DP on a friends short film, would like some advice.

deltoidjohn said:
How about you tell him you're more than happy to do it his way - and then hand him the list of lights & modifiers you'll need in order to get the set's he's chosen lit & balanced within 7-8 stops so that everything looks good when recording straight to a REC709 ready LUT.

Once he balks at the rental costs, you can suggest doing it your way instead! :grin:

Otherwise, just shoot it his way as best as you can (like Rob said, treat it as a challenge), and if anything goes wrong just wash your hands of the mistakes and tell him you warned him!
Click to expand...


Haha! Well the fortunate thing is I have a ton of my own equipment. I own 2 Aputure 120D and a 300D, to small LED Bi color panels and Lowell Pro Light kit. So I will just treat this as a challenge. I totally agree with trying to capture the look in camera as much as possible but when it comes to exposure and post grading I feel the its best to expose brighter and get the most latitude in post regardless of what the intended look is.

The idea of not wanting to do post coloring/grading on a project that is a personal short and has no time crunch simply because you want to be old school and get everything in camera is so silly to me. He is a great friend but sometimes I feel he can be very dense to the fact that just because you were taught one way in a school 6 years ago does not mean it applies to everything. In the end it is all subjective and not method is right or wrong per say so to each there own, I will just work the way he wants and we will see what happens.

I will probably still record RAW and just record the proxies onto a SD card and monitor via a LUT that he will have to apply in post. That way he still can throw a simple lut on the .mp4s and have his look with no extra work but has the RAW files in case he realizes he needs extra latitude with the files.
 
What I would do (and I dont know if the camera does it) is make a 1 stop over LUT, and try to shoot the entire film so that single lut looks great.

You are then exposing a bit right, but not demanding everyshot gets individual attention

It is reasonable that a producer/director would not want a set of footage where every shot needed individual exposure compensation.

If you can burn that LUT to the proxies all the merrier.

You will still have some head and foot room should the shot need more wiggle down the line.
 
morgan_moore said:
What I would do (and I dont know if the camera does it) is make a 1 stop over LUT, and try to shoot the entire film so that single lut looks great.

You are then exposing a bit right, but not demanding everyshot gets individual attention

It is reasonable that a producer/director would not want a set of footage where every shot needed individual exposure compensation.

If you can burn that LUT to the proxies all the merrier.

You will still have some head and foot room should the shot need more wiggle down the line.
Click to expand...

Okay, that is a interesting idea, I can not bake in LUTS to the C200 but adding one in post is such a easy thing he should not have a issue with it. I agree with the idea of not having the footage be all over the place in terms of exposure, but on a no budget shoot where we only have 8 hours and 40-50 shots required it is more of a time vs preference thing. In post you have all the time in the world to perfectly match shots, making are day and getting what is needed for the story comes first.
 
Im guessing you can expose correctly :)

WHat can be baffling at the lower level post is if you specifically ride the raw shot to shot, say holding a window but only in shots where there is a window but not the reverses.
 
I won't claim to have personal experience but I believe even in the "old school" days they had photochemical color timing and messing with printer lights and whatnot to achieve some control in post. It's not like exactly what was captured on set was what you saw in the theater even back before digital color correction.
 
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