Changing brightness of daylight during interviews

[John Sharaf]

Hi Paul,

Such are the consequences of living in the real world.

Auto Iris is not going to help you unless you can simultaneously and in sync raise the interior lighting at the same time (not possible).

All I can really suggest, is that if you are in such a situation where the sun is going in and out of the clouds in the background, and it does not serve your artistic intention, you’ve got to choose another background!

JMHO

JS

[Mark Suszko]

I don’t think it will entirely solve your problem, but you might be able to save this in the grading process, somewhat, if you can counter the lighting changes there. In retrospect, maybe an HMI outside the window could have kept the levels more continuous, but, that may not have been in line with the budget or the style of the shoot.

[Rich Rubasch]

If we know we are shooting in a room with outside windows we always have a roll of ND filter paper to completely cover the windows. This minimizes the effect of the light “breathing” but it still does just not as noticeable. You could garbage matte around the subject with a soft edge and keyframe the mids and highs to follow the light changes much like tracking an object.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com

[Jason Jenkins]

I use curtains like this to black out the windows: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Home-Fashion-Insulated-Blackout/dp/B001A63XTS

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

Check out my Mormon.org profile.

[Mark Suszko]

But if they’re counting on daylight as part of the lighting design, blackout curtains won’t help. Unless you mean to completely replace the window with interior lighting. If there was budget and time for it, the thing to do might be to build a cardboard/foam core box or cloth tent around the outside of the door or window to isolate it and put daylight-balanced sources inside of that box or tent, so you’d have a steady source that looked “motivated”. But I get the impression they were using available light because they didn’t have enough gear to light it with artificial sources alone. I could be wrong.

[Paul Rhys]

Thanks everyone – sorry, I didn’t have email notifications on so didn’t see I had replies.

All of these useful, this was a down-the-line interview with a short amount of time to do it in so sounds like the “real world” was all I could hope for on this occasion, but I’ll take those suggestions with me for different kinds of shoots. Cheers!