I spoke with Alan Ipakchian from Vitec Group to see what’s new with Litepanels’ line of industry-standard LED fixtures. Their new Astra models offer increased brightness over the original 1×1 Astra; the Astra 3X and Astra 6X provide, as you might guess, 300% and 600%, respectively, of the 1st generation panels’ output.

The Litepanels Astra 1x1 Panel lineup now consists of eight models, with the latest being the Astra 1x1 Soft Bi-Color LED Panel that was announced at NAB 2016. The Astra 1x1 family is known as being extremely portable, which DPs know means faster lighting setups and potentially more scenes completed in one day. They are also extremely flexible due to their bi-color settings, battery options, and light modifiers.

Litepanels' Astra series is designed with premium quality, high CRI, surface-mount LEDs, which are paired with custom designed TIR (total internal reflection) optics. The design follows the one square foot form factor of many popular Litepanels models.

It was a busy NAB for our tech specialists with visits to the most interesting booths at the show, as well as Tech Talks and training workshops on the AbelCine presentation stage. With so much to cover, we wanted to round up all of our NAB blogs and presentations in one place for you.

I visited the Litepanels booth today and spoke with Alan Ipakchian about the latest offering in their Astra family. The new Astra 1x1 Soft Bi-Color uses the same LED technology found across the Astra line, but where this light differs is the inclusion of a built-in diffusion panel.

If you stopped by our CCW booth earlier this month, you'll remember that we featured a Phantom Photo Booth as part of our display. Of course, when shooting high-speed footage, one of the most important considerations is having enough light - and that's where the new Litepanels Astra comes in.