Shooting rooms with tv's and pther bright lights

January 7, 2005

One thing I've noticed when trying to shoot with my MiniDV camera is that light sources come out un-naturally flared. This is obviously because light differences are a lot more different on camera than to the eye. (i.e. you might see an evenly exposed set but on film the shadows that were there come out even darker)

Thing is, how do they do it in film? Do they dim down the lights and use other studio fill lights to compensate for the light loss?

Thing is, what I'm trying to get my head around is shooting low lighted scenes. Here?s an example from "Road to Perdition":

Example

Now there is still a fair amount of DOF in that picture, plus it looks like they are using a long focal length lens zoomed in so the DOF is even further decreased. I have done a bit of experimenting with my SLR, (50mm 1/30th 400iso) and even in brightly lit rooms I can still only get about an f4/5.6. Even if they were using 500iso, lets be realistic, 400 to 500 iso doesn't make a huge difference atall, unless you?re doing long shots.

So, are DOF characteristics that much different between cine 35mm and stills 35mm that you get a lot more DOF? Obviously with stills 35mm you are using a larger area, so the DOF will be smaller.

Are cine emulsions any more light sensitive in anyway?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Edited January 7, 2005 by Daniel J. Ashley-Smith

oscar jimenez · January 7, 2005

I think that it is a matter of Zone sistem use. I do my tests with 35mm stills ( I do always use slide film to get to the real thing ) but anyway, the speed we use at 24 fps will be somewhat 1/50 of a second. Do you use a spot meter? that will give you exactly the placement of each subject: background, skins, etc with accuracy. Try to get a hand on Ansel Adams "The Negative" book, I guess all we do is there.

good luck

Phil Rhodes · January 7, 2005

Hi,

Also, you're shooting video. Video does this tons more than film. Shoot the same scene side by side on your video and film stills cameras and compare the way they see light.

Phil

David Mullen ASC · January 8, 2005

In terms of exposing TV screens correctly, you either have to darken them or light the room brighter (or both) if you want them to be balanced with room exposure.

In terms of making a scene dark and moody, don't confuse how dark a scene looks with what light level was used for shooting. You could make a scene lit by sunlight look really dark if you underexposed it enough. You could use slow-speed film and huge powerful lights indoors and make the scene look dark and moody.

In the case of "Road to Perdition" the light levels probably were low because Hall liked to shoot near wide-open for less depth of field, often at an f/2.0 (wide-open on a Primo) unless he had to use a zoom lens. Usually he used 500 ASA film also but often he exposed it well-enough to print at higher printing lights, so he was probably treating it more like a 400 or 320 ASA film. He was not fond of underexposing the negative, preferring to print things darker in post instead. Of course, with video, you'd probably want to underexpose in-camera more to create that effect.

The effect you see in the still is something like printing or exposing people to look about one-stop below normal brightness, a "down" look. Now whether he was rating his film slower, like at 320 ASA, but then underexposed the faces in the shot by one-stop to look dimmer, or if he rated that film at 500 ASA, exposed normally, and printed it darker, doesn't really matter because it all sort of ends up the same thing. By rating the 500 ASA film at 320 ASA, and shooting a gray scale at this new rating and telling them to make it look normal, you are in essense "printing down" the image in video dailies and then later in prints, otherwise the image would look 2/3's of a stop overexposed. So by setting your ASA rating to be lower than normal, generally overexposing a little, you are giving yourself more leeway to intentionally underexpose a shot to look moody because on the negative, it does not end up quite as "thin" as it would if you were rating the film normally. Again, all of this applies to color negative exposures, not video or color reversal where there are no benefits to overexposure.

January 10, 2005

I was wondering about over-doing the light but then under-exposing on the camera. Do video assists on 35mm cine cameras give an accurate example of the lighting? I mean is there some kind of control panel on the video assist that lets you input the film speed and it will raise the gain to match the specs?

Or are video assists there purely for a rough description of what it will look like in framing wise?

Otherwise it would be hit or miss and you would be forced to run a series of tests. Time consuming tests.

Phil Rhodes · January 10, 2005

Hi,

> Do video assists on 35mm cine cameras give an accurate example of the lighting?

No. They couldn't possibly, they don't have the dynamic range.

> Or are video assists there purely for a rough description of what it will look like in

> framing wise?

Yes.

> Otherwise it would be hit or miss and you would be forced to run a series of tests.

> Time consuming tests.

Yes. If you want to do anything out of the ordinary (special processing, special camera techniques, special lighting effects) you end up shooting tests at gigantic expense.

Phil

Kevin Zanit · January 10, 2005

Well, I am willing to bet Connie Hall's work was not hit or miss very often. The man was a master of the format, and he sure as hell had an idea what the final product would look like.

Shooting film is not like shooting video. The video tap is for framing only. This is where an experienced eye and light meters come in. This is also why shooting film is considered to be considerably more challenging (at least until you have developed the skill set needed to shoot film).

Kevin Zanit

Phil Rhodes · January 11, 2005

Hi,

> Well, I am willing to bet Connie Hall's work was not hit or miss very often. The man was a master of

> the format, and he sure as hell had an idea what the final product would look like.

Yes, but he also worked exclusively on productions where making mistakes could be got around, by returning to a location, being on a given set for several days, whatever. Having unlimited money is not quite the universal cureall, but it almost is.

Phil

Kevin Zanit · January 11, 2005

Well he was a humble man, but I can tell you he screwed up far less than he led on in his great stories.

Having all the money in the world doesn?t make for good cinematography. He lit a scene with flashlights and well placed bounce board :o

I get your point though Phil, but nonetheless I don?t want to discredit him.

Kevin Zanit

Jon Rosenbloom · January 11, 2005

Many points to make:

First, yes, every photographer should read "The Negative" by Ansel Adams. Having read the book, you should shoot a lot of slides on a manual exposure camera, and bracket your exposures. Stick your hand in front of the camera, shoot it w/ the needle in the middle of the scale. Stop down, stop down some more, open the aperature, etc. Develop normal. Observe. You'll be able to see what David means by a thin negative. When you develop your skills, your approach will be up to you. Some DP's like to shoot an optimally dense negative no matter what the scene, not too thin, and not too thick. I've known TV DP's who underexpose everything by 3 stops because the post-people transfer his footage very bright. (Personally, if it's not a "normal" light scene, I like to nudge the stop towards the final look.)

As far as the practical lights go: Film is way more forgiving than video. If the practicals are too bright, you can do a few things: You can put in lower wattage bulbs, put the practicals on hand dimmers, or - if you're looking at a lamp w/ a lampshade - you can put some ND gel on the inside of the shade that's facing the camera. This last bit is a pain-in-the ass, but w/ mini DV it's still often needed. You should practice cutting and taping the gel a few times before you blow an hour on the set trying to figure it out.

Video Tap: You would be amazed at how strong an influence the video tap can have on lighting. (Though, you've got to be a real pro to do this.)

Conrad Hall: I'm between Phil and Kevin on this. If you've got 30 experienced lighting technicians, a truck full of Primo lenses, million dollar sets, and so-on, it's a good bet that you're going to come up w/ a decent image. You could almost phone it in, you could sit in the chair, tell the operator to set up an M/CU, tell the gaffer it's a bright sunny day, and so on. But, there's a whole lot of pre-production during which you're going to have to answer some mighty big questions, and you better know what you're doing. Also, it's not necessarily the DP's technical skill for which he gets hired, but his taste, his vision, his instinct for what will serve the script.

But yes, Conrad Hall had a lot of money to work. I remember in the AC article on "Road to Perdition," the gaffer explained that they didn't do any pre-lighting. Those 40' trailers of Grip and Camera and Lighting equipment were viewed as Connie's tool box.

Phil Rhodes · January 11, 2005

Hi,

Speaking of being underexposed and printing up, I'm watching (for my sins) Top Gun, which I just bought on DVD, and am therefore in a better position to evaluate than at any time before. There's a handful of shots during the beach volleyball scene which are grainy, with bluish blacks. It's mainly high-speed stuff, but the entire sequence is bright sunlight and the rest of it (including other high speed stuff) looks great, considering its age. It's almost as if they pulled a high speed specialist camera off the aerial shoot and shot some stuff with it in a different format.

Also the DVD is in 2:1. Was this the intention? Again, something to do with special format aerial stuff?

Phil

David Mullen ASC · January 12, 2005

Also the DVD is in 2:1. Was this the intention? Again, something to do with special format aerial stuff?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There are a few Super-35 titles, framed originally for cropping to 2.35, where the directors decided to only matte the home video widescreen version to 2:1, figuring it was a good compromise between keeping the semblence of the original framing while not making the image too small on TV. "Star Trek 6", "Austin Powers", "Top Gun", and "Howard's End" all come to mind. The first widescreen laserdisc of "The Abyss" was letterboxed to around 1.9 : 1. The first widescreen transfer of "Lawrence of Arabia" was around 2:1 as well (it was shot in 2.20 : 1 65mm) because David Lean told Robert Harris "find a shot where something important is at both ends of the same frame and use enough letterboxing to hold all that information".

January 12, 2005

Hi,

Speaking of being underexposed and printing up, I'm watching (for my sins) Top Gun, which I just bought on DVD, and am therefore in a better position to evaluate than at any time before. There's a handful of shots during the beach volleyball scene which are grainy, with bluish blacks. It's mainly high-speed stuff, but the entire sequence is bright sunlight and the rest of it (including other high speed stuff) looks great, considering its age. It's almost as if they pulled a high speed specialist camera off the aerial shoot and shot some stuff with it in a different format.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Those shots you've noticed were actually blown up, cropped and rematted on the optical printer (clearly). The composition wasn't good enough for Tony Scott, apparently. So he made a close up out of a medium wide. Nice. Cough...

Remember also that Top Gun was originally going to be shot animorphically, but the sturdyness and weight of the lenses would not suffice for the aerial filming.

Edited January 12, 2005 by fstop