C300: 1st time night filming outside, need advice!

anatusa

anatusa

Veteran
Hello

its my 1st kind of a serious filming outside during the night.... its a city celebration day.... what CP profile would u recommend me to use? what would be the best iso settings? as i understand its best to use 850 iso for most dr... any other advice that u would recommend me to follow?

Regards
 
You can use ISO 850 or higher to get maximum highlight protection. In a controlled environment, such as green screen, lower ISOs might prove better with some of the DR shifted to below 18% gray.

When shooting outside at night all of this is academic. You'll most likely need to use higher ISOs. Maybe areas with lots of light spill will allow you to hit 850.

I don't think exposing is that tricky: if people are prominent you'll want to make sure that at least the lit parts of their faces gets exposed OK. If it's more of a crowd shot with beautiful city lights I'd might give the lights themselves (lamps, lit store fronts) a little love and let the crowd drift into the shadows.

Don't try to achieve what can't be done. That is: don't under expose to "save" lights/lamps that are in the shot from blowing out, or over expose to "get detail in the shadows" when it's simply dark. Just looking at a good monitor and going off of that is probably simple and good enough.

Also, know your lenses. By knowing how DOF changes with focal lengths and focus distance you can go wide open when focusing on things further away, or using wide angles and still get a workable DOF. I wouldn't go wide open when doing close up portraits, since I personally feel the sharpness might fall off too quickly.

Be mindful about the background. Everybody loves OOF highlights, even if we've seen quite a bit of that the last few years.
 
thank you for your advices, especially about "detail in the shadows"! what u told about high lights makes sense, in fact it seems obvious to me now, not sure why i thought otherwise before...

most of the time i use Brian`s Cinema 2 profile, but i noticed that if i have to shoot inside with bad lighting situation, i get lots of noise in shadows,- i wonder maybe there are settings that work better in low light situation?
 
anatusa, another method for shooting in low light situations to avoid increasing big ISO settings which increases noise, is to chose a larger shutter angle. In low light I sometimes change the shutter angle from the standard 180 degree to a larger one like 270 or 360 degrees. You can get slight motion blur but I suggest you have a play to see if you like.
 
Here in town as well as our clients shooting out of state that they are using 3200 at night with street lights and it is "clean as a whistle"....and, when needed, 6400.....and remember, Canon made their "noise" move so it looks like film grain, not noise, thus no real "screen door" effect.

Jim Martin
Filmtools.com
 
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