the Green, Blue and White ones, which will give you a blue-green color shift.

To avoid any flicker effects (strobe effects) between the lighting and your camera you'll either want to run the LEDs either via current-controlled DC power or high-frequency pulse-width-modulation (PWM). You'll also have to think about whether you want spot lighting or flood lighting, or a combination.

The folks at Rosco specialize in all kinds of lighting for a wide variety of industries but especially for theater. They can be very helpful. Here's a link to their Australian website: http://www.rosco.com/australia/index.asp

wow, you guys are fast. Much appreciated. Very interesting to hear that the leds would colour shift at temperature! Not sure what the answer is there - fans sound a bit of a hassle... maybe I can fix that in post. Will also look out for DC current controller - thanks. I think it will be best to stick with what I know and either shell out for off the shelf units, or contract someone to wire up some units for me. Thanks guys, this really helped.

Thanks, I am aware of CRI and the variable quality of lights of all kinds. Being necessarily involved in colour correction and post-processing I often don't worry too much (I know, I know, lazy answer). Also, the lighting (and lighting colour) is often 'dramatic' rather than realistic, so between this and the post correction I'm not too worried about that. More important would be consistency - both between individual bulbs of the same spec and over time. I guess I just have to hope that these companies are consistently inconsistent! But I concur - good answer. AJB

I'm glad to hear you are aware of the color quality issue, I don't like to see anyone's hard earned money go to waste. If I may suggest to you that if it is within your budget take a good look at Philips LED's, I've found they are more consistent than many others. I don't work for them nor get any benefit from suggesting their produtcs, even though they are my competitor. But I believe it is only fair to acknowledge companies with good engineering that are really working to make good products.

Good Luck!

FYI:

Colorkinetics are Phillips LED's (see post 7)

http://www.elationlighting.eu/images/media///manuals/manuals_e/opti-tri-par-cutsheet.pdf

or

http://www.colorkinetics.com/ls/rgb/

Before you get to involved, try a simple experiment.

Go to your local radio shack type store. Get two D size cells (flashlight batteries); a battery holder; a few leds of the required color. Connect the negative leg of the LED to the negative battery clip, same for the positive.

See if that is the direction you want to go.

Another option is try a string of christmass tree lights.

Wouldn't a current limiting resistor be required?

Another thought is to use fibre optics, your light source can be remote & can be LED or any other type of light. You would contain this in a box then position fibre optic strands to illuminate your scene. This would keep the heat well away from your models & allow you to use colour filters, dimmers etc without having to worry about the size of these interfering with your scene.

You can buy fibre optic lights but they are just a light in a box with a bundle of fibres attached so I'm sure you could make this yourself. Fibre bundles are cheaply available.

If you don't take my advice, as many of the LED fixtures in the links I posted are specifically designed for film/video, then I definitely recommend Nigh's recommendation as being comparably good.

The iW Blast listed in the colorkinetics link comes in two varieties, one is 3 color mixing and will give you a variety of near white shades along with just about any other color you could desire and the other is a two tone white (one warm one cool) allowing you to adjust your white tone. These would be my 1st recommendation. My 2nd recommendation would be to use fiber-optics to transmit whatever light source you choose to use for the reasons Nigh listed.

If you need 'practicals' (porch lights, street lights or other light sources present IN your model as opposed to the lighting being used for general illumination of your model) then fiber-optic gives you the option to put an actual light source in it, adding to the perceived reality of your scene, without having to use more light sources as one light source can service many fiber lines which are fairly simple to install into a model.

GA Nigh!