Well with strobes we tend to use "Watt Seconds" which is also problematic for the exact reason you mention. Yes, lumens are better as they reference the actual output of the lamp (bulb). The best for strobes is the use of guide numbers which is a measure of how much light hits a target at a specified distance, measured in fStops, but that gets pretty convoluted... Ultimately though it is very similar to your lumens at one meter suggestion, so I will try that. I use watts simply because that's what I'm used to thinking in (at least in terms of what light I would reach for, if using hot lights). The most photographic way, of course, would be to be able to measure the light at the subject using a virtual light meter, but that's probably unrealistic.
And yes, a world without bikinis is not a world in which I would choose to live.
Mihai wrote: ↑Mon Mar 26, 2018 6:43 pm
Watts isn't such a good measure for specifying "amount of light" because it just specifies how much power the light bulb consumes. Maybe it made more sense in the studio strobe world because most filaments had about the same efficacy, but in Maxwell we also have to accommodate everything from common incandescent bulbs to highly efficient fluorescents.
We also have to specify quite a lot in the manual to stick to "real world values" because we saw a lot of people have no clue how camera exposure is controlled so they set their emitters to 1.5 million watts because by default the camera is set to bright daylight exposure. So they can end up with a lot of noise and possibly also artifacts...
For users new to rendering coming from a photography background I usually tell them to use the Lumens setting as this is well correlated to real world lights, whether strobes or big fresnel lights. Usually the "lumens at 1m" specified by the manufacturer is all that's needed and they can enter this directly in the emitter settings.
PS. I hope the 30s-40s fashion starts coming back because there is no era with more elegant womens fashion. Or mens for that matter. But we can keep the bikini...