John Sharaf
Forum Replies Created
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Tom,
I just shot this very thing last weekend at the NCAA Track & Field Championships. Needed transition from day to night, so I shot a time lapse of the daylight falling, sky getting dark and the field lights revealed.
JS
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The color of the screen and the color of the lighting are two different things! Green is often chosen because there’s blue in the foreground objects. Essentially you can use any color in the background that does not appear in the foreground.
As regards the color temperature of the lighting, you want to use the same (either daylight or tungsten) on both. This allows the camera to be white balanced properly and to make the color reproduction as accurate as possible.
Fluorescent shop lights do not produce accurate color rendering, so should be avoided. Proper photographic flo’s (like Kino Flo) both have special color corrected tubes and ballasts that make the lights flicker twice as fast to create more light.
Of course you can do anything you want, just carefully observe your results and make the proper adjustments.
JS
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Setting the face at 70 ire is old school. With the new HD cameras that are so good at reaching into the blacks, we set faces at 45-55ire dependind on whether high key or low key. This automatically allows more detail in the highlights because you’re stopped down a little more.
As far as whites, it’s really a matter of on one hand not clipping the video so that it interferes with the auto circuits of home televisions and/or distorts the audio and on the other of holding detail in the white areas. When shooting white limbo’s (like the eHarmony ads or the Apple PC vs. Mac commercials) the whites are at 80 ire, yet they look really white. Where you want to hold detail in whites, like a chef’s jacket, so you can see the wrinkles and textures, this is where you have to be careful with the exposure.
I agree with the previous reply that zebras can be very useful in determining the exposure and where the clip occurs, but only if set to 100 ire. In the case of a face in front of a bright object, obviously the face is more important and unless the background is critical in the visual context it’s ok to let it go “detail-less” by overexposure, as long as you’re camera or NLE will clip it to make it “legal”.
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Bill,
You can always invoke more shutter in this case by going to 180 degrees you’ll be shooting at 1/120th of a second and freezing most action. The thing to be most cautious of is fast action across the screen. Also the motion blur is not bad per se, but only if you want to cleanup the edges manually frame by frame in post.
JS
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Ernie,
It has never been, nor never will be, the manufacturer’s “policy” to listen to individual end users. In the past design criteria from network broadcasters often influenced product development and really that can be attributed to the development of the P2 and XDCAM file based video, but in reality, product design and technologgy is more often driven by the marketing guru’s who can demonstrate to the top managers how many thousands (or millions in consumer electronics) of units at what price can predictably be sold. If changes to the products (usually by software) can be accomplished after the fact to accommodate real user issue can be done, all the better.
In this case, where you and others seek a cheap feeder deck, I’d have to say that it’s a little late in the game, although as I recall, at last NAB (2007) there was some talk from Panasonic about just such a product, but it’s obvious that in the fervor of promoting the P2 line, the marketeers prevailed in killing such a product as it would have confussed or delayed tape based users from considering transition to solid state.
To Panasonic’s credit however, the P2 Mobile is a “killer product” which for a $12K street price offers 21st century technology and a significant improvement in quality (10 bit recording, AVC-I codec and no horizontal down res). At NAB, they rightly so, demonstrated this product as a way to leverage the aging Varicams into continued usefulness.
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The better color sampling, the better the key. For that matter, the better the resolution (without artificial enhancement) the better the edge lines. That is not to say that you can’t shoot with a DV camera. As far as transparent objects, this is not an insurmountable problem either, it’s done every day, but again the better the technology you use (latest Ultimatte hardware) the better the effect.
JS
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Either you rent a Musco light at about $3500 or shoot at twilight.
JS
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Goran,
Although not a recommended workflow (because of excessive head were in rewinding and playing) you can playout through the firewire to capture in NLE, but you will not have deck control. The playout is in realtime, which is the advantage of P2 cards, although the format is the same, namely DVCPRO100, although some of the P2 cameras and the Ps Mobile do offer the higher recording format of AVC-I which rivals the quality of D5, namely it is 10 bit and does not downres the horizontal resolution, so you can see that P2 can offer quite a few quality and workflow advantages.
JS
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Laurie,
Please feel free to contact me off list, as I represent a Sony dealer in SF and would be able to put together a very attractively priced kit for your production needs.
Regards,
John Sharaf
john at sharaf dot net -
Is Local/Remote switch remote?
JS