Lighting for video....

N

Nick Castronuova

New member
Well i'm going to start work on a short production on video next semester, so I had a bunch of newbie lighting questions. Most of my experience in film school comes from Film and not video, so forgive me if I seem ignorant.

Basically, how do you light for video? What are some good examples of standard, studio high key ratios? I'll be metering the whole thing, and getting a monitor is possible, but doubtful. So how should I go about lighting for video? Obviously I won't need the powerful lights that one needs for film, but what's a good way to light without blowing the video/colors out?
 
I'd rather shoot video with a monitor than a meter, personally, but coming from the film world, I can understand why you'd want a meter. A midrange cam like the HVX200 has about 7 stops of latitude, but you usually don't want to use the darkest one, figuring you'll crush the blacks to reduce noise in post. A nicer cam like the f900 might buy you 8 or 9 stops, the Viper even more.

Two stops between key and fill is conservative TV lighting (like the news), four stops is aggressive lighting, but trust your camera, not the meter.

Depending on the cam and any adapter that you're using, you may be surprised at how much light you need.
 
Monitors are definitely more easy to use if you have the right one--and that's the key. The good ones are so expensive: in the $4000 and up range. The video world has always relied on scopes and monitors for exposure feedback and everyone on this site really falls into this "video" category unless you're actually using real film and film camera and most on "DVXUser" won't be ;-) regardless of whether you call yourself a "filmmaker" or not. Most are using digital video cameras now to do "filmmaking" so will probably adopt video production techniques seem to be appropriate anyway for the smaller crews found on indy sets. Where the real crossover between film and video comes is in the use of the 35mm adapters which change the dynamics of the light reaching the sensor (for the worse).
 
Absolutely. Particularly HD which is unflattering to most "normal" people. That is, people that don't have "star" type skin. ;-)

Thus, soft light will put most people in their "best light" so to speak.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top