Rick Burnett
Section Moderator
I think it depends on the equipment and the limitations of the equipment as well. I might know to my eyes (and a lighter meter) that I want a particular difference in light within the scene, but, that doesn't mean my camera is going to do a good job of exposing and recording what I want.
With waveforms/false color/zebras/histograms you take some of the guesswork out of trying to judge exposure by actually viewing the image, since viewing conditions can be so harsh sometimes depending on your camera settings OR even your eyes if you've accidentally stared into a bright light on set!
To get the most out of an 8-bit camera, I want to understand how a scene is going to get recorded, but I think that is a problem that the camera operator needs to worry about (or DIT I've read).
The person setting up the lighting for the scene needs a way to accurately make measurements between different parts of a scene for consistency. Why would you ever NOT use a light meter here? Or, someone setting up silks, or what have you. This I believe is what Nuno is saying, how could you ever use the camera to judge this. Just look at the graphs if you move your ISO around and how far above a particular IRE value you being to clip the highlights, it moves around. Or, if you are using different profile settings for outside or inside. It is a moving target.
All that said, I for one do a lot of small crew shooting, so we often use the camera as our exposure tool. It works for us, but I would really NOT like to have to keep giving my camera to someone setting up lighting to check their light design But since we do both, we can do that and it works out well. We expose for what is important to us in the scene and move everything else around with lighting to adjust to that.
Of course, I spend A LOT of time getting to know the curves in my camera for this reason. With a camera with higher bit depth, I'd feel like I have more freedom to not have to hit things so accurately.
With waveforms/false color/zebras/histograms you take some of the guesswork out of trying to judge exposure by actually viewing the image, since viewing conditions can be so harsh sometimes depending on your camera settings OR even your eyes if you've accidentally stared into a bright light on set!
To get the most out of an 8-bit camera, I want to understand how a scene is going to get recorded, but I think that is a problem that the camera operator needs to worry about (or DIT I've read).
The person setting up the lighting for the scene needs a way to accurately make measurements between different parts of a scene for consistency. Why would you ever NOT use a light meter here? Or, someone setting up silks, or what have you. This I believe is what Nuno is saying, how could you ever use the camera to judge this. Just look at the graphs if you move your ISO around and how far above a particular IRE value you being to clip the highlights, it moves around. Or, if you are using different profile settings for outside or inside. It is a moving target.
All that said, I for one do a lot of small crew shooting, so we often use the camera as our exposure tool. It works for us, but I would really NOT like to have to keep giving my camera to someone setting up lighting to check their light design
But since we do both, we can do that and it works out well. We expose for what is important to us in the scene and move everything else around with lighting to adjust to that.Of course, I spend A LOT of time getting to know the curves in my camera for this reason. With a camera with higher bit depth, I'd feel like I have more freedom to not have to hit things so accurately.
