[Todd Terry]

Well one “secret” is simply to use daylight-balanced lighting in the studio (56K LEDs, HMIs, daylight balanced flos, etc.), but since you have existing studio lights I’m sure you don’t want to go down that (expensive) road.

My next suggestion was going to be to tweak your monitor settings… I know a couple of the TVs in my house have picture profiles that include “warm” settings. Sounds like you have already tried that.

The next suggestion would be to put color correcting gel over the monitor. You’re right that you see “correct” looking monitors on the news all the time. I can’t speak for the others here in town, but one of the stations here does just that, basically has orange gel over their on-set monitors. It looks gawd-awful terrible in person, but to the camera it looks right.

The gel you are looking for with be orange, known as CTO… and it’s specifically for turning daylight sources into tungsten-balanced sources. You may not need full CTO, that might be way too much. It might be that half or quarter CTO is enough, or more than enough.

You could try tweaking the laptop output, but I wouldn’t be overly optimistic about that.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Sounds like that would do it. Let us know how it turns out.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

[Blaise Douros] “Leave it to this forum to invent solutions this crazy”

Hey, in my household, for almost any task I seem to find myself as the target of the following: “Is this going to take a complicated system of winches and pulleys?”

Yes, tilting the glass top-to-bottom (either way) OR rotating it a little left-to-right could easily solve the problem… if that still works logistically in the room and looks right on camera. It certainly is the easiest thing to try. Actually a side rotation would be easier than tilting it, by quite a bit.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

[Rick Wise] “…if you are lucky enough to shoot film as we still do at the Academy of Art University…”

You do, Rick? I’m impressed by that.

I haven’t shot film in a very long time… but I do consider it invaluable that I know how to, and could if I wanted. Although I don’t miss cursing in the darkroom while blindly trying to find the scissors. “I know I put them right there!”

I do miss the smell, though.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I do have a bunch of cans of 35mm in the fridge here, if anyone wants it….

It’s way out of date, obviously, but I’ve shot with film that was as much as 10 years old before with no ill effects. These are mostly shortends and recans, although there’s what looks to be a factory-fresh roll of 5279 in there. If anyone wants it all, it’s yours for the shipping cost.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

John does more precise and much much higher-end work than I do, so it sounds like he uses a light meter some… which is understandable.

If I wanted to use one of my meters, the first job would be to go look for them (I think I know where they are, but can’t assuredly say that I do). I probably haven’t used a light meter since the last time I shot film… so that’s been at least a few years now.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

That is a puzzler.. you could try polarizing film on the monitor (in addition to the filter on your camera)… but you are right in that all LED monitors are, in theory, already polarized.

If you happen to already have two polarizing filters, you could keep one on the camera and hold the other one up in front of the monitor and see if you can find a rotation where the image completely disappears (goes dark). That would be an easy test, and would save you the expense of polarizing the whole monitor before you find that it doesn’t work.

Also, keep in mind there are two kinds of polarizers… circular, and lenticular (or linear). The one on your camera is probably circular, most filters for cameras are (because you have to have a circular polarizer for things like autofocus to work). It might be the case that you get better results, in this instance, from a lenticular polarizer. It’s work a try.

What would really be cool and work perfectly is something that is a lot more complicated and inventive… that’d be some kind of electronics voodoo that would “flash” the monitor on and off 24 times a second (or 30, or 60… whatever your camera frame rate is)… and have that syched with the camera in such a way that the monitor is dark during the camera exposure. That way the monitor could be as bright and angled as straight-on as you like, and never be seen by the camera at all. But we are getting into something much much more complicated there.

I’ve often thought that something like that would be a cool blocking/marking system on set, if you have actors that have to do complicated or exactly repeatable actions and hit marks precisely. You could have some kind of laser projector that projects spike marks and blocking lines on the set, but because they are phased on-and-off with the camera shutter speed they are perfectly visible to the actors but completely invisible to the camera. Same principal.

And Rick, click on the “lightboard” link in Adam’s original post, that will show you exactly what these are and how they work.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I won’t even write any advice, because Mark has said just about everything that needs to be saying.

And yeah, for 500€ (or dollars) you’re not going to get much (if anything) in the way of pro gear. You’d have to add two zeros to that to really do ’bout everything you need, and at least one zero to get started with the basics. That’s not to say it can’t be done, but it IS going to mean a lot of DIY gear and instruments, as Mark suggested hit YouTube for do-it-yourself ideas.

But moresore, I chimed in because of Mark’s comment….

[Mark Suszko] “Now, old tungsten-halogen lights have arguably had their day,”

I totally agree, but was reminded of an article I just read about cinematographer James Bagdonas, who shoots the show Modern Family. His style on that show has changed a little bit in the last few seasons, but the article noted that initially “…shooting was designed to take place almost entirely on fixed sets on the 20th Century Fox lot using a lighting package made up entirely of decades-old tungsten units the studio had once rented regularly but which rarely left their storage area by 2009.”

It also noted that he will now sometimes use some LED fixtures to augment what he has when he has the budget for them (which I also think is funny because some of the cast members are making a million dollars an episode, and he has to worry about being able to afford to rent a couple of Astras for the day)… but the old standbys are still the tungsten fixtures that Fox had in storage… because they are free.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

You might ask in another forum, likely the Premiere forum would be a good choice…

https://forums.creativecow.net/adobepremierepro

Sadly this Canon forum gets almost zero traffic these days (the last new topic posted was almost a month ago) so it might be a while before someone smart with an answer pops up in here…. and really this is a Premiere question anyway.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Yikes… that is a HUGE amount of window to cover.

Probably not what you want to hear, but I’d say by far the easiest and cheapest and fastest way would be to simply pump in enough light inside that you are able to get an exposure so that the windows aren’t too blown out. Of course the exterior should still appear to be a stop or two brighter than the interior to look natural. Sounds like a job for a few HMIs to me.

BUT… if you have no choice but to cover the windows….

Screen works to a degree. You can buy large rolls of black screen-door mesh at Home Depot or Lowes. The thing is, screen only works a bit… maybe a stop at most… if you’re lucky And you can’t double it or you get moiré patterns. But it helps a little. We covered gigantic windows in an airport gate with screen once.

Another thing I’ve bought before is rolls of tinted vinyl, the cling stuff that people put on sunroom windows and such. They used to have huge rolls of it at Hancock Fabrics (in store or online), but unfortunately Hancock is no more. Other fabric stores might have it, you’d have to check. It’s usually where the big bolts of upholstery fabric and such is. It’s basically fairly dark ND material, but about a tenth the price of the real stuff. It would still be a huge (and time consuming) job to cover all those windows.

Is it a long scene?… or something you can get in a couple of takes? If that’s the case, set up in advance, rehearse it to death, wait till dusk starts, and pull trigger at the exact moment that the exterior lighting is just right.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I get what you are saying… just a couple of things…

As for the video effects….

[Ritchie Mellor] “The guys in the band love it…”

The guys in the band are wrong ☺ … kill those effects. Umm, and don’t do any “star wipes” either.

[Ritchie Mellor] “…we want to make it look good for the audience primarily…”

Yeah, you have to pick. No setup is going to look perfect for the live audience and for the camera, one is always going to be better than the other… which brings me to…..

[Ritchie Mellor] “What is difficult with the lighting is that we are being paid to play…”

Then don’t do it during a paying gig. Do you guys ever rehearse? Do that in a cool space, invite a few friends over to be your audience, and shoot that for your videos. Do one song, two, or run through your whole catalog. You will have complete control over lights and sound, and you can make sure everything is right for the cameras, not for the real people’s eyeballs. Or… find a cool venue or space or bar or tavern or pub, maybe some place you’ve played before, and offer them a gig for free. You can do the lighting and sound however you like and worrying about the audience experience won’t be your primary concern… hey they are getting a free show.

As for sound…

[Ritchie Mellor] “…does allow a bit of “forgiveness” from the viewer because they know it is a phone recording…”

Don’t fall into that trap too much. There’s an old adage that is absolutely true, people will often overlook marginal or even bad video, but they will NOT forgive bad audio. Great inventive images will really be noticed and get an audience’s attention, but great and perfect sound will not… it is simply expected. You are not a magic act or a dance troupe where the visuals are the most important thing…. you’re a band, you are selling what you sound like, that part needs to be as good as possible, no matter what it looks like. If your video looks great but sounds bad, that’s selling someone a rotten banana that has a perfect peel. They’ll want the banana until they tear into it to eat it… but after that, not so much. Or think about it this way in the music and music video world…. there are audio recordings that have no videos. But I can’t think of any music videos that have no audio track.

Audio is often the stepchild in video production (in our shop unfortunately that is true, too) and it’s easy to fall into the “that’s good enough” feeling about the sound side of things… but in your case the reverse should be true. Get the audio absolutely as good as you can… then get the video side “good enough.”

Of course in a perfect world both audio and video should be great. That’s the obvious goal.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com