Advice for outdoor night music video?

[firehawk]

Thank you Rob very much for all the great input. That really helps. I'm checking with the coach to find out about the stadium lights.

[rob norton]

Thank you Rob very much for all the great input. That really helps. I'm checking with the coach to find out about the stadium lights.

hope it all goes well.

[morgan_moore]

Hi. Got a shoot coming up that is a low budget music video to take place on a baseball field at night.

You didnt actually say that you want it to look like a sports pitch - Im guessing you do.

Random thoughts.. (maybe not connected)

Tungsten work great in well ventilated well powered locations.. like sports arenas

You could get some funk by blancing at 3200 and let the house (stadia) lights do some funk.

In general you can keep the house lights causing front lighting off the subject with a black board.

If its a vid about baseball then changing rooms and alike could make fun

A 2k un gelled is going a long way

RGB (disco) leds are mainly horrid.

[firehawk]

You could get some funk by blancing at 3200 and let the house (stadia) lights do some funk.

In general you can keep the house lights causing front lighting off the subject with a black board..

Thank you very much. I was wondering about how to pull white balance.
Perhaps hitting the subject front with tungsten will allow us to color them correctly and the background stadium will be weird color due to stadium lights.

Can you explain how to keep the front lighting off the subject with a blackboard?

Perhaps the RGB lights are bad ideas. The ideas I had for them was to try to add some color to backgrounds in tighter shots. And also put some on the ground under fog and behind fog to color it?

[firehawk]

Do you need the field lights to sell the location more? Can you turn on the back two towers and leave the front ones off? Then you can have a lot more control over the talent.

Coach said the lights all come on together. So we can't leave some off. Not sure about if its gradual start or not.

[morgan_moore]

Thank you very much. I was wondering about how to pull white balance.
Perhaps hitting the subject front with tungsten will allow us to color them correctly and the background stadium will be weird color due to stadium lights.

Can you explain how to keep the front lighting off the subject with a blackboard?

Perhaps the RGB lights are bad ideas. The ideas I had for them was to try to add some color to backgrounds in tighter shots. And also put some on the ground under fog and behind fog to color it?

Remember balancing at tungsten is only an idea.. you must test that!

By black board I mean large black lastolight, 8.8 cloth, or whatever, casting a shadow (of the stadium lights) over the talent.

[firehawk]

Remember balancing at tungsten is only an idea.. you must test that!

By black board I mean large black lastolight, 8.8 cloth, or whatever, casting a shadow (of the stadium lights) over the talent.

Ahh..Thank you very much for explaining that

[firehawk]

I am concerned about white balance. What are some recommendations concerning how to pull that off?
I'm probably going to shoot the video with Sony FS700R, A7Riii and maybe A7Sii.
Is the general idea to white balance to whatever color temp I'm hitting the talent with? If I hit them with tungsten then balance to tungsten? If daylight then daylight balance?

Manually White balance the talent with a white card for each scene/setup?

We are probably going to be moving pretty fast since limited time once it gets dark and only shooting one night so I don't want to over-complicate things but I surely do not want to shoot a bunch of footage that the color looks terrible and I'm having to match up and patch up in post.

[morgan_moore]

You want to set a fixed temperature. either..

aroud 5500k which might I guess match the stadium lights and then fill/key with LED which is also 5500

You then geat a white is white look through the whole thing

or

balance at 3000k which will make you tungsten fixtuers look white and any daylight (and probably the stadium lights) will look blue.

if your talent is lit with tung at 3000 and the camera is 3000 they will have a cool/funky/stupid (directors choice) blue rimlight from the stadia lights while having normal skintone.
This is the cheapest way to get a 'funky' look

often a camera is left at 4000 making any tung fixtures a bit warm and stopping the daylight fixtures from going too blue.

[rob norton]

I am concerned about white balance. What are some recommendations concerning how to pull that off?
I'm probably going to shoot the video with Sony FS700R, A7Riii and maybe A7Sii.
Is the general idea to white balance to whatever color temp I'm hitting the talent with? If I hit them with tungsten then balance to tungsten? If daylight then daylight balance?

Manually White balance the talent with a white card for each scene/setup?

We are probably going to be moving pretty fast since limited time once it gets dark and only shooting one night so I don't want to over-complicate things but I surely do not want to shoot a bunch of footage that the color looks terrible and I'm having to match up and patch up in post.

The general idea is to go with what you like the look of. You can go for accuracy where everything appears similar to how you'd see it with your eyes. However, you could be entering the same territory of a small town news package where they're giving the high school sports updates (this is actually a poor example because some of those news pieces are hue city). I'm sure there are baseball movies which are also more true to real life, but they would have had much more control over pretty much every single aspect of the shot.

At the other end of the spectrum would be an "anything goes" "plan". This approach is part of why astera titans became so popular. People add those in the shot with some vibrant colours and call it a day. IMO now that we're on this side of the trend it's beginning to feel pretty sloppy and lazy. However, it's often also a case of making the most of what the shoot had access to, as well as the stylised colours with lights in shot being the preferred look over anything else.

I'd be looking at some type of middle ground, where it's not completely real but not whacky RGB for the sake of it either.

Other than the look you want, WB choices can come down to the difficulty of changing the colour of the lights. Sometimes it's faster to add CTO, sometimes it will be easier to add CTB.

In your case you're obviously not going to change the CT on the actual stadium lights so one option is to key your talent with something that's as far away as possible as those lights for some colour separation.

Check out Matt's newsshooter article reviewing the rotolight - https://www.newsshooter.com/2020/05/...tan-x2-review/

In the 'Real-World Performance & Quality of Light' section, Matt has WB'd for some RGB lighting. His face is natural enough but look at what happened to the BG light. Maybe you could do something similar for one or two shots?

In short, there's no one size fits all or correct way to set white balance on a music video shoot like this, which should be the fun part. Where in broadcast TV you'd be fired on the spot, you have a chance to express some creative freedom, even if that means staying accurate.

Can you go there ahead of time? Take your camera, one person and a light and experiment with a variety of WB settings.