I'm still trying to adjust from my DV days to the HMC 150, HMC40 and NEX EA50U. It seems nailing correct exposure is a little different in SD 4:1:1 avi vs HD 4:2:0 AVCHD in the tolerance and effect.
Setting zebras at 100% and also checking the waveform lets me guard against what is truly blown out but I noticed that faces/skin turn ugly before they are technically blown out so I need to adjust my procedure.
I guess my inquiry is two part:
1. Is 82% (IRE) the breaking point where the skin tones start turning ugly with AVCHD? When shooting footage with caucasian faces either close up or in wide shots is it best to set the zebras at 70% and allow for some zebra on the noses and/or foreheads? Or is it best to set zebras at 80% and just know that if a face is zebra-ing then it's a problem and back the iris down until it's not. That will sometimes mean underexposing other parts of the image but I guess that will just have to be.
2. In a multi-camera event what is the best way to match my Panasonic cameras? In the SD DV days we'd manually white balance match all of them and run auto iris and it all worked fine. But with the new cameras I'm running into variances matching iris exposure on the cameras. Auto iris seems to under expose sometimes depending on lighting sources in the image. Like if a light fixure comes into the image it will iris down because of the hot spot of the light, leaving the rest of the image underexposed.
On the last outdoor overcast wedding I ran two cameras on auto iris and mine on manual iris using zebras and WFM. Mine ended up being a higher exposure wheras the other two on auto matched so the match between cameras was not as good as it should have been. If three operators with 3 cameras all ran on manual iris how do you all get it the same?
Setting zebras at 100% and also checking the waveform lets me guard against what is truly blown out but I noticed that faces/skin turn ugly before they are technically blown out so I need to adjust my procedure.
I guess my inquiry is two part:
1. Is 82% (IRE) the breaking point where the skin tones start turning ugly with AVCHD? When shooting footage with caucasian faces either close up or in wide shots is it best to set the zebras at 70% and allow for some zebra on the noses and/or foreheads? Or is it best to set zebras at 80% and just know that if a face is zebra-ing then it's a problem and back the iris down until it's not. That will sometimes mean underexposing other parts of the image but I guess that will just have to be.
2. In a multi-camera event what is the best way to match my Panasonic cameras? In the SD DV days we'd manually white balance match all of them and run auto iris and it all worked fine. But with the new cameras I'm running into variances matching iris exposure on the cameras. Auto iris seems to under expose sometimes depending on lighting sources in the image. Like if a light fixure comes into the image it will iris down because of the hot spot of the light, leaving the rest of the image underexposed.
On the last outdoor overcast wedding I ran two cameras on auto iris and mine on manual iris using zebras and WFM. Mine ended up being a higher exposure wheras the other two on auto matched so the match between cameras was not as good as it should have been. If three operators with 3 cameras all ran on manual iris how do you all get it the same?