Zombies Scarier In Dark???!!!

Slimothy

Slimothy

Veteran
Hello,
Big lighting boo boo here....I was forced (believe me I wouldn't have tried if it was my choice) to light a room in a "candle lit" style setting last night and guess what?! That's right, EVERYTHING is underexposed. I use Vegas 5. Anyone else ever F*** themselves over in a simliar way? I could sure use the advice. Basically what is the most effective way to brighten things in Vegas? Just use the Brightness/Contrast Plug-In? Or is there something more effective?
 
I've been messin w/ it a bit. Pretty grainy!!! Lol. I'm going to have the scariest zombie because he is the kind you can't even see!!!!!
 
Maybe you could go black and white. You'd have that grainy Night of the Living Dead look. I was considering doing that, myself.
 
It's going to be grainy no matter what you do. Heres the procedure for the fix, if you can all it that;

Step 1 Add the Levels plugin>go to the Gamma slider and move it to from 1 to about 1.25
Now you can see how much true detail you have in the shadows. You can play with the other 4 sliders here, but noot too much of anything.

Step 2 add the color curves plug in>your goal here is to preserve your color saturation you want to create an elongated s of sorts by moving the bottom control point to the bottom right and the top control point to the top left. Reevaluate your picture, if it is still too dark>

Step 3 Add the brightness and contrast plug in > this is a very harsh adjustment so use it sparingly.

Step 4 Your picture is probably looking a little fuzzy so add an unsharp mask. A little goes a long way

Step 5 by this time you also have probably washed out your blacks. Try a little black restore.

Again this is a real big band-aid, you will not have clean crisp video.
 
How could you underexpose with digital? Did you not have a good monitor, or one not calibrated to the right brightness?

were you actually relying on just candles for your light source?

Candles are very cool, I love shooting them. But you always need additional light, even if the audience doesn't realize there's additional light. These can be hard scenes to light properly though without a flicker device. There are ways around it by using multiple candles that are not in frame, being controled by grips or PAs to provide light from different angles and with a piece paper moving in front of it gives a more pronounced flicker look on the characters faces. (poor mans flicker device)

I'm certainly no master at this though, I'd love to hear what other people do.
 
No, I wasn't using just candles....I was using two 500 Watt worklights, and another homemade christmas light thingamajig I made myself. I bounced everything (except for the christmas light thing) to try and not have TOO much light, and I don't know if it's like this for everyone, but it always looks a bit brighter in the lcd then when you capture it. And No, I don't have a good monitor as that is a few extra hundred bucks that I needed to buy my actors with (zombie porn is a hard sell), lol. I didn't even have a camera man, let alone a person to wave paper in front of the light, although I tried to do it myself while working the camera......well, I'm sure you understand what happened there. So what I have is a heap of underexposed wanna-be candle-lit bullshit that any lighting pro would scoff at. Thanks so much Gopher Greene!!! I'll try that!
 
I pumped my brightness and contrast up 75% in Premiere... sure the picture is grainy as hell, but I'll submit my web version with this adjustment and the DVD version without it.

Dump your web version to disk and check it. The compressed version for the web will be a lot darker then your actual video... and fortunately the grain isn't nearly as noticeable. So accept the grain and brighten it for the version that we'll all be voting on... and keep the other version a little cleaner for the DVD.

That's what I'm doing.
 
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