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Hello everyone, We are about to shoot a commercial on 16mm and our priority is to achieve the cleanest image possible, with minimal grain. Ideally, we would overexpose 50D by one stop, but we are not sure we ll have the conditions to do so. Given that limitation, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the best approach: 1. Shooting 250D at 100 or 125 ISO and correcting in post. 2. Shooting 250D at 50 ISO and pulling one stop (or even two stops) in processing. 3. Sticking with 50D at box speed (no push or pull). On a previous project, we had excellent results overexposing 50D by two stops, but that might not be possible this time. Would love to hear your experiences and recommendations! Thanks in advance!

From most of the sources I have read, it was always written than overexposing film (thicker negative) would lead to increased latitude in the highlights and underexposing film (thinner negative) would lead to increased latitude in the shadows (the opposite is true for digital which makes sense). However, I am currently reading Glen Kennels excellent book on "color and mastering for digital cinema" and am now a bit confused if what I have read regarding overexposing = more highlight detail and vice versa is true. Perhaps I must be misunderstanding something. 1) Now in this book he mentions that to obtain more details in the shadows, you would want to overexpose to obtain a heavy negative and then print down to extend the range into the shadows. This would lead to deeper blacks as he shows in a diagram, but as he also mentions, is that can uncover "details that might otherwise have been lost". As well as to underexpose the negative to assure that all the highlight information is obtained in the negative. Perhaps I am confusing underexposing to ensure that all the highlight details are captured and overexposing to obtain a larger range of details in the highlights as the same thing, when in reality they are different. However, it seems like it would make much more sense to underexpose and then print up to obtain more details in the highlights. Furthermore, I don't understand how underexposing would lead to more details in the shadows compared to as is mentioned in the book, overexposing and then printing down. I hope someone could maybe help me clear up some of my confusions regarding this. 2) Another point I would like to mention is that overexposing the negative is said to lead to more contrast; however, when I'm looking at the curve of the color print film, the gamma of the curve seems to be the same, which is theoretically the definition of contrast in projected print. Although I thought that perhaps the reasoning is that we now have a larger difference between the minimum and maximum amount of density on the color film print. Is this correct?

Newcomers tend to ask if a certain film stock will over or underexpose in a specific camera they have just purchased when shooting in the automatic exposure mode. Has anyone actually gotten negative footage that was either too over-exposed or too under-exposed when shooting in the automatic mode, and of course assuming there was adequate light with which to shoot?