Shooting out-of-gamut LED colors

[Elliott Balsley]

I do a lot of shooting at live events, where the lighting guys frequently use LEDs (ColorKinetics, Chauvet, etc.) to wash the white walls, make patterns, etc. It looks cool in person, but the colors sometimes don't translate correctly on camera. I see two reasons for this:
The LEDs have various spikes on their spectral output that are more noticeable on camera than by eye.
The highly saturated colors are out of Rec 709 gamut.

The talent is lit with tungsten, the colors are just background. So my camera white balance must be 3200K. Is there any way to get a more accurate background with camera settings? I'm shooting on P2 cameras usually. It seems like what is needed is a custom color matrix so I can choose how out-of-gamut colors are quantized. I suppose a RAW camera could work, since it would record a wider gamut, then tweaks could be done in post. But the live monitoring would still look wrong.

 

[Grug]

In my experience of event shooting (which is admittedly pretty limited), I've found that most 'architectural' LED lights seem to push a bluer light through their projection and colour (which is to be expected as LEDs are inherently blue. So balancing for daylight (5600k) yields MUCH nicer results with architectural LEDs in the background. I'd strongly suggest lighting the talent with daylight balanced sources if you want to improve things.

 

[Razz16mm]

In my experience of event shooting (which is admittedly pretty limited), I've found that most 'architectural' LED lights seem to push a bluer light through their projection and colour (which is to be expected as LEDs are inherently blue. So balancing for daylight (5600k) yields MUCH nicer results with architectural LEDs in the background. I'd strongly suggest lighting the talent with daylight balanced sources if you want to improve things.

You don't often get the option with live event staging. Lighting is not under your control. But setting a bit cooler color temp, not full daylight but maybe 3.5-4k, could help.

 

[Policar]

Try different cameras.

I've found the red/MX handles street lights poorly. Canon CX00 handles them okay but over-saturates highlights and you need to grade. That said quite good. F5 handles them okay, but again... the clipping areas over-saturate very badly. F3 seems similar, also quite good. Alexa... perfect.

What camera are you using... hvx? I have found the hvx loves to over-saturate anything beyond like 80 IRE just to a ridiculous extent and there's very little DR toward the knee. You'll do better with a "cinema" camera (not a dSLR). Not sure it's an issue with rec709, but all these cameras offer log modes that help a bit. Honestly I think the MX sensor is garbage with mixed light, though, don't know why you're so into raw.