Hi there,
This is gonna seem a totally stupid newbie question...and it is, however it's something that's bugging me so please indulge my stupidity. I've shot some shorts before on 16mm in black and white, but never in colour and on digital. When I lit my scenes for 16mm I did what you would expect - I decided on how I wanted the lighting to seem, set up the key/fill/backlight accordingly and used a lightmeter to take a reading where I wanted a correct exposure, and so set the aperture. However, I've started to shoot on digital, yet the whole lighting thing totally confuses me.
What I mean is, normally, with film, there is a certain amount of mathematical precision involved - you pick the lights and set the camera accordingly. However - with digital I don't know what to do. In fact, I don't know if digital is just versatile or I'm just not getting 'it'. Is it a case that the manual Iris, ND filters etc allow us, as filmmakers to have an a huge amount of control over our image, to get exactly what we want using the combination at our disposal - OR is it a case that I just don't know what to measure everything professionally for digital?
My problem is largely consistency - when you work out the maths of a film camera you can know precisely what you're gonna get - but with digital, without the maths to fall back on I seem to be just judging it all between each shots. I don't like this method because it feels too imprecise - some shots seem darker and lighter than they should be - mainly, like I said, because it's still guess work for me. I know a lot of it can be fixed in post, but I don't want to have to fix things, I want to get them right the first time. Please can someone help me sort this issue out?
What I'm thinking is that if you have storyboarded your scenes anyways then maths and precision equations don't matter as such, you can use the LCD to just move things about till it's what you want. However, I'm gonna be filming a travel program soon, where lighting has to be less stylised and instead has show the scenery as best possible. Surely I need to be more professional than just fiddling with settings until it looks nicest. One thing I have been doing to set the correct exposure is using the auto iris, zoomed in, to take a reading of the thing I want, the side of the person's face I want, then hitting manual and zooming out. This works, but again it seems imprecise - especially if even when zoomed in I'm only seeing part of someone's face, so presumably the camera is taking readings from the whole frame too, giving an influenced exposure.
I've been reading here about grey cards. I get that they have all the shades to allow the camera to correctly guess the aggregated light reading, but again if I'm shooting say a master shot, there's nothing really to zoom into, so what do I do then? Do I put the camera facing the person I want to shoot, zoom in as far as I can and just move the grey card as close as needed? I'm thinking grey cards are mostly used when filming something in a Noir style where there are pronounced differences in lighting? I especially don't understand exposure relative to Zebra's. As far as I know, zebra's are used to measure areas that are overexposed - that they are therefore a valuable tool in setting exposure. I understand that the 100% zebra is your upper limit, that anything higher and you're gonna blow it out and get awful [and unbroadcastable] whites - therefore we naturally want to make sure we lower the exposure so there are no areas that show up at 100%. Likewise, I understand that 70% zebra is the natural skin tone of a white person. From what I've read on this site, having a bit of overexposure, aka a bit of zebra stripping, at this 70% is alright as it adds conture to a person's face, but that we shouldn't have any at 100%. I'm gonna be shooting in Egypt a lot. The Egyptian people have naturally darker skin, yet I don't know therefore what Zebra striping to set my camera to to make sure Egyptian faces have the right balance.
Also, I took my camera out to the park today just to film on a really bright day - important for me to master because in Egypt it will be very very bright, esp with lot of reflections from white beach sand and the sea etc - but found it near impossible to get a good amount of light into the camera without having a lot of zebra striping. I.E. if I believed the image was correctly exposed the stripes were often going, esp on the sky [which I don't want to blow out] - or I compensated for the sky but the ground was too dark. I believe the solution to this issue is a polarising lense?
Lastly - my camera is a PAL camera - does this mean that I don't need to worry about editing in a either a normal or a 24P timeline? For PAL are they one and the same?
Thanks for any answers, I know newbie questions are annoying.
This is gonna seem a totally stupid newbie question...and it is, however it's something that's bugging me so please indulge my stupidity. I've shot some shorts before on 16mm in black and white, but never in colour and on digital. When I lit my scenes for 16mm I did what you would expect - I decided on how I wanted the lighting to seem, set up the key/fill/backlight accordingly and used a lightmeter to take a reading where I wanted a correct exposure, and so set the aperture. However, I've started to shoot on digital, yet the whole lighting thing totally confuses me.
What I mean is, normally, with film, there is a certain amount of mathematical precision involved - you pick the lights and set the camera accordingly. However - with digital I don't know what to do. In fact, I don't know if digital is just versatile or I'm just not getting 'it'. Is it a case that the manual Iris, ND filters etc allow us, as filmmakers to have an a huge amount of control over our image, to get exactly what we want using the combination at our disposal - OR is it a case that I just don't know what to measure everything professionally for digital?
My problem is largely consistency - when you work out the maths of a film camera you can know precisely what you're gonna get - but with digital, without the maths to fall back on I seem to be just judging it all between each shots. I don't like this method because it feels too imprecise - some shots seem darker and lighter than they should be - mainly, like I said, because it's still guess work for me. I know a lot of it can be fixed in post, but I don't want to have to fix things, I want to get them right the first time. Please can someone help me sort this issue out?
What I'm thinking is that if you have storyboarded your scenes anyways then maths and precision equations don't matter as such, you can use the LCD to just move things about till it's what you want. However, I'm gonna be filming a travel program soon, where lighting has to be less stylised and instead has show the scenery as best possible. Surely I need to be more professional than just fiddling with settings until it looks nicest. One thing I have been doing to set the correct exposure is using the auto iris, zoomed in, to take a reading of the thing I want, the side of the person's face I want, then hitting manual and zooming out. This works, but again it seems imprecise - especially if even when zoomed in I'm only seeing part of someone's face, so presumably the camera is taking readings from the whole frame too, giving an influenced exposure.
I've been reading here about grey cards. I get that they have all the shades to allow the camera to correctly guess the aggregated light reading, but again if I'm shooting say a master shot, there's nothing really to zoom into, so what do I do then? Do I put the camera facing the person I want to shoot, zoom in as far as I can and just move the grey card as close as needed? I'm thinking grey cards are mostly used when filming something in a Noir style where there are pronounced differences in lighting? I especially don't understand exposure relative to Zebra's. As far as I know, zebra's are used to measure areas that are overexposed - that they are therefore a valuable tool in setting exposure. I understand that the 100% zebra is your upper limit, that anything higher and you're gonna blow it out and get awful [and unbroadcastable] whites - therefore we naturally want to make sure we lower the exposure so there are no areas that show up at 100%. Likewise, I understand that 70% zebra is the natural skin tone of a white person. From what I've read on this site, having a bit of overexposure, aka a bit of zebra stripping, at this 70% is alright as it adds conture to a person's face, but that we shouldn't have any at 100%. I'm gonna be shooting in Egypt a lot. The Egyptian people have naturally darker skin, yet I don't know therefore what Zebra striping to set my camera to to make sure Egyptian faces have the right balance.
Also, I took my camera out to the park today just to film on a really bright day - important for me to master because in Egypt it will be very very bright, esp with lot of reflections from white beach sand and the sea etc - but found it near impossible to get a good amount of light into the camera without having a lot of zebra striping. I.E. if I believed the image was correctly exposed the stripes were often going, esp on the sky [which I don't want to blow out] - or I compensated for the sky but the ground was too dark. I believe the solution to this issue is a polarising lense?
Lastly - my camera is a PAL camera - does this mean that I don't need to worry about editing in a either a normal or a 24P timeline? For PAL are they one and the same?
Thanks for any answers, I know newbie questions are annoying.
