artistiam
03-17-2005, 09:14 PM
I'm shooting a scene from my feature and I was wondering can anyone give the best settings to shooting a outside scene? Thanks
MattC
03-18-2005, 08:46 AM
Describe your workflow. Are you going to be achieving your "look" in camera, or are you going to be going through a detailed post process? A good base point I think is:
16:9
Full Manual
-3 Gain (if you can, depends on lighting)
24pA
Zebra on (set to about 90)
Gamma: This is tough I go back and forth. If you want to use "presets"; in post (say a particular Magic Bullet look) then leave this set to normal (I think, juries still out). If on the otherhand you want your gamma set in the camera, or you are going to tweak the gamma yourself in post then set it to cine.
Knee: Middle
Black: For the most part, Middle. If you are trying to increase latitude in low light, set it to stretch. Stretch is sort of like using an UltraCon filter and gives you a great deal of latitude in the blacks. You can always make things darker in post.
Color Matix: Same basic answer as for Gamma, although I lean more and more towards the CineMatrix, although to be honest it's a very subtle difference.
V Detail: debatable, I'm using low for now.
Noise Reduction: Off
Color Gain: +1 (but this again depends on the look you want to wind up with. If you are going for that 16mm, kind of washed out look, you might leave it alone. In any case, I wind up decreasing saturation and chroma in post, but that is a personal taste thing. I think +1 captures good color information that you can then play with in post - of course I could just be seeing things.)
Sharpness: -4 (I might even bring it down more, although on the project I'm working on now, I'm using a black promist filter so this setting seems to work well in conjunction with that - experiment.)
Coring: Depends on what you're shooting, so far I like +3
Setup Level: 0
Master Ped: -3 Again, it depends on what your shooting and what you're going to be doing in post. I could bring the pedestal down more in camera for what I want to end up with, but I'm doing that in post with good results and like the flexibility.
Red/Green/Blue Gain: Again, I think if you're going to be doing a lot with color correction in post you might want to leave them all at 0. If not, well then it depends on what you want (warm, cool, etc.) If you want to get closer to the DVX, you might want to warm it up a bit, say +1 red. Personally I wouldn't, I would go -1 Blue and leave the red alone.
That should give you a a flat, but nice, starting point. There are so many variables though it really depends on what you want to do. And today, you can't ignore post, or what you're going to do there. I'm working on a short right now and spent three days shooting test footage with different settings and then playing with all of the settings in post to see which look/combination I liked best. I think this is really your best bet.
Matt