Shooting a club scene. Please help.

[vortex677]

Hello all. Im shooting a club scene for a short i'm working on. My question is in terms of lighting should I just leave it dark and let the club lights (Flickering lazers and so on.) Light the place which is dark or should I light it all up with good lighting and darken in post? My other question is what settings can you share with me that you recomend Iuse for such a scene. I'm sorry if I sound naive. I never shot in a club before. Thanks in advance for all help provided.

[Capt Quirk]

I have shot in clubs before, but never really in a controlled manner, i.e. shooting bands on a lit stage vs. a couple in a booth for film. That said, I would try to bring the clubs overall light level up a little with some really wide soft lights, then use lights semi normally on your subject, but dimmed a bit to blend better with the environment and not stand out like a spotlight in a dark room. Does that make sense?

[vortex677]

Thans it does. Do you have any recomendation on which lights i can get. The owner of the place said as long as it does not interfere with the ambiance we can use whatever lights we need but not intense. Also what settings on the hvx200 do you use? Is it stock settings? Thanks again.

[wgzn]

pretty much anything you use to fill light the room IS going to have a pretty heavy effect on room "ambiance"

id suggest getting a couple of 1k arris with dimmers and diffusers

[Capt Quirk]

And I don't use those cams, but you would open the iris up until you can see the details you want. There is no "magic setting", you set it at where it needs to be to get a good image in your environment.

[valladao65]

a thought or two...

Will the talent be speaking? Is it just ambient clubby sound?
Do you need to control the crowd in anyway?
Are you able to do any test runs with no talent to see what you're working with?
I would think a club scene would call for general darkness with flashing clubby lights.
I guess it just really depends on exactly what feeling you want out of the shot and exactly what the shot calls for in your script.

[vortex677]

Thank you all.
To answer the questions.
Will the talent be speaking? They will be wispering in eachother's ear. Nothing will be heard but the music which will I will make a sound over for it and mute out the real sounds.
Do you need to control the crowd in anyway? Not really they will be dancing regularly to techno beats and so on.

Are you able to do any test runs with no talent to see what you're working with? I will not be able to do any test runs because I was lucky to get the owner to allow me to do this in his place. He was cranky and I don't want to rock the boat.
The look I want is to have a dark cluby type look with lazers but still be able to shoot with minimum noise. I have been having many problems doing that with the hvx200. I dont want to play with the gain levles because it only magnified the problem. I was wondering what settings would be usful to use in such a scene not any magic or anything just something I can test out and then tweak it a bit. Please let me know. Thanks so much for all your responses.

[TedRR]

vortex, one side note. It's a good idea to post on all doors...
"filming will be taking place tonight. By entering you acknowledge and consent to be filmed and have your image used for any purpose".

You can use different language and there will be many that can add more disclaimer.
But you NEED to get the owners permission to post this or you will be subject to that one jerk who will "jerk" you around. :beer:
Best of luck!

[puredrifting]

This will sound like a cop out for the lighting but consider shooting the 5D MKII, this is the kind of environment where you can get great images because the camera can shoot ISO 1600 instead of ISO 500 like most small chip video cameras.

Low light needs to either be lit up and crushed down in post OR shoot with a huge imager that is very light sensitive. I have seen some footage in the 5D forums shot in clubs with just ambient and it looked like a real feature film. And the guy swears that it was only available light. Impressive.

Dan

[vortex677]

O yes my lawyer took care of all that stuff. Infact all of the people that will be attending had to make reservations and also had to agree with the disclaimer. Thanks for telling me though. As for the 5D MKII i am not going to have much time to get it and I don't have the time to learn all of it. I am getting flashers that shoot about 10 times a second. I hope that will be enoupgh. I would love to do this all in post by crushing it down. But if I light the whole place the lasers fog and so on will not have any effect. I wish I can test the dam place. please still shoot out ideas if you can when i complete it ill show you all the clip and we will see how it came out. So please shoot more ideas. Thank you again.

[Mattykins]

I was shooting in a bar two weeks ago for a shoot. I was DP on it. We had access to a few light kits. Nothing major.

I had six lights plus the bar lights up, we also had daylight coming in through the windows that were behind us. And it was still dark and bar looking. We gelled everything. Had a 1.5k softbox adding to the daylight. We had three Mole 1ks blasting gelled lights up to the ceiling for a bounce. And then two 650s adding some color in the scene. All of this on top of the lights in the bar.

We lit the hell out of it. And it came out looking pretty awesome. Yet everything we didn't want light fell to dark. You'd be surprised how much light you need to get a noise free yet bar/club looking feel.

[Capt Quirk]

You'd be surprised how much light you need to get a noise free yet bar/club looking feel.Unless you use film.

[monday1313]

www.neatvideo.com

I'm not affiliated with them...I'm just flabbergasted every time I use that plug-in to take out noise...there are numerous threads about that plug-in on this forum. it costs 99$ and man is it worth it...it even knocks down the grain from lens adapters some too...

[Mattykins]

Umm, you would also need roughly the same amount of light. HD norm is roughly 500 ASA. So, if we transition to a 500T stock. Let's just say Vision 3 - the 7219 (using 16mm) it wouldn't change much of anything. Vision 3 is the cleanest of the high speed films Kodak has. Huge step up from Vision 2. But you are still getting a denser grain.

So not exactly. We went low end digital because that's what I had to work with - that's what money allowed. And realistically, there wouldn't be much of a difference at all. In fact, I'd go so far as to say you'd need more light with film especially using a finer grain stock.


Unless you use film.

[proffit]

My advice too is to light club scenes, and then adjust / darken it in the post, in cc-stage.

Basically so, that it might look even "too bright" for a club setting when you compare it to real life. This, because then there's more possibilities to play in the color correction stage without noise. Of course it depends, if the owner / club promoter accepts this arrangement for more lights.

One possible method could be to light all the wide shots using more lights, then adjust them to more intimate for close-ups, and keep the club owner happy. Video noise is more evident in the wide shots, but for close ups you can get away with smaller lights and it looks good.

If you just shoot with the standard lights and practicals that are found in clubs, you'll almost definitely end up with noisy or murky picture when you try to adjust it in post.

The human eye is very adaptive, so even a dark club starts to look normal in few minutes, but video cameras don't have the ISO range of human eye, so it always looks darker.
No, better to play it safe and light it, so you can bring it down without noise.

I shot a documentary in a techno rave where there was lots of lasers and other light effects (strobes etc.).
I'd say it's best to adjust the Panasonic's chroma levels to reasonable levels, not that high, because they will definitely blow over legal range and may introduce some chroma artifacts, especially in the red channel. Of course they can be brought down in CC, but it can be tricky and time consuming, and adds more work. Especially with video cameras, the strong club light effects always go over the broadcast legal saturation range.


Also, keep an eye for any strange UV lights or any other odd (uncotrolled) light effects, as I've noticed they can look odd in the video and create strange effects on people's faces.

Once I had to color correct a club scene, where the white balance was just a little off and some ridiculous errors had been made in the light department, so the end result was that I had to remove a strong pink hue from one side of actors faces and an orange (!) hue from the other side just to make them look normal, not zombies...


Strobe lights are also an old problem maker in the video world, especially when they pulsate very fast. I'm not 100% sure about progressive shooting with Pana, but standard video (with fields) sometimes has trouble with strobe flicker. Best to check with a field CRT monitor if there's a problem with the strobe pulse rate and video's fields Hz.
I did shoot fast strobe lights 25p with DVX, and had no problems though.

[vortex677]

Thanks somuch I’m going to try it one completely lite up in the day time and one at night. I will post up stills of the shot after cc and before on both. Thanks for all your help. the shoot moved to Sunday and Monday. so still keep info coming. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for all the help.

[Knoxworth]

Hello all. Im shooting a club scene for a short i'm working on. My question is in terms of lighting should I just leave it dark and let the club lights (Flickering lazers and so on.) Light the place which is dark or should I light it all up with good lighting and darken in post? My other question is what settings can you share with me that you recomend Iuse for such a scene. I'm sorry if I sound naive. I never shot in a club before. Thanks in advance for all help provided.


Its all up to your better judgment. You've seen the space and maybe know what to expect. If the natural ambiance looks good, leave it.Otherwise I would argue that having full control of the lighting, and adding effects in post, is the way to go. It depends on the tone of the project, and your own instincts.