Best approach when recording bright light to low light scene-ie. outdoors to indoors?

A

analogs

Well-known member
When shooting a scene from outdoors with good lighting to indoors with low lighting, what would be the best approach.

Example - Following a subject walking from patio to inside the house in the daytime into a poorly lit room. Would you,
- shoot outdoor and indoor separately at the right exposure and use in-between cuts to join the separate shoots together.
- adjust aperture or iso in realtime as the subject moves from outdoor to indoor - what sort of problems would this create?
- light the indoor room to minimise the difference in exposure between outdoor and indoor - what happens if you want a drastic difference though?

Are there any settings you would recommend - eg. adjust the camera for the outdoor exposure and push exposure in post if possible?

If you were in this situation, what would you do. Would you add artificial lighting in the indoor room, find a different location with a better balance between outdoor and indoor exposure, refuse to shoot the scene, etc.?
 
Every 1stAD, Director, DOP should be aware that an 'out to in' shot will raise a red flag and cause production issues on lo budget productions.

Simple cutting is the simplest way to aviod this shot.

If you need to do it then you know the answers and laid them out above.

In order of cost/skill

-Use auto ISO
-Have a remote motor on the iris and pull it during the transition (skill level needed)
-Use lots of lights
-wongling the file in post

Usually I guess a combination of 2 and 3 are used.

There is nothing worse than lighting a scene and then being told the camera enters with the hero!
 
IMHO, even with pro ACs with FIZ at the helm, this shot is very hard to pull off to make it look the least bit natural because our eyes adjust quickly and smoothly and ramping iris, exposure and radically changing DOF is difficult to sell as a "real" POV shot. It's been done and can be done but it's a tough one and will require a lot of takes and rehearsal to get even in the ball park of usable. I shoot a lot of BTS footage on TV and features and I try to do this shot by myself quite often and it's almost impossible to do by yourself. I get the shot but the transition looks awkward and frankly stupid. When I edit, unless something happens during the transition that I HAVE to see, I would just cut, as mentioned.
 
You could do the doorway trick - you shoot with the doorway crossing the frame side to side, or some other strong vertical 'divider'. Ten you shoot the interior starting from the same point but with the interior exposure set. Then in post you track a wipe that follows the divider. Pretty common nowadays I note. You use the moving divider to disguise the cut. Doorways, window frames, or other frame filling obstacles. Sometimes you can add something like a wardrobe or filing cabinet to the set to allow the subject to pass it.
 
I only done this once with a fairly good level of success. I used a T2i with Magic Lantern to shoot a wedding. I followed the bride and groom out of the church and into the street. To pull this off, I enabled HDR mode (a Magic Lantern feature) that worked by recording two different exposures, every other frame. So the odd frames might be set to 160 for outside and the even frames were something like 800 or 1600 for the indoor portion. Back in post, there is a script that would separate the exposures and then interpolate missing frames before merging together the best exposures of both streams. It actually works okay, provided you don't need 4K and the motion in the shot isn't too fast.
 
Translation:

$$$, $$, or $ here?


[Actually some reality TV makes so much money.]
 
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