Overexposure and Printing Down

[Jon Peter]

With film, one way of adding to your image a bit of saturation, slightly richer blacks, and added contrast is to overexpose the negative and print down back to normal.

 

If you were to be shooting say, a music video, whose only exhibition would be digitally, does the above still hold true? Since black level is a technical function in the digital arena and there is no actual film print, is there any use in overexposing the negative (let's say by 1-stop) and bringing it back during telecine?

 

 

Sincerely,

 

Jon Peter

[David Mullen ASC]

Not so much advantage in terms of black level only, but in terms of digitally color-correcting the image, which may affect shadow information, I've found that a denser negative in scanning is still better than a thinner negative because as soon as you decide to brighten something exposed too dark but keep the blacks black, you see noise and grain in HD and higher resolutions.

 

So it really depends on how good you are at exposing. If you're sure you will never accidentally underexpose, then you should be fine with a normal rating.

[Jon Peter]

Thanks, David.