Sunpak Readylite 20 Cordless Video Light Review

Seeing as we've recently had a new arrival in the family I've been shooting most of my home video indoors lately. I very quickly noticed that despite having all the lights turned on my videos just never looked "right" . Always a little too dark, or too orange, or too grainy. Ugh....it was very disappointing and my wife was giving me the "you wasted money on that new video camera, the old one was good enough" look. All the married guys know what I'm talking about.

So, after a little searching online for advise I realised that:

A) I needed more light
B) I needed to adjust my white balance

Now adding more light came with a few major hurdles for me, it had to be portable, cordless and small enough to mount on the cold shoe of my JVC Everio GZ-MG505. First I checked out the local big box retailers but all they offered where rather pathetic 3 watt cordless lights that looked and felt very cheap. This was not going to cut it.

After a reading a few posts on the camcorderinfo.com discussion forums I decided that the best option for me was the Sunpak RL-20. Unfortunately, try as I may I could not find any local retailers that stocked it and so my online search began. I ended up getting the best price on Ebay of all places and had my light delivered within a week. Not too bad.

So how did it perform?

I figured it would be easiest to post a few screen caps of some video I shot of a few random DVD's and objects. All video was shot with my living rooms lights on (2 x 60w) and the camera w/ RL-20 mounted on a tripod approx. 4ft away.



This first screen capture is with the camera in Full Auto with the Sunpak RL-20 OFF

The next screen cap the camrea is still in Full Auto but with the Sunpak RL-20 ON

As you can see above, although the second picture is noticeably brighter but the colour is still off and there is a noticeable orange tinge to everything. So obviously we need to adjust the white balance. I never realised how important this was until I started shooting mostly indoors and couldn't figure out why everyone looked orange.

In this screen cap the camera is in Manual mode, with the Manual White Balance ON, Sunpak RL-20 OFF.

The final screen cap uses the same settings as above but with the Sunpak RL-20 ON

Overall the picture is greatly improved from the first picture to the final picture in this set. The combination of the increased lighting from the Sunpak and the white balance adjustement yields video that is far more vivid and with much better colour accuracy.

Here's a few pics of the Everio with the Sunpak mounted on the cold shoe:

Sunpak RL-20 Summary:

Pros:

• Cost - Approximately $40 including shipping
• Size - Small and light enough to mount on my Everio
• 15 watt halogen bulb
• Lot's of light for it's size

Cons:

• Battery Life is a short 17 mins.
• Zoom button slightly obscured by light when mounted
• Li-ion battery takes 5 hours to charge fully
• Does not take standard "AA" rechargeables
  

Where'd my DVD drives go?

I just encountered my first major problem since upgrading to Vista about 6 months ago. It was only a matter of time, and judging from what I've read online from various sources I've actually been pretty lucky to last this long without a serious problem.

Right after I finished installing my new memory I went ahead and finished editing my daughter's birthday party video. Great, the new RAM really sped up that task. Time to burn...

What the hell, where did my D:\ and E:\ drives go? They're not showing up in Adobe Premiere Elements . Hmmm...maybe it's Premiere acting funny I better check Windows Explorer. Nope gone there as well. WTF? Now I'm really confused, I haven't changed anything other than adding a couple sticks of RAM. Now I have to start troubleshooting.

First thing that crosses my mind is maybe I've disconnected one of the cables when I opened up my case. I take a quick peek and confirm this is not the problem. Then I check Device Manager and see that I have a nice error message informing me that an error is preventing Windows from loading the device drivers (code 39) for both DVD drives. I didn't write down the exact error message but it was something along those lines. I try updating the drivers for both, and Nada. I get the typical "you already have the latest drivers". Maybe a quick rescan of my hardware will make them show up. Nope. That would be too easy.

Surely System Restore should be able to fix whatever change was made to my system. I mean isn't that the whole point to it? I try the last 4 restore points before giving up on System Restore. That's not gonna fix it either, and I'm really not feeling like re-installing my OS. It took long enough the first time and I'm lazy.

Now I'm getting really annoyed, but I remember that Google is my friend and surely I'm not the first to experience this problem. First stop, the Microsoft Knowledge Base. Surely there's a fix for this already, but try as I might I can't find anything. Thank you Microsoft for nothing.

After some quick "Googling" I finally find a fix for my problem here. Now normally I'm pretty reluctant to mess around with my registry but like I said before I'm lazy and not feeling like doing a clean OS install. Luckily for me the reg-edit works like a charm and my drives magically reappear.

Great...now let's get back to work and burn that video. WTF? My drives still don't show up in Premiere Elements but I'm staring at them in Windows Explorer. Grrrr. Why does it have to be so difficult? Oh well, don't feel like re-installing Premiere so I'll just export to folder and burn it with Nero. What a PITA!

So, that's where I'm at now. My drives are back and working fine, except for when it comes to Premiere Elements. And I still have no idea what caused this mess.

RAM Update...

The RAM arrived from Crucial.com at 2:30pm of Friday, holy crap that was fast. I placed my order at 10:20am on Thursday and had it at my door 26 hours later. Needless to say I am very impressed with the service I received and would highly recommend them to anybody needing a RAM upgrade.

So, did it fix my video editing troubles? Well, to test it out I fired up Premiere Elements and edited my daughters birthday party video that I had been neglecting for a few weeks. With the new upgrade not only did I not have any slowdown when importing and editing my files, I was even able to listen to iTunes and check my Facebook going back and forth between Premiere and Internet Explorer with no problems. Doesn't sound like much, but it's a huge improvement for me. There was no way I could do anything else while running Premiere before the upgrade.

Now the down side to the upgrade...it's left me wanting more. It's such a huge improvement that it's led me to thinking about how to get more. More speed, more processing power, more hard drive space, more FPS on Microsoft Flight Simulator 10. It's a never ending cycle with me.

So as it stands this is what I'm running on my main PC, keeping in mind that it's almost a year old.

-Dell E520
- Intell Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86 GHz
- 4 GB of PC-4200 DDR2
- 250GB 7200 rpm hard drive + 250GB external USB hard drive for back ups
- 256 MB Nvidia 7600GT video card

Definitely not the best or fastest system in the world but it does everything I need it to now that I've upgraded the RAM. Now that I'm editing more and more video I'd definitely say 4GB or RAM is more like a bare minimum for editing the MPEG-2 files created by the JVC Everio's. Anything less will only frustrate you, and make you procrastinate when it comes to editing the footage you shoot.

In search of more RAM....

When I bought the new Dell E520 last year I was sitting on the fence about wether or not to get 2GB of Ram or 4GB. At the time it was a $300 upgrade, and I figured 2GB would be PLENTY! Boy, was I wrong.

Lately I've been doing a ton of video editing in Adobe Premiere Elements and 2GB is sorely inadequate on my machine. I find myself constantly running out of system memory, saving my work, and restarting. If I'm really unlucky I get all the way to encoding my project to DVD, only to find encoding failing 50% of the way through as my system chokes and dies. I figured out through trial and error that if I keep the number of media files in each project below 50 I don't run into many problems. Unfortunately, with home videos I end up "starting and stopping" my shooting a lot and each time I do my JVC Everio GZ-MG505 creates a new video file. Long story short I end up with a ton of files when shooting vacations etc.

So, what to do? Well, after a bit of searching online I found that crucial.com had by far the lowest prices I could find and YES they deliver to Canada. I picked up 2GB of DDR2-PC4200 for $66.98 US including shipping. The cheapest I could find locally was $55 for 1GB, plus the dreaded GST +PST. Until Canadian companies get their collective crap together, I'll be buying online as much as I can.

I'm eagerly awaiting the FEDEX man arriving today as apparently it's at their depot already, even though I only ordered yesterday. Hopefully this solves my problems.