video & film lighting Hi

[william koon]

Hi, Can anyone explain the difference in lighting for video versus film? Is it correct to give a narrower lighting ratio for video as compared to film ? Thanks

[David Mullen ASC]

Hi, Can anyone explain the difference in lighting for video versus film? Is it correct to give a narrower lighting ratio for video as compared to film ? Thanks

 

There is no general difference. There is no such thing as "video lighting" or "DV lighting" or "film lighting". Lighting is lighting -- you want a soft side key from the left, you do it in film or video. You want a big backlight, you use a big backlight. You want the light to be orange or blue, you use an orange or blue light.

 

There ARE differences in contrast range and low or high end latitude, and you adjust your lighting with that in mind... but you'd have to do that even if you were shooting film, but doing a bleach-bypass to the negative, or using cross-processed reversal, or normal reversal, etc.

 

Since most video cameras have poor overexposure latitude compared to color negative film, you have to make adjustments to hold that bright detail and keep it from clipping. That's not quite the same thing as using a flatter ratio of key to fill. Since video cameras tend to see into the shadows quite well, you don't necessarily want to use more fill lighting. Nor do you necessarily want to underexpose everything just to hold more highlight detail, because you may get noise. What you want to do is find ways of bringing down the brightest spots in the frame to something the video camera can handle, whether you use of net flags, ND grad filters, ND on windows, dimming practical lamps, using darker clothing, whatever solves the problem when some part of the frame is too hot.