Nice writeup, Art.

I missed your usual diagrams (though the lighting geography became more clear as the article progressed), but I enjoyed shooting my LED flashlight though my Lee swatch book to see exactly what 250 and 129 did.

I was wondering as I watched why you didn’t use a fractional Black Promist on this show… than I read that you did, and it disappeared. Crikey. I like your layered-node approach to unsharp masking; I’ll have to keep that one in mind.

At first, I thought you were mad using a 5D on a show where the hero product is characterized by finely-detailed edges and high contrast. On second thought, chroma moiré on a diamond simply looks like internal fire: nothing wrong with that at all!

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  09/21  at  01:59 PM

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Sorry about the diagrams… I had to choose between delaying the article further and doing diagrams or posting it quickly without. Sometimes these articles become so complex it becomes quite easy to stall… and stall… and stall.

We did use the Soft Effects 2/Black Promist 1/4 but that was the most I could get the director to sign off on because the effect became so pronounced over the HDMI output. Any reason why that might be? I see the same thing with chroma and highlight clipping on occasion: The HDMI output tends to exaggerate those, and they look just fine later.

I’ll have to show you the node tree in Color. It worked really well.

If there was any moire in the diamond it just looked like glimmer.

Posted by Art Adams  on  09/21  at  02:12 PM

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The chroma and luma blowing out in live mode may be due to their being “rounded off” by the recording process—the Canon, I think, does more processing going to the card than it does to the live outputs. But I’ve seen similar things with many prosumer-grade camcorders, where the EVF / LCD show the highlights and shadows smashed and the color horribly garish, but the recordings themselves are Just Fine. The Canon’s default settings are contrasty and colorful, and that may go for its LCD setup as well.

As to why the filtration looked good live, but vanished on recording… that’s just wrong. I’ll have to take my 5D in tomorrow and try this while I still have Joe’s filter case; I’m sure there’s a big ProMist in there I can test with (the biggest ProMist I own is 58mm, and my smallest Canon lens is 77mm)...

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  09/21  at  03:22 PM

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Hi Art: Thank-you for another valuable article. Cheers.

Posted by test123  on  09/22  at  12:31 PM

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Thank you Art!! This article is great. I love the look you got here. I’m just finishing up a short film and I found a similar soft/contrasty look. But, the part I struggled with was lighting the wide shots. I didn’t have the same rapid falloff to work with so I ended up using harder sources for better control. Do you have any advice for matching up wides and closeups for this kind of lighting?
Thanks!!

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/29  at  08:17 AM

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Matching wide shots and closeups… hmmm. Well, I do what they do in the feature and TV worlds: I cheat. A lot of the time closeups and wide shots are lit very differently, usually with harder light for the wide shots and soft light for the closeups.

It’s really easy to cheat looks and quality of light when switching perspectives. The tough shots are where you have both wide and tight in the same shot; you can’t necessarily change the quality of the key during the shot but you can change the fill quite easily by mounting a source on or near the camera for the tight shot.

The farther away something is the less contrast and resolution it has, so if something changes between the wide shot and the closeup we usually accept it. I remember reading an article in American Cinematographer about Jack Green, ASC, where he said his technique on one movie was to put double scrims in all the lights and put frames of Opal diffusion in front of them for the wide shots, then pull a double and replace the Opal with Lee 250 for medium shots; and then pull the final double and use Lee 216 for the closeups. I don’t do that (my jobs are rarely that big or that flush with gear) but I have discovered that as long as the light comes from the same general direction and has roughly the same contrast from wide shot to closeup you can get away with quite a lot.

For example, in the article above I point out where a hard edge light in the wide shot became very soft and beautiful in the closeup and nobody noticed, because the hard light in the wide shot was an edge light from that angle and nobody noticed it become a soft light later.

I don’t know that I can give you solid examples from my own work at the moment; I do soften the light for closeups when appropriate, but I’ve found that it’s much more effective and quick to move the fill light instead of moving the key. I just posted an article on fill light that might be interesting for you to read.

Posted by Art Adams  on  09/29  at  04:02 PM

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I’m glad I’m not the only who cheats Thanks Art. I will check out your article on the Fill Light. And thanks for providing some of the most solid lighting advice on the web.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  10/03  at  05:34 AM

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