Theater lighting

M

mandj

New member
Hi,
I have never used a forum before to ask anything I have always tried to figure thing out myself but with my canon xh-a1 I am stumped, I use this camcorder mainly for dance recitals and plays which almost always give puts you in a dark rooms and very bright lighting condition on stage, I have noticed two different issues with this a1. 1st is focus in instance auto focus, if the subject moves on stage towards the camcorder greater the about four feet the subject becomes blurry. 2nd is over exposure, I have used both auto and manual shooting modes and still have more over exposures then I had seen in other camcorders I have used. In manual I used shutter, f-stop and gain to try to correct for the over exposures with some luck ( shutter @ 75, f-stop varied and gain to a -3 ) but still think I could do better. I have not used any of the custom pre-sets.
Could anyone give me some ideas on how to get better video shooting in a theater environment? I strongly believe this camcorder is capable of getting video then I have achieved. When I do get a chance to use this a1 outdoors the video is beyond great.
 
Use the zebra function. It tells you exactly which area of the image is overexposed so you can close down the iris accordingly. Don't trust the LCD. Autofocus is a problem at long focal length because the depth of field is so short and the camera favors the background rather than the foreground. I wouldn't use autofocus at all unless it's a wide shot. One last thing that I've found is you should turn down the red gain in the camera because theatre lighting tends to favor orange/red for some reason. Looks good to our eyes but horrible on camera.
 
Hi Mandj,

Jade said it perfectly - just the kind of problems I found on my last theater shoot. It was a real problem using the small monitor with low lighting at 30-50 feet from talent. Yes, certainly stick with manual focus (unless you have an unmanned wide-angle B camera down on the stage). And the lighting guys really love red light to add drama for some scenes, leading to lots of color correction in post (nasty doing a two camera adjustment in post).

Good luck, Michael
 
I've found the A1 to do quite nicely with theater lighting - at least compared to my DVX100. It seems to have more latitude for one thing and it controls the reds which has always been problematic with the DVX.

As the others said, use your zebras and expose for the highlights. I have my zebras set to 90% (I think) and then make sure skin tones are below that. You're still bound to run into sparkly or reflective costumes or even just a white shirt that if you try to keep completely out of the zebras will cause you to significantly underexpose the scene. Those situations are a judgement call.

As for focus, again as others have said, stick with manual focus. Before the show I focus on various spots on the stage and make a mental note of the distance reading. Then during the performance I adjust the focus based on that.

I find the A1's LCD is just too small for this kind of work. I use a cheap 7" LCD monitor mainly to judge my framing. It's not very useful for critical focus but you have to pay some serious bucks for one that is. The A1 will not display zebra information to an external monitor so I either look up at the A1's LCD or use DV Rack which I have recording to disk. I used to use DV Rack as my only external monitor. It worked great for SD. Now that I'm shooting HDV, the time lag in DV Rack's monitor is too long to be useful for anything other than exposure.

Moonlitnite is right about the color correction for colored lighting. It always shows up stronger in the camera than our eyes perceive it. I don't try to completely color correct each scene though. In a blue spotlight, for example, I just try to warm up the scene enough to get just a hint of normal skin tone.

-Dan
 
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