Nicolas POISSON

I am no expert, but I do not see how low bit depth is responsible for noise. My understanding is that noise comes from the randomness of electronic reading circuit, but as well from the inherent random nature of light. When light is low, its randomness becomes more obvious, even with the perfect noise-free sensor and 1-zillion bit AD converter. Hence the best solution is to add more light. I would think that low bit depth could even reduce noise: with levels more distant from one another, there is less digital levels to choose from. Analogue levels slightly varying due to noise will lead

Well, some fundamental parameters are missing here. A RAW file cannot be seen by the eye, it cannot be displayed. So it cannot “look good” or “look bad”. It has to be processed in some ways : de-bayering, white balance, and so on. Indeed, there is not such thing as a "RAW image", even if everybody uses this term. There is only "Raw data", that can be processed immediately in the camera or stored as RAW data to be processed later. You cannot compare the quality of a RAW and a Jpeg image. You can only compare RAW data processed by a user and the same RAW data processed automatically by a

Very interesting ! My feeling is: - I do not find the soft-box too powerful. Indeed, the problem is mainly a question of direction. If it was at a lower height and slightly upward, it might work better at selling the book as a reflective source. - yes you could cut a hole in the lampshade, or hide a light behind. But in such a scene, I would not put the lamp in front of the character. I would rather put it on its side. Then this kind of trick would no longer work. - I am not at all annoyed by the lampshade being too thick. A slight hot spot would be good too (slight variations a

I do not understand what you mean by "dominate". The pen is just a stuff an actor can play with, no more.

The shadow on the upper third is due to the bulb with a silver cap on its top. Now I use aluminium gaffer tape instead. LED bulbs do not heat much, and this allows to shape the cap as desired.

I start to understand where I mistook. What please me in picture #8 is that one can better see the folds of the lampshade, whereas in picture #6 we see more the mesh of the fabric, folds being more "shadowy silhouette" (do we say that ?). From what you all say, if I want the lamp to look like in picture #8, I should accept it to be purely decorative, and have the key light motivated by something else. The lamp could still justify a bit more light here and there, but not be the key light. By the way, is there a benefit to have the (fake) source from that other key light in the frame at som

Sure! This is the goal. Thank you both of you for your remarks. By the way, anybody willing to share its own experiments or tricks is welcomed. I am a bit surprised, and thus interested, by what I understand as a question of “realistic” look. I thought, maybe naively, that one could cheat a lot with lighting. Even in movies that are supposed to be somewhat realistic. One cheat with white balance. Characters are rich spoiled brats that leave lamps on during daytime. The moonlight is deep blue. There are smoky atmospheres in bars where nobody actually smokes. I spend a lot of time goog

Picture 3 We go back to initial exposure. We replace the bulb with a 0,5W (yes, half a watt) LED bulb. The intensity through the lampshade is better, but the bulb still appears as a hot spot. The top no longer clips. This is better. Picture 4 We place a roll of diffusion (Lee 400) right around the bulb. We are rather happy: the lampshade brightness is adequate, it is rather homogeneous, and the top is not clipping. We really like the lampshade now. But the table now receives hardly any light. We did try to light it using a projector outside the frame, but the lamp cr

I am looking forward to improve my lighting know-how. I did experiments a few weeks ago for a short film. Two people are talking around a table in the house of a theater. There is a lamp on that table that will be in the frame. It will be the fake source to light the characters. Our mission, if we accept it, is to have the dynamic range of that lamp to fit in what the camera can accept, without catching the eye too much. We are enthusiast (read “we have no money”). We do not have plenty of devices to balance the overall lighting. So we go the cheap other way: lower the hot spots, raise t

Wider or... lower height. When shooting with the full sensor width, 16:9 uses a greater surface than "17:9" or "DCI" (other ways to say 1.85:1). However, on mirrorless cameras with high pixel count, the "1.85" ratio, although smaller in surface, might be less downsized than the 16:9, resulting in a "wider" image (4096/2048 vs 3840/1920).

Ooops - mistake, sorry.

There are a few pictures of the set-up of " Portrait of a Lady on Fire" here: https://www.red.com/news/claire-mathon-afc Given the size of the windows, half the surface of the wall can be considered as a large source, the other half being a large reflector.

I vote for theatrical "moving heads" as well. There are three kind of these: beam, wash, spot. "Beam" type has a very narrow beam. "Wash" is similar to a PAR64 lamp, rather wide angle, with soft edges. "Spot" is similar to a profile projector, with sharp edges, homogeneous light within the beam, and the ability to be shaped with a gobo. Since the beams in the video appear rather sharp, I'd say these are "spot moving heads". These used to be of HMI technology or similar, with a rather high colour temperature (7000K or so). LED is becoming more and more common, although not as powerful, but

I would not categorize all DSLR in a single set and make generic conclusions based on two models that are 6 years old. All I can say is that the 645Z delivering lower quality video than a BMPCC is not really surprising. Concerning the images you posted, well I cannot tell which camera has better skin tones since there is only one sample. But I would not link skin tones to any debate like pixel binning vs line skipping. I do not understand what you mean. Whatever video device you use, there is always a compromise between the amount of data, image size, frame rate, compression ratio, and

Reading reviews here and there, it seems that the 645Z was already not that great for video when it was released in 2014. It has a medium format sensor and crops only a little. So the area used for video remains very wide. But there is much more to image quality than the algorithm used to output 2K video from a high resolution sensor. Video on DSLR and mirror-less has improved a lot in the recent years. So it is not really surprising that an "old" dedicated video camera delivers better image than an "old" medium format camera.