B&W in camera or colour shooting?

mitsos68

mitsos68

Active member
I hope to be able to shoot a B&W short during this summer. Half will be shot in a forest and the rest around a small lake. A bit of running (using a steadicam), a lot of fine detail in the trees and on the surface of the water.
Do you think that it would be better regarding dynamic range, motion artifacts, resolution, to shoot B&W in camera instead of colour? Shooting this way the control on tonal range in post will be harder.

A member mentioned in another thread that:
I think it was Philip Bloom who mentioned that when shooting black/white on AF101 the bitrate didn't drop so the resulting image looked noticeably better than shooting in colour and going black/white in post.

Any thoughts?
 
Makes sense, plus you can mess around with color filters (for contrast, etc) in the field and see the results in your viewfinder.
 
I'd Shoot in B&W. You can still tweak the contrast, etc. in post.

In B&W certain colours come out the same shade of grey, i.e., reds and green can look the same shade of grey. You would see this on your monitor and adjust or not accordingly and not get a surprise in post that all kinds of stuff shot had no separation.

You should also light B&W differently. You are getting no separation from colour, so you need to light for separation or your pictures look very flat. Again you would see this in the Monitor if you Shoot in B&W.

Though I do have to say, nothing beats Shooting B&W on Film, it just don't look the same on Video.
 
Thank you for your time. I am pretty familiar controlling tonal range with filters and how colours translate to shades of grey. I've been shooting and developing b&w films for many years myself, besides I am only the ...director of the film not the dp...!
My mane concern is the possibility of so much "better" IQ while shooting b&w, so we could possibly live without so much control in post.
Did anyone really experience such a thing?
Thanks again for your help.:happy:
 
I would take the time to do a test before the shoot...always a good thing to do!
 
i'd do it in post. I don't buy into the bitrate argument- really should not make a noticeable difference. And it's easy to make color into B/W in post but if you ever change your mind you're never going back the other way.

Noah
 
if i've made the decision to shoot B/W then I will always do it in camera. I light and especially, compose, very differently with B/W.

I'm always shocked when I see the raw off my lumix after shooting B/W. 1 in 250 pics will be re-done in colour using raw. it never really looks right in colour after the act.
 
It's been a looong time.
I shot my (almost no budget) 15min short film last year (I am the director). B&W in camera, finally. With a red filter all time on the lens. A 14-35mm zuiko and a few old OM's.
Treiler is on vimeo and a few stills from graded sequence (grain added in Apple Color).
I am pretty happy with the result, already tested my DCP in a theater. I knew the limitations of the camera, (but this is MY camera), wish I had an external recorder...
 
Congrats- that's beautiful, I love it! :beer:

I love B&W + red filters!!!

You should embed the Vimeo player on this page (or in the Grabs/Footage section)!

How did it look in the theater?
 
groveChuck said:
Congrats- that's beautiful, I love it! :beer:

I love B&W + red filters!!!

You should embed the Vimeo player on this page (or in the Grabs/Footage section)!

How did it look in the theater?
Click to expand...

Thanks.:)

Well, it did look ...ok!
Long shots suffered a bit. I had to use smoothcam (fcp7) for a couple of shots, which means extra zoom for an already 1920 (25p) zoomed frame to 2048*858 for DCP scope.
In the theater, before my film, another one, shot with a RED (shot 4k, 2k DCP) was projected. You could definitely see the difference in resolution. In every shot, CU, long ones!

But as I said I am happy with the camera, considering the cost (then blackmagic came) and the freedom it gives you!

I used steadicam for few shots (girl running in the forest) and in a couple of frames codec broke totally apart...
A test I shot with 5D II was a disaster. I suppose it had to do with the conditions of shooting (forest, lake waters).

Red filter worked more on reds (skin tones) and much less on blue (sky), green (trees). Anyone knows why???
Nowhere near like it worked in film. Less dramatic.
 
+1 on shooting B&W in-camera.

Yep that looked great. Confirms this camera is able to put out a wonderful B&W image. Curious as to what your camera settings were?
 
mitsos68 said:
It's been a looong time.
I shot my (almost no budget) 15min short film last year (I am the director). B&W in camera, finally. With a red filter all time on the lens. A 14-35mm zuiko and a few old OM's.
Treiler is on vimeo and a few stills from graded sequence (grain added in Apple Color).
I am pretty happy with the result, already tested my DCP in a theater. I knew the limitations of the camera, (but this is MY camera), wish I had an external recorder...
Click to expand...

Stunning. Really like the look you've created there!
Regarding an external recorder . . . Have you not considered BlackMagic's Shuttle2 ??

Best.
 
Thank you all.

Shot with cineD, reduced detail, red filter on camera. Sorry I do not ...remember more details! We did a lot of tests with the makeup artist though!

During editing, I trashed all converts made with FCP (sad to say this) and did it all over again, using 5DtoRGB to ProRes4444 with the flatter settings. Big difference in highlight detail.
Maybe more noisy, but really I do not care a lot about noise. We even added a little more grain in Color.

At the time of shooting available was only BlackMagic's Shuttle V1. Even if I could afford it, total cost of SSDs would be out of the question...
To make things worse at the time HDMI was not working, a not uncommon failure of the camera. Repaired later under warranty (you do not want to know the cost of main board).

:)
 
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