Team Deakins · James Ellis Deakins, Roger Deakins

LEDs - with Jeffrey Lee, Ph.D.

December 10, 2025·1 hr 6 min·6 clips

A physicist explains how he used lasers to control worm behavior before designing LED film lights.

The conversation starts with first principles. Roger and James treat LED lights as a newer fixture on film sets, then ask Jeff Lee how he got into the work. The pace is slow, technical, and useful. Jeff explains that LED chips have to stay in the right operating range if the fixture is going to hold its color. Heat is the problem that keeps coming back. When chips run hot, the fixture may speed up the fan; when they cool down, it can slow the fan automatically. Jeff would rather automate that behavior so filmmakers can stay focused on what is in front of the camera. Fans get a plain treatment. They are needed because the light needs cooling, but nobody tries to make them sound glamorous. Roger moves the discussion toward Fresnel design. He compares the Q5 and Q7 series with a 1K Fresnel, while pointing to LED advantages like color and intensity control. The old lamp is still the reference point. The question is how to get something close to a tungsten point source when the light is coming from many diodes packed together. Jeff confirms the tradeoff. More diodes in a tight space can bring more intensity, but it also makes the heat problem harder. Roger brings in a factory memory, recalling the difficulty he saw at an ARIES manufacturing site in Germany during early LED development. That detail says a lot. The craft problem is not just whether LED can be bright. It is whether LED can behave like tools cinematographers already trust. Near the end, Jeff connects his way of learning to being made to do things the hard way first, and the hosts tie that back to learning on film before digital.

As heard by us

A practical Team Deakins conversation about LED heat, color stability, fan control, and the challenge of making modern fixtures feel familiar on set.

LEDs get treated here as a working cinematography problem, not a shiny gear upgrade. Roger and James Deakins talk with Jeffrey Lee about the part of modern lighting that often stays hidden behind the image: heat, fan control, color stability, and the difficulty of packing enough…

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