johnhafner
Active member
I mostly just eye-balled it.
I used the HDMI out on a samsung 1080p LCD monitor as a reference monitor and basically just got the picture as good as possible how I would want the final picture.
I wasn't typically exposing at 0 though, depending on the lighting, many scenes were low key and quite dark overall and I'd underexpose on purpose. Having the full hd out I would check the talents face to make sure enough detail was recorded. With the HDMI out as a safety net I felt very safe shooting -1 or -2 stops though if the scene was supposed to look dark. On the darker shots, to be safe, I would set up the iso fstop and exposure to look correct for final output, then open up a half stop or so for safety intending to lower it back in post.
I tweaked the monitor by hand, it has a film profile I used with a seemingly lowered gamma level, and I set the dynamic contrast on. It's a Samsung 23" 1080P hd monitor with speakers which I bought because I was enamoured with the color reproduction on my 52" LN650A Samsung LCD.
For exposure I first set via the 7d exposure setting bars. In video mode it seems to do a center weighted exposure measurement depending on where the white focus rectangle is placed so I place that on the Talent.
I used faithful picture style Sharpness -2 from center. Contrast -2 to -4 from center. Saturation 0 color tone 0 or +1. ISO 160-320(first scene was at ISO 1000 in places) depending on the fstop (1.8-2.8) for the house scene White Balance was set Manually to ~5200K and we used daylight balanced lights with CTO gels.
Once I had the exposure and white balance etc, dialled in for a setup, then I lit. And much of the overall picture was done while watching the monitor feed in HD and fine tuning with gels and dimming on the florescent window key and fill lighting and adjusting/scrimming/snooting the tungsten background lights. Whenever I couldn't see the monitor, I had to trial and error or have someone else watch it while I adjusted lights. (Don't recommend this, I eventually just moved the monitor.)
Oh and we used the heck out of a $20 fogger filled with Haze juice to help get a nice flat cinema-like lighting style. That thing was running the whole shoot.
If I had had the time, I would have taken a test clip of a color chart with an 18% grey square, copied it to my color calibrated macbook pro monitor and compared the grey levels to make sure they are 18% there. Color wise I could have done this better, but the talent had a white dress and I tried to just eyeball it so looked right and make sure her face didn't look too orange. Mostly just set the white balance @ the start and kept it there. When you have multiple lights and diff white balances on 5200k and 3200k lights, where you hold the chart makes a BIG difference. We had our 800w CFL 5500k key with 3 or 4 sheets of 1/2 CTO which made it VERY orange. So white balancing versus that would correct all the orange that should be there. So once again eyeball on a reference monitor is what I recommend.
Basically I treated it like a film camera and got it all looking good, exposed properly then shot, not intending to do much color correction in post. Interesting note, Dark Night, did almost 0 color correction in post, and very little ADR. They got it right straight out of the camera.
I used the HDMI out on a samsung 1080p LCD monitor as a reference monitor and basically just got the picture as good as possible how I would want the final picture.
I wasn't typically exposing at 0 though, depending on the lighting, many scenes were low key and quite dark overall and I'd underexpose on purpose. Having the full hd out I would check the talents face to make sure enough detail was recorded. With the HDMI out as a safety net I felt very safe shooting -1 or -2 stops though if the scene was supposed to look dark. On the darker shots, to be safe, I would set up the iso fstop and exposure to look correct for final output, then open up a half stop or so for safety intending to lower it back in post.
I tweaked the monitor by hand, it has a film profile I used with a seemingly lowered gamma level, and I set the dynamic contrast on. It's a Samsung 23" 1080P hd monitor with speakers which I bought because I was enamoured with the color reproduction on my 52" LN650A Samsung LCD.
For exposure I first set via the 7d exposure setting bars. In video mode it seems to do a center weighted exposure measurement depending on where the white focus rectangle is placed so I place that on the Talent.
I used faithful picture style Sharpness -2 from center. Contrast -2 to -4 from center. Saturation 0 color tone 0 or +1. ISO 160-320(first scene was at ISO 1000 in places) depending on the fstop (1.8-2.8) for the house scene White Balance was set Manually to ~5200K and we used daylight balanced lights with CTO gels.
Once I had the exposure and white balance etc, dialled in for a setup, then I lit. And much of the overall picture was done while watching the monitor feed in HD and fine tuning with gels and dimming on the florescent window key and fill lighting and adjusting/scrimming/snooting the tungsten background lights. Whenever I couldn't see the monitor, I had to trial and error or have someone else watch it while I adjusted lights. (Don't recommend this, I eventually just moved the monitor.)
Oh and we used the heck out of a $20 fogger filled with Haze juice to help get a nice flat cinema-like lighting style. That thing was running the whole shoot.
If I had had the time, I would have taken a test clip of a color chart with an 18% grey square, copied it to my color calibrated macbook pro monitor and compared the grey levels to make sure they are 18% there. Color wise I could have done this better, but the talent had a white dress and I tried to just eyeball it so looked right and make sure her face didn't look too orange. Mostly just set the white balance @ the start and kept it there. When you have multiple lights and diff white balances on 5200k and 3200k lights, where you hold the chart makes a BIG difference. We had our 800w CFL 5500k key with 3 or 4 sheets of 1/2 CTO which made it VERY orange. So white balancing versus that would correct all the orange that should be there. So once again eyeball on a reference monitor is what I recommend.
Basically I treated it like a film camera and got it all looking good, exposed properly then shot, not intending to do much color correction in post. Interesting note, Dark Night, did almost 0 color correction in post, and very little ADR. They got it right straight out of the camera.
