Tips for shooting a welding commercial?

J

jshbckr

Veteran
I might be shooting a commercial for a place that welds and fabricates steel art, railings, etc.

Are there concerns I should have about getting shots of welding? I wasn't sure if it can damage a lens or sensor... Just thought I'd ask!

And if you know of any cool techniques or tips, that would be great!
 
I would talk to the welders and take their advice about protecting your own eyes, when shooting the welding. I find it hard to belive that it woud damage the sensor on a camera through, unless you maybe held a shot of a high intensity arc for a very long time.

As for shooting, a lot of arc welders throw off high intensity ight of short duration, like a strobe light. You might have issues with the rolling shutter in those situations. We once used an arc welder to simulate lightning, but because of rolling shutter, I would not do that with a video DSLR without testing it first.
 
That's a very good point. I might end up using the company's video camera, but I was going to have my 7D along with and thought I could maybe shoot with that if the situation allowed. At least I can try it out and I'll be able to fall back on the other camera.
 
jshbckr said:
That's a very good point. I might end up using the company's video camera, but I was going to have my 7D along with and thought I could maybe shoot with that if the situation allowed. At least I can try it out and I'll be able to fall back on the other camera.
Click to expand...

Do us a favor and see if you can get some shots in, with the 7D, that tests the rolling shutter like we described above, and see if it is an issue. Then update this thread with what you found out.

We're all in this together...
 
It's been a few months since I posted this, I kind of forgot about this topic!

Just thought I'd update and post the finished commercial!

EDIT: Wow, I cannot embed this video for the life of me. I clicked the "Vimeo" button in the new post window... pasted the embed code (I tried both the new iPad/iPhone HTML5 code and the old code) but nothing worked. It said "This video does not exist. But clearly it does!

http://vimeo.com/13118273

It has some obvious weird strobe-effect with some of the bright weld flashes, but overall I don't think it's too awful. Especially for a no-budget local commercial!

Not too bad for how little our company charges for commercials (we make all the money in the air time!)
 
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jshbckr said:
EDIT: Wow, I cannot embed this video for the life of me. I clicked the "Vimeo" button in the new post window... pasted the embed code (I tried both the new iPad/iPhone HTML5 code and the old code) but nothing worked. It said "This video does not exist. But clearly it does!
Click to expand...

Tylers86 said:
Apparntly this forum does not allow for vimeo embedding.
Click to expand...

This forum does allow Vimeo embeds. What people don't realize is that you do not post the entire vimeo URL within the embed tags, only the video's ID number.

 
Very nice. I suppose a casual viewer would not pay attention to the banding effect. We did a "how it's made"-like shoot of a drywall cart manufacturing process but used CCD's for that one. It was a lot of welding.
 
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