The first time I heard a DP ask for a "LCD", I had to ask what that was. I hadn't heard this acronym before.
"A Light Control Device" it was explained to me; a soft-grid.
Soft-grids and snap-grids are great for controlling the spill light of a large source. There is the benefit of a large source, without light going everywhere.
A bonus
is the feature of a soft-grid is it evens-out the falloff. A
person, or object, getting closer to
the grid, will actually start having some light cut from them which counters the increasing brightness of the source.
There are a few downsides to soft-grids. You do lose some light, but it is not significant most of the time.
Grids are not good if you ever see the reflection. It is often okay to see the reflection of a large source. It just looks like a window, or something natural. Not so with a grid. The reflection of a soft-grid look like a soft-grid. It doesn't look good.
I have soft grids for most of my lights. Most of them are 40-degrees which seems to be a good general width for these.
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| Snap-girds for 4x4 Kino Flo housings. All my Kino Flo housings have Quasar Crossfade tubes. |
A new thing (to me anyhow) are the Ultra-Soft Egg Crates from Light Tools.
I haven't gotten to work with these yet. They are grey. It supposed to give softer edges than the traditional black grid.
One of the coolest things I haven't seen are the focused grids. These grids with the cells arranged at different angles so the light is focused at a point, say 12 feet away on a 12x12 foot grid.
I
was reading about these focused grids on a set, they said they were
awesome. The set had pools of soft light seemingly coming from no-where
without spill.
I hope to get to work with these sometime.
PS: Most of my snap-grids have been custom made by Andrey at Gridssoftbox. His website is: https://sites.google.com/site/gridssoftbox/
I've been buying snap-grids from him for years. He does great work and has been awesome to deal with.
Update 10/31/21: Andrey's new site: