How to blur background behind talking head?

R

rlsconrad

New member
New user, thanks for any help.

I'm shooting a talking head in medium shot (from chest to top of head) and want to have the talking head in sharp focus and the background out-of-focus. I visited my local camera shop, and they were some help.

My background is in old-school 35 mm cameras, where I would play with (a) f-stop (b) shutter speed and (c) film stock speed ... to get the optimal relationship for sharp foreground, blurry background. I understand aperture size and how it relates to depth of field.

So I've played and played with f-stop ... shutter speed ... ND filters ... gain ... manual focus ... etc. and I can't figure out how to do it with the AG-DVX100.

If I do an extreme zoom -- yes. I can get the foreground to be sharp, and the background to be out-of-focus. That works. *BUT* when I zoom out for standard talking head framing ... the focus between background and foreground is virtually the same.

So I refer back to the header for this post ... how do I do that? Thanks!
 
rlsconrad,

The only way to get a shallow depth of field with the DVX is exactly how you did it, with Z99 zoom. If you hav'nt got the room to back all the way up from the shot & zoom in, your pretty much out of options other than spending some money on an adapter to go on the lens.

There are other methods that have been used like getting in real close to the subject but the blur is not quite the same. Another option people sometimes use is green background then add in the plate and blur that out in post.


Hope this helps
 
if you feel like taking a whole lot of time for the shot (ie if it is the money shot) then there is a tutorial on www.videocopilot.net on how to gain shallow depth of field, but it kind of takes a while. just go there and click tutorials and then find it. good luck
 
rlsconrad said:
If I do an extreme zoom -- yes. I can get the foreground to be sharp, and the background to be out-of-focus. That works. *BUT* when I zoom out for standard talking head framing ... the focus between background and foreground is virtually the same.
Click to expand...

Move the camera back instead of zooming out. Move the subject further away from the background.
 
blurring background another way

blurring background another way

if you really have ALOT of time on your hands you could try duplicating layers in After Effects and then hand drawing a matte around the subject on the top layer and applying blur to background layer. It works best if your subject isn't moving too much (otherwise you need to keyframe the mask) and their hair is fairly flat to their head. You need to experiment with feathering the matte and not overdoing it. It's not perfect solution but it has worked for me a couple of times.
 
move the camera far..zoom it in, open it up.. bang thats it done and done.
I do that for my doc's
 
Zoom - Z76 will give you the perspective of an 85mm Portrait lens. Set the camera to Z76, then move the camera where it needs to go to get the framing you want.

Aperture - At Z76, you should be able to open the lens open to F2.0. If it's reading F4 or something else, you need to use ND to get the lens open to F2.0, that's as wide as the iris will go at that focal length.

Scene File - The default sharpening tends to fight against shallow depth of field. Decrease the DETAIL settings and possibly increase CORING to kill the nasty in-camera sharpening and allow the background to go out of focus. I shoot DETAIL -7 and I like my results, but try it yourself.

Blocking - You want the subject as far from the background as possible. Arrange your scene to accomodate.

You won't get 35mm look out of the stock camera, but you can do very well with these techniques.

Oh, and if you'd prefer the perspective of a "normal" lens, Z56 equates to a 50mm lens in 35mm motion picture photography. At Z56, you can probably get the iris open another 1/2 stop, to F1.7.
 
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