Videoing of apartments

[Mark Suszko]

What do you mean by the phrase: “corporate videos of apartments”? Do you mean you’re doing virtual real estate tours? We need to know what you’re doing and the reasons before making good recommendations.

Assuming you ARE doing those, you are either doing a huge number of middle-value homes, or a handful of high-dollar homes. By the time you’re working on show video tours of multi-million-dollar properties, it’s ridiculous to scrimp on lighting, which leads to a crummy look on the video and no sales.

If you’re one of those poor guys who has to try and photograph a dozen properties in a day and turn them around to uploads overnight, for almost no money – I would say it’s faster to shoot the interiors as HDR stills with a DSLR or go-pro and touch-up the color grading and balance when you get home. Or, you could shoot the interiors at night. I think I would color-correct the flash unit of the DSLR and try to get everything into daylight color, leaving just the light fixtures looking a little yellow.

For ground-level work, you could bring along a color correction gel in a frame and lay that against the exterior side of the windows, take just that angle, move it, take the next angle by the next door or window… this us really a job that needs a grip assistant.

[Mark Pirres]

Hi there,

sorry, I should have explained a bit better – nothing that advanced, this is just a client who wants to have a video of his apartments to post on his website – we’re using DSLRs, steadicam, slider, that’s all

[Mark Pirres]

Hi Mark

my sincerest apologies for posting my previous reply – I completely misread your previous message! (never reply when travelling home on a bus!)

There’s not enough budget to use film lighting, and we need to shoot in day time (they want to see light streaming through the windows in some shots at least) – I’m obviously one of those poor guys!… I’m not sure what you mean when you talk about HDR stills, they want videos – only.

Using the following example of a video I’ve found of a quite luxury apartment though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiMayYjL6P8

It seems to me that they’ve shot some of the clips mixing natural light and light fixtures and still got quite a pleasing result. For example at 0:37, there’s a living room which seems to have a lot of mixed light. Any idea on how they’ve achieved that?

thanks

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[Mark Suszko]

For one thing, they are shooting late in the day, or super-early. Second, they are just allowing the exterior windows to “blow-out” to white. When all you have is white and no detail, you can use the color isolation tool in the FCP-7’s 3-way color-corrector, in FCP-x, In A.E., or in an outboard color-correction software like Apple Color of Magic Bullet – to grab just one shade of “white”, and make it match another. That’s the same idea behind the “Pleasantville Effect.” Or the Red Jacket in “Shindler’s List”.

You know, for all the “elegance” of the linked video, and the obvious time and expense they took in shooting, they make some pretty basic editing mistakes of tromboning zooms in and out, and crashing left-right pans or slider moves into each other, without a transitional shot to change direction. Also, too many unmotivated rack focus shots in a row. And the lighting seemed kind of stark to me.

Why I suggest doing this with stills is that stills shot at 4K can be animated in post, removing a lot of the need for field gear like sliders or jibs. High Dynamic Range RAW imaging also lets you play with the lighting with a lot more detail.

[Mark Pirres]

Ok thanks!

Shooting stills meaning a time-lapse I take it? It might be doable for some of the shots, but they would also like shots walking around the rooms.

I might agree with the cutting, but the light would be satisfactory enough for me. Shooting very early or late in the day won’t be possible, but I’ll follow your suggestions about isolating the colors in post.

Would you reckon to set the white balance at around 3000 K (the apartment will mostly have halogen lights fitted on the ceiling)?

[Grinner Hester]

I tend to just go auto preset with run and gun stuff like this. It’s really not color correction anymore (to me). It’s color creativity. I’d be fine tweekiing it anyway so I just need all the informqation.