Matt Sandstrom

if it's a locked down shot you can also shoot a clean plate and cross fade. could look a bit too "magical" perhaps but if the talent is already almost invisible in the shadows it might work. it obviously starts with the lighting.

/matt

The shooting is taking place in a town square at night.2 actors,kinos,chinese balls and HMIs for backrounds.

What are the best settings for this sittuation?

it depends on how you want it to look. generally you shouldn't change settings for each location but chose one profile and stick to it, at least per project but often for everything. hd doesn't really have a look of its own so it's all in the set design and lighting. the only general advidce i can give is to use cinegamma and turn down sharpness a bit.

/matt

I'm sorry you have it backwards. It is my opinion the solution is getting the right generator for the job, not the order in which one turns on lights.

oh, i got your opinion just fine and in general i tend to agree. I was talking about the realities of our project this summer. Finding a new generator would have been hard and once we figured out the order that was the best solution. /matt

i would say that the main difference between night and day, aside from david's great suggestions, is that at night the walls are dark while in the day they are lit. this is obviously not always the case but it's a trick you can use if you want to change the time of day quickly.

/matt

Your problem occurred was caused by a voltage drop. The generator was too small for keeping up with getting therespective lights on.

yeah, that makes sense. there was a noticable voltage drop when we struck the hmi with the redhead on as well, it almost died completely, but as you say tungsten lights don't care. anyway, the solution to always turn them on in that correct order seemed like a better one than to get a bigger genny, though not optimal.

/matt

(just make sure you strike the HMI with nothing else on)

i've had the opposite experience in a similar situation though. we regularly ran a 575 hmi and an 800w redhead on a 2k honda this summer, and if we plugged in the redhead while the hmi was on it died every time, but it worked just fine as long as the redhead went on first. this was a 575 and not a 1200 though, and 800w is a bit more than "and then some", but i just thought i'd share.

/matt

We do things for the people we love not out of some quid-pro-quo logic, but because we want to.

exactly. those who didn't get that from my post are, respectfully, not very bright.

it's about being a decent human being.

exactly, again.

/matt

i'm fairly sure my logic would work fine in that case, i.e two stops for each halving of the image size. i don't know the exact image size of either 35mm or 1/3" though, so all i could do was calculate the difference between 2/3" and 1/3" and extrapolate.

/matt

no, you don't owe them anything. that wouldn't be fair since you never asked for anything. this said most people love their parents and want to help them out no matter what.

do you buy your friend a beer because he's your friend or because he bouht you one yesterday? i know for sure that the day my friend started demanding i bought him beers i would be less happy to do so.

make any conclusions from this potentially either nonsense or zen wisdom you like. ;-)

/matt

i'm guessing it's two stops per half image size, since two stops is a doubling of the aperture diameter, which is really what's determining depth of field. so 4 1/2 then?

but does this really work? while you get the same depth of field it won't look the same, would it? i have a feeling the background gets more and more out of focus as the focal length increases, even if dof is maintained. what i'm saying is if you're trying to create or match a look it's not the dof itself that determines it but the amount of fg/bg blur.

/matt

Set your camera to facory defaults and light.

except there's nothing default about the camera defaults. i believe cinegamma is much closer to the "native" gamma of the camera than the default for example. changing the settings is no different from chosing how to rate a stock or what camera filters to use. and again, many custom settings will result in much less image manipulation than the default.

i totally get your point though. there's very little you can do with the camera compared to how much you can do in front of it.

/matt

good advice. for this particular camera though i must say that i like to expose every part of the image and then bring it down in post. the hdv codec has a nasty habit of getting *really* noisy in the darker areas. i'm talking 1996 web video level of mosquito noise and blocking that you'll see the second you start doing any kind of color correction.

/matt

blocking or diffusing the sun on the subjects only works if you can find a background that's in the shade. if you can throw it out of focus it's not as critical but it can't really be fully sunlit. a blue sky will kill the illusion so try and blow it out. and of course make everything a little blue.

i wouldn't shoot it sunny if that's not what the script calls for. better a bad illusion than the complete wrong emotion in my opinion. ask the director though. not all will agree with me.

/matt

I fail to understand the latter part of the above statement ( and Linearly encodes the densities...).

linear means that double the density means double the value. log means that double density means that the value increases by one. but i guess you knew that. i believe that ccd's are linear so if you record light, which is a log entity since it requires a doubling to get a linear increase in brightness, you get a log signal. the dsp converts this to a linear scale using a gamma of your choice.

/matt

...and put a double in the forground performing the same movements. sometimes referred to as the la haine trick, but i'm sure they stole it from somebody else.

/matt

i only use fcp. sorry.

/matt

ok, the color thing is mainly art direction. let people wear grey shirts instead of orange and purple, and put a cross in the background rather than an elephant god and you're set. :-) i'm joking but i'm also dead serious.

other things you can do is to use more back and cross lighting, which tends to desaturate an image. one last thing is to desaturate the image in camera or post, but imo that's an overused effect that doesn't really do what people think.

/matt

just rent one, they're only like $20 per day, or do you need it for a long time? my educated guess is the pd170 one will work fine as long as you have the correct step ring. since you're working at the telephoto end of the zoom you don't need to worry about vignetting. this is if you're only using it for telephoto shots. if you plan on keeping it on all the time it won't work.

/matt

well, if you have access to the camera why don't you just shoot some tests? sharpness down, cinegamma on, skin dtl off, cineframe 25 or off (deinterlace in post), will be a good start. then you can experiment with exposure as well as color and white balance offsets until you get what you want. avoid overexposure at all cost or you'll never get the film look.

btw europeans think european films are grey while indian ones are really colorful, so i'm not sure what you're talking about. ;-)

/matt

yeah, night exteriors can be hard to do, especially if you're inexperienced and don't have plenty of light and a good gaffer. what's the location and what's the natural light like there? what lights were you plannng on bringing. you realize that this is more a lighting than a camera issue, right?

/matt

it's your call but the feeling i get is that if you're at the butcher's the sunlight would actually feel warm and the ourdoor neutral. if so i'd use a 1/4 cts on the 5k and leave eveything else tungsten. and maybe a little blue on the outdoor setlight if it's supposed to be in the shade.

/matt

how will you light it? is it mainly int or ext? day or night?

and what on earth is amateur about long shots anyway? go to the theater and see "du & jag" right away. shot with the z1 by my good friend linus eklund. plenty of fantastic long shots. and a good example of what hdv can look like when blown up to 35mm. i.e. not quite as sharp as "real" hd but neither with any of the common video artifacts.

/matt

Since he's shooting on a stage, a tungsten unit on tungsten stock would render "white"

oh, i thought the outside was a "real" outside for some reason. guess i type the fastest but read too slowly. :-) i second your suggestion then.

how do you plan on lighting the exterior itself? the 5k is supposed to hit the interior through the window, right?

/matt

The only problem is unwanted spill.

is that really a problem with a ring light? they usually spread to the edge of the frame and beyond anyway, and by definition cast no shadows. i guess it could become a problem if it starts hitting reflectors and shiny objects outside the frame, but that's about it. i've very limited experience with ring lights though, so please educate me.

/matt

The inside light is going to be wormer and the fake day light quite cool, but which kind of difference should it be to look naturel?

less than full. i usually correct all to the same temperature and maybe just leave any practicals warm. using a tungsten unit for the sun is a less than perfect idea since you'll have to gel it blue, and then gel the window orange, meaning you'll lose a lot of light. a 1200 hmi will give you as much light with less hassle. anyway, if you decide to do it that way i'd probably start with full ctb on the 5k and half cto on the window. or you can gel all the indoor units half blue and leave the window. it depends on what you think is easier and what light output you're getting. are you shooting film or video? print or telecine?

/matt