lstringfel
Member
I need some advice on camera settings for sports at night under stadium lights.When I did this before with everything on''auto" it was horrible .I need some expertise!
filming at night under stadium lights
- Thread starter lstringfel
- Start date
Michael Carter
Veteran
Well, you're in the HMC 150 forum so I'll assume that's the camera.
But then... why are you shooting "auto" with a $3k camera?
Your best bet is to go out there at night and do some tests, or allow some time to white balance and set exposure when you shoot the event. Do a manual white balance under the lights. Even though they're stadium lights it may not be a lot of light, and you may need to add gain - gain = grain, you may have to live with it.
If you don't know how to white balance and you're not up on basic exposure... you'd might want to start googling and hit the bookstore...
But then... why are you shooting "auto" with a $3k camera?
Your best bet is to go out there at night and do some tests, or allow some time to white balance and set exposure when you shoot the event. Do a manual white balance under the lights. Even though they're stadium lights it may not be a lot of light, and you may need to add gain - gain = grain, you may have to live with it.
If you don't know how to white balance and you're not up on basic exposure... you'd might want to start googling and hit the bookstore...
lstringfel
Member
HMC 150. I have been doing manual white balance and checking with vectorscope and using manual iris and WFM in past few months (after reading/rereading/rereading Barry Green's book) but haven't done night time shoot since last year.These lights are whatever are commonly used in high school stadiums.I confess my ignorance to this.
Michael Carter
Veteran
They could be HID, sodium vapor, whatever - all that really matters is if you can balance to 'em. A lot of those industrial lights are designed for massive output and that's it - not pleasing color temp, etc. (remember a few years back a bunch of parents sued a school system - someone had replaced some sort of vapor/arc light and didn't install the UV shield, people in the high seats got a little fried...). So you may find some odd spikes of color, some flicker, etc.
It may sound odd, but one thing you can do if your WB won't get close enough is take your cam (with test footage) to a good photo store and lay some wratten CC filters over the LCD (keeping in mind the 150 LCD seems a little blue). We used to do this with polaroids or color temp meters back in the film days to dial-in filtration. But between WB and the color controls in-camera, if you can find a night to test you should be able to dial it in.
If it's an outdoor stadium (my sense anyway) is you can have a little more leeway - if you can get the grass green and the uniform colors decent, some oddball halos around the fixtures or strange shadows just look more "dramatic".
As a final aside on color, the little Marshall HDMI 5" LCD (designed for DSLRs) is pretty nice with the 150 - it has color bars and blue-only and can be decently calibrated. And it's shoe-mount. At $550 it's not cheap, but man, it's a cool little monitor for the size, and the cheapest monitor you'll find with calibration features.
It may sound odd, but one thing you can do if your WB won't get close enough is take your cam (with test footage) to a good photo store and lay some wratten CC filters over the LCD (keeping in mind the 150 LCD seems a little blue). We used to do this with polaroids or color temp meters back in the film days to dial-in filtration. But between WB and the color controls in-camera, if you can find a night to test you should be able to dial it in.
If it's an outdoor stadium (my sense anyway) is you can have a little more leeway - if you can get the grass green and the uniform colors decent, some oddball halos around the fixtures or strange shadows just look more "dramatic".
As a final aside on color, the little Marshall HDMI 5" LCD (designed for DSLRs) is pretty nice with the 150 - it has color bars and blue-only and can be decently calibrated. And it's shoe-mount. At $550 it's not cheap, but man, it's a cool little monitor for the size, and the cheapest monitor you'll find with calibration features.
I shoot for our high school marching band. I am only using a TM700 right now but did very similar when I was shooting with an XL2. The two keys are white balance and exposure. I found that the stands were a grey aluminum that made a great neutral for white balance (I am on top of a press box so difficult to get to a WB card). Exposure is more difficult as the lighting on the field is never even. The goal is to get the scene bright enough while minimizing the amount of gain used. On the XL2 I could set the zebra level to around 90% and then chose the section of field with the most action and would open iris +gain until the field lines were just bumping the zebras. I would then double check the zebras on the white parts of the uniforms. I would let the speculars off the instruments blow completely out. I usually ended up slightly under exposing and then doing a very light touch with color corrector in Vegas. I would bring up gain slightly and then play with offset and gamma to get a decent contrast. I hope to move up into a HMC150 for this season.
Alexander1310
Member
I'd bump it up to 1/120 shutter speed over just simply a 1/60 shutter speed to get the best frame capture for potential overcranking of an sction sport. You're still going to counteract the 60 Hz frequency of the flourescent lights.