mixed light sources in restaurant

Olivier Egli · December 2, 2004

hey all

once again I am in the course of prepping a music video shoot.

this time it is going to be in a turkish restaurant.

a quick run through with my color meter showed very varied light sources.

the fixatures are in the frame so they cannot be gelled. Also I am going for a cyanish allover

look with some excess in green and blue.

here's the thing:

one part of the frame is covered by a kitchen with energy saving osram lamps outputting at

around 4100K with an average of about +12CC in green (a lot, I know).

the other part of the frame is covered by the part where the customers sit and eat. there

I have halogenic lights with around 2700K and +2CC in green.

My plan now was to use daylight balanced kinoflos in addition to the existing lights.

And over the flos I would hang 1/2 or a 1/4 CTO to bring them down and add a plusgreen which would

give me quite exactly +12CC.

The front part of the restaurant would then look quite normal and warm compared to the kitchen,

which would give me a nice tonal separation, which I intend.

Is my assumption right? Will my plan work out? Anything I overlooked?

PS: I do not use any type of color camera filtration...

Edited December 2, 2004 by scubba

Olivier Egli · December 2, 2004

...and I intend to use the Kodak 7229 expression stock

for more subdued contrast and color rendering and smoother

skin tones. would you agree my choice? the 7218 is somewhat

too harsh and hard looking for this kind of location imo..

Michael Nash · December 2, 2004

In the kitchen it would be easiest to put matching tubes in the kinos (matching the overheads) rather than kill the output with color correction gel. Almost any type of cool white will get you in the ballpark, they don't have to be the same manufacture. On tungsten film you will definitely get that cyan cast, and you can fine tune the blue-green balance in telecine.

In the dining room I would fill with tungsten light, possibly gelled with 1/8 or 1/4 CTO. You can also put tungsten lights on dimmers to dial in the precise color temperature.

Olivier Egli · December 3, 2004

In the kitchen it would be easiest to put matching tubes in the kinos (matching the overheads) rather than kill the output with color correction gel. Almost any type of cool white will get you in the ballpark, they don't have to be the same manufacture. On tungsten film you will definitely get that cyan cast, and you can fine tune the blue-green balance in telecine.

In the dining room I would fill with tungsten light, possibly gelled with 1/8 or 1/4 CTO. You can also put tungsten lights on dimmers to dial in the precise color temperature.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

hmmm...interesting. some lighting guy once explain to me that the color shift downwards the temeprature scale was not so strong as upwards. which means you wont really be able to tell that the 2700K fixatures in the dining room are of a lower output (redder) than my tungsten lights. Am I wrong?

Michael Nash · December 3, 2004

2700 degrees is different enough from 3200 to become visibly more orange on tungsten balanced film (but it is a slight difference). You could light with 3200 degree sources and get away with it, but if you're trying to preserve the warm color of the practicals you'll need to correct your movie lights to match.

I don't worry about the amount of shift upward vs. downwards by a particular number or whatever; in practice you learn that there are only so many types of lighting you encounter, and the "recipes" for color correction are always the same for those sources. You're able to estimate gel densities by eye after awhile. But I DO think about the stop loss of color correction gel; adding CTB to a source always costs more output than adding CTO (about 1-1/2 stops for full CTB; 2/3 stop for full CTO).

It's great that you've got the diligence to approach this academically, but I caution you not to be a slave to numbers and theory. That alone can't replace experience, so shoot tests (on stills or video) whenever you're unsure. A theory is just a theory until you prove it or disprove it!