Camera setting suggestions for heavily saturated lighting...

Ted Arabian

Ted Arabian

Member with Ladder
Hello.

i am shooting a short for Lovefest and have created a very lavish set with heavy saturated lighting. And lots of candlelight.

I shoot tomorrow and do not have a lot of time to experiment with camera settings.

If anyone has experience with similar situations and can give input, I'd greatly appreciate it!!!

I usually shoot in plain ol' Scene setting #6. Should I make adjustments? I know that there are many to play with...

Here are some grabs of the set/lighting....

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Thanks for your input and advice!

-Ted
 
It looks very nice, but with CINE gamma and CINE matrix, saturated colors can blow out/overexpose very easily, where one of the color channels can hit 255 in RGB, even though the zebras won't report overexposure.

If you want to be very safe, use the NORM matrix, and reduce the CHROMA, even drastically, this will keep colors more in check, and you can safely bump them back up again in post.
 
With all that red, you're probably going to need to use a chroma blur in post, as well. That's a TON of red.
 
Cool! There's 3 suggestions. Thanks guys! I wish that I understood all all of this chroma/gamma/matrix/cine! :grin:

So, with reducing the CHROMA....

Joshua Provost said:
If you want to be very safe, use the NORM matrix, and reduce the CHROMA, even drastically, this will keep colors more in check, and you can safely bump them back up again in post.
Click to expand...

I will be able to bump the color back up without looking "processed" or anything?

I really do want this to look good, even stellar! And I just don't want to blow it because I am a camera owner and not a DP, LOL!

Thanks again all!

-Ted
 
Actually the colors shouldn't give you too much trouble in this particular circumstance. Red is a big problem usually only when it interacts with a non-red-family color (so, red against green = really bad, red against blue = horrible, red against purple = not so bad.) Full-on red and blue give DV a lot of hassle and can make your image look soft and not sharply focused. But the blocky nastiness that you can encounter from reds shouldn't be a problem for much of this footage, since the reds and purples all kind of blur together. Depends on what your actors are wearing though, if they show up in blue jeans and green t-shirts then yeah, you're gonna be in blocky hell and you'd be better served to borrow an HVX for that shoot and shoot it in DVCPRO50.

Do you want it to look super-saturated in the final product? Or do you want to tame that beast? If you like super-saturated, straight F5 would give you an eye-popping technicolor look based on that art direction. If you want to tone the colors down, use NORM matrix instead of CINE, and consider lowering the CHROMA LEVEL to reign in the colors.

By all means, shoot a couple of test shots and play the footage on an NTSC monitor/TV to be sure of what you're getting.
 
Thank you Barry, for that WELL EXECUTED guidance!

I do want this film to have a heavy saturated look, hence the art direction. I will heed your advice on the colors. I do have a heavy downlight of Primary Blue and that hot pink back light... all on a red set!

This will be interesting and a great challenge for me. And that is why I participate is to grow and learn.

I also appreciate the note about viewing on a NTSC TV... something that I should do but don't always. I will DEFINITELY do so on this project!

Thank you to all who chimed in.

I will continue to visit this thread in case others want to give their 2 cents!

Again, thanks!

-Ted
 
Well, if you're mixing blue and red together, that's a recipe for disaster. Red and purple, okay. Red and orange, okay. Red and blue? Not okay. DEFINITELY run some tests first.
 
Ted,

Just got your PM.

One of the things you can do to cool the image down (take some red out) is to adjust the color temp. down. Also, recheck your white balance as well.

And as Barry said above, be careful about mixing colors.
 
Thanks Brandon for that tip!

Barry, I did shoot test footage last night, (using your suggestions) and watched it on my TV at home. Wow! Stunning. The footage looked great. Even better than what my Nikon D70 displayed.

Thank you so much!

Hopefully the footage I shot today with actors came out equally as nice.

Awesome guys. Gotta love this place!!!

-Ted
 
Hello again!

i just wanted to report back that my shoot went great, my footage looks lovely and I learned a few things!

I shot my DVX100B on F5 and did not adjust any of the camera settings. I would later learn that you guys up at the top of the thread were right! Too much reds, turn down gamma! I will remember that in the future! I have some pixel distortions in one shot but I don't love the shot anyway! I have others!

Anyway.... thanks! I appreciate those who read and replied.

Best,

Ted

Oh! A few screenie!!!


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A heck of a lot better than that Nikon D70!!!
 
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