How to film black and White w/ HVX200?

I

indigodark

Member
I was reading a post on how stunning the black and white recording looks with the HVX200. Does anyone know the settings to actually fim in black and white?
 
I don't know any settings, but a lot of people choose to shoot in color, then convert to B&W in post. With the HVX having a 4:2:2 color space, this translate well to nice, rich B&W footage. Some careful planning in set design, and costumer design can help you mold the look you're after.
 
4mat said:
You can go into the scene file and turn chroma down to get BW:)
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Not really. Turning the Chroma level to -7, you still have plenty of color, just more washed out.

You need to remove the chroma in post.

Maybe it's different in the UK, with the PAL model? :)
 
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R Gale said:
Maybe it's different in the UK, with the PAL model? :)
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Nope I was wrong, hadn't checked it out before posting.
Thought you could turn the chroma right down to BW but nope.
Post is always best option unless you got some nice 35mm BW stock and money to burn.
 
When shooting b&w, it's extremely helpful to have a field monitor that can switch to black and white. Generally, what you'll find is that you'll need to crush the blacks a bit (master ped -5 or below, or Cinegamma V), and let your highlights blow out a bit to get that nice, rich, contrasty, b&w look. When you see this on a color monitor, it looks awful, but when converted to b&w in post, it looks fantastic.
 
If you have AE, try using it's Tint filter to desaturate the footage. (the default settings on mine are set to white and black already - just move the slider to 100% for full B&W) It gives a different B&W look than turning down the chroma or desaturating and IMHO the contrast and overall look is better.

Garrett
 
The most important thing to remember when shooting BW is that light and shade play a much bigger role when shooting BW.
Look at better lighting when shooting for BW. Of course your going to loose all the color infomation so playing with the light is essential to adding depth to compositions.
A good way to practice is to go out and shoot a few rolls of BW 35mm stills with an SLR.
-matt
 
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In post, you get the most control and the most beautiful BW images by mixing the R,G & B channels into a grey scale image. Photoshop has a Channel Mixer that does this, so you can experiment on your own computer before going to post. Here's an article about converting color to BW, including using the channel mixer.
 
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