Shooting Live events with Lighting grids

[Outlaw Productions]

I am having some issues with these events. I am tasked with shooting Dance recitals and the costumes range from very dark black/reds to pure white dresses. The problem is that the light intensity from the grid stays the same. So I manually am riding the iris as I zoom in and out. My question is this......Is there an easier way to ensure that the images are not over exposed and is there a better setting on the user dial than another. Currently I am shooting in SPARK mode. Is this the wrong setting? I just would like to have the image seem more stable and not all over the luminance chart..

Are there any tips/advice that someone might be able to share?

Thanks in advance.

 

[TMY]

It is situations like these that I wish you could program the auto-iris to limit itself to a few stops.

Unfortunately, most of the time, the people who are running the lights at (I'm assuming these are in the elementary/grade school range) these kind of events range from complete yahoos to only having stage lighting experience and don't really understand the lighting needs for video. The only thing I can recommend is to bring you blacks down a bit to keep the image looking "clean", and you could program the auto-iris to shoot a stop or two higher or lower, depending on your needs.

 

[bill totolo]

You should have someone on headset at the console controlling the lights with a dimmer.
If that isn't possible, set your curve to retain as much info as possible and expose for flesh tones.

I wouldn't think Spark is the best scene file setting for this. Whatever setting you use try setting the knee to "low" and using "cine-like" gamma.