lightning black and white

E

edwave

Member
Hi
i'm gonna shoot some scenes that should take place in 1943. have you guys any suggest about the differences with shooting colour?
How much is important the color temp of my lights? And which kind of lights work better or worse in b&w?
thanks

....of course i'll be shooting with DVX
ed
 
Use red filter to highten contrast.

are you shooting film or video?

study old balck and white films to get a feel for what you want it to look like. There different ways to light B&W. Some old styles have very dramatic dropoff and a lot very black to solid black areas, extremely directional and dramatic. I guess it depends on what you're shooting, if it's more noir style or conventional.
 
color temp of the lights doesn't matter. The film "Running Time" was shot B&W so that they could go from inside to outside in single takes and not have to worry about color temp. Strangly the first use of flo lights for video work was in the old CBS studio before the switched to color.
 
I disagree with you Fitz, color temp does matter if your shooting color film or video then going to B&W in post. For instance if you use tungsten balance in daylight everything will come out in shades of blue in color. That transfers to shades of grey in B&W, which maybe different then the contrast you originally had intended. If your shooting B&W film, your right it doesn't matter, but shooting color then transfering to B&W in post I'd make sure I had as clean as color picture I could before going to post. Also if you decide to some sort of special effect in post like kepp a red car red as in sin city you can still make that descion in post.

As far as kind of lights, Fitz is right it doesn't matter. More important really is what your shooting on, B&W Film, Color FIlm or video.
 
we are deciding between using a DVX100 (maybe HVX200 since we'll be shooting in spring) and 16mm b&w film. we'll make some tests..
my intention is to going digital for many reasons...so we'll have color shots to transfer in b&w. does some combo monitors have a b&w switch?
some suggestions if we'll use 16mm istead?
 
I wouldn't use a red filter - as you are probably aware, red in DV is horrible. Barry Green would explain all the technical reasons why it is so.

Get as good a picture as you can in color, and use channel blending in post - simple desaturation doesn't work, IMO. In order to get the look of a B&W film, you want all three channels to get the same blend. I usually start with 30% red, 50% green and 20% blue, and then take it from there. You want lest blue than red because the blue channel is quite noisy, and if you have red and blue of the same density side by side, blue should look a little darker than red in B&W.

Once you have the proper channel blend, you can get on with changing contrast and other post effects.

Good luck!
 
Yeah, a red filter would not be good. DV records color at 1/4 resolution, so if your image is run through a red or blue filter, you'll end up with a picture with 160x480 resolution, instead of 720x480. Really blocky, really ugly.
 
If you want to check out some recent B&W footage, you can download the trailer to I film I shot earlier this year (sorry for the shameless plug). We shot on 16mm and S16mm film, occasionally using a red filter. We shot on the high speed Kodak B&W stock (I forget the call sign, TriX maybe? Or Plus X?) and we shot a couple of sequences on Fuji Reala 500D and then did the desat. in post. Check it out.... www.atarms.8m.com
Just right-click on the image of the German soldier and download the Quicktime video file to your computer. Also, the color temp of lights can affect the sharpness and the contrast of the image, because of the way that it affects the crystal formations in silver halide on film. As for Video, you got me. I think that worrying about the quality of light would be a lot more important. If you mix an HMI and some open faced lights, they're still not going to match, but it would be because of the consitancy of the shadows, not because of color temp.
 
thanks everybody

xCheck your suggestion is really interesting. what do mean with starting with the same blending? do you fix it in camera? or essentially is a post-prod work?
 
One thing about B&W film, check your processing cost, not very many labs will process B&W. The last time I checked it was pretty expensive
 
Depends on where you go. There are a number of labs that do not cost a great deal of cash. You can get your film processed inexpensively through Point 360 or Fotokem, also MPL Media in Nashville.
 
well..
the final decision is to shoot digital.
We should use a DVX-100 but since it will be next spring i'm looking forward to get my hands on the HVX. I'm also thinking about using a 35mm adapter to get more film look (dof, aov you know..)
The hope is to transfer it later in film.
Is there anyone that can forsee how HVX will handle b&w?

ed
 
It depends. The wider the latitude, the less it will look like conventional Black and White. I've seen some footage taken from a CineAlta HD camera transfered to Black and White, and it looked really terrible because the camera can see so deeply into black. When your camera sees deep into shadows, in black and white, that just means that everything is going to look a muted shade of gray. And the most important thing in black and white is contrast, so the more you dilude your contrast...
 
Oh, FYI profnoxin. The Quicktime link on the website has been fixed so that a left-click will do ("Fast Start" instead of the whole download thing).

But still... you SHOULD right-click download it. That way you can make it BIGGER!

:thumbsup:
 
Hey, Brian! I didn't even notice that it was you! Holy hell. I just responded on another board to your post about the flicker plug in. That's hilarious.
 
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