Spread Those Lights!

As Lester Bangs said in the movie Almost Famous: "Here's a theory for you to, uh, disregard completely."

I've picked the brains of everyone in TV and film and pro-DVD that I can in the last few months and I'm astonished at how many professional camera people in the underwater arena care so little about good white balance. It seems everyone I talked to relies very heavily on post to fix their mistakes. There's a general sense of "let's get it close and fix it in post" that certainly is not present on THIS particular board. I have FCP and a very fast Mac, but I don't have a six-figure production house at my disposal. Moreover, my understanding is HDV suffers greatly with added manipulation.

Lots of you know I'm on a constant quest for "perfect" WB with the Z1U and my Bluefin, and so far it's been mixed results. So with that in mind, here's that theory...

Having returned from a shoot on Grand Cayman with less than favorable conditions, I noticed that when not using my lights at depths below the 30' range with ovecast conditions, the result was a lot of my images far too dark, and regardless of how much I white balanced, the colors didn't pop in a way I would have preferred. A lot of it wasn't usable in a way I'd be proud of.

(Okay, seriously this time...here's the theory:)

I'm thinking of possibly getting extensions for my HID light arms and spreading them even further apart from one another and significantly farther from the housing itself. My hope is that this will allow me to use both the CC filter for general reimbursment of red flavors and, more importantly, also allow for other colors to pop at the edges just a bit more than they would with straight ambient light and a filter.

Every single pro still shooter has strobe arms at least twice the size of any video guy for the exact same medium/wide angle shots. Is it crazy to think that a similar setup wouldn't work for me?

Obviously this isn't a technique that would work in all situations, and I'm certainly trying to make the sun my friend a lot more than I used to while shooting. But deep? Low-light? Overcast? Low contrast? I'm trying to find out if there's a balance or harmony that can be achieved between the red filter and supplemental lighting.

Educate me, folks. Is this a misguided theory/purchase?

I dunno about video. But in stills if you cc to tone down the blue and also use artificial light, it's best to use blue filters on the lights to match the color of the ambient light. You get uneven color, otherwise ... too red where the lights are shining.

Chris in Red Stick

Peacedog

You'll find your theory has a few problems:

1. Power of the sun: To properly light a subject 3 ft away, you need at least 2000 lumens. To light a reef scene, well my 11000 lumen HMI light can't do it in strong sunlight but does well at night.

2. Color rendition: Notice in the shadows of your lights there's green or blue? Well, they are more pronounced in daytime because there's the big ball of light up in the sky. Daytime lights compensate for what is directly in the light path and that's it. So your subjects have to be right in the path.

3. Whitebalance: If you leave it in daylight, what is lit in the foreground and subject will be correctly balanced but again shadows and background will go blue/green. I personally have never liked that look. WB on the subject and you may overcook incidental subjects in the foreground too, like Ceedave says.

4. Balance: With your lights stick say 2.5 feet out, your housing balance will be shakey, esp in a bit of current or surge. Still guys get away since they have one shot at a time... not 59.97 fps.

I'm one of those who believe in color correction in post. Just have to make sure there's color to correct. Some scenes you cannot correct however. That's why you have a few people omplaining about TV series never giving good color. What you see on TV is broadcast colors, and that's always going to lose out to 8 bit color on your computer monitor.

Also NEVER edit in HDV if you are going to put effects on. Use at least a 100mbps codec or better 8 bit uncompressed.

Hello Drew.

When you say don't edit in HDV if you are going to put effects in, what kind of effects are you talking about ? Color correction too ? Also how do you get uncompressed video into your computer if the footage is on tape ? What kind of codec are you talking about ? I edit m2t files with Vegas. Is this not the correct way ?

Thanks,

Ron

I wouldn't say it's incorrect, just that HDV is highly compressed so when you add effects it's recompressed some more, thus losing more info. Everything you do in HDV is small scale destructive, more so the more effects you add.

However IF you are not outputting to anything except web, then it's fine even for 480P HD web. I would suggest at least a 4:2:2 codec.

Sorry I haven't touched Vegas since BS(before Sony). But you can capture and convert your clips into whatever codec you want. I use uncompressed because there's no compression at ALL, thus you don't lose any info. It is however highly demanding on throughput and you need a disk array capable of at least 200MB/s to playback HD uncompressed.

Shooting day vids where you need to rewind the camera at the end of the day and show the customers, you need wow CC so CCing during the day is very important.

Shooting for yourself, well as long as it's kinda close you can always fix it up.

Shooting for a TV, then maybe WB once and leave it so it makes life easier for the editor to CC it and also the camerman may miss the shot if messing around with CC.

RAW HDV (m2t) is not good to CC. As Drew said go to another codec like Aspect HD, Canopus HQ, etc. It handles CCing much better but only to a certain point. The sharpest shots you can get with HDV is with lights but keep the camera still as you get that HDV compression problem on movement if in tight.

The cameras processor cannot handle all the data thats coming in on movement so it drops the res abit so it can get it to 25mbps and onto that little tape. One of the bad things about HDV, but still cheap for all of us and you can shoot around it once you know its limitations.

To get uncompresed footage into the computer you nee a true HD camera, 120mbps+ $$$$$$$$$$$.

Mixing natural CC and lights is a fine balance, that is having the subject light up but still have the background in colour uisng the natural light. Move abit and the subject is too pinky/red.

Best to just WB on the subject lit up by the lighs, well thats what I do.

Yes still guys have life easy to create the same effect.

Spreading the lights will help with backscatter though but you may need more light power as they are further apart I suppose.

So am I getting it right that you can't get uncompressed HD without a more expensive camera that does the 120 mbps stuff or is there a way to deal with uncompressed in the less expensive models most of us use and it becomes a matter of the codec and etc.?

Pablo, you can convert HDV to uncompressed 1080 in computer. You do not need a camera for that. However your source is still HDV. The "theory" is that if you are color correcting in uncompressed, you add back the missing color and chroma detail that was dropped in 4:2:0 HDV. This is especially true when compositing other material into the material. At the very least there isn't a recompression degradation.

Uncompressed 10bit 4:4:4 1080 is actually 165MB/s avg, 234MB/s for capture real world. There's no need to go there except if you want to do a filmout or want the best quality for doing the color correction and other effects.

I think Wags was referring to 8bit uncompressed HD which is normally avg120MB/s but for real world it's in the 150MB/s range. This codec is better for HDV conversion because HDV is only 8 bit too.

Here's a list of bandwidth requirements for editing in various resolutions:

720p 24fps 46MBps

720p 30fps 50MBps

720p 60fps 100MBps

1080 24p (8-bit) 98MBps

1080i (8-bit) 120MBps

1080 24p (10-bit) 110MBps

1080i (10-bit) 165MBps

Setup your disk array accordingly. Also realize while there's no compression, the CPU is taxed when outputting or rendering.

3. Whitebalance: If you leave it in daylight, what is lit in the foreground and subject will be correctly balanced but again shadows and background will go blue/green. I personally have never liked that look.

So my favorite technique is to use the automatic whitebalance, and then just fill the subject close to the camera with color using the lights. Back in time, when I shot still photography, we used to call that Closeup-wideangle shots.

I must say, that sometimes I feel, that you guys are spending way too much time on the tech stuff, and then forgetting, that the ordinary viewer would never notice, if the footage is included in a good story.

To me it looks like this is the method that Howard Hall uses most of the time Howard Hall 20007 HD demo reel, and if it's good enough for good old Howard, it is certainly good enough for me B)

To me it looks like this is the method that Howard Hall uses most of the time Howard Hall 20007 HD demo reel, and if it's good enough for good old Howard, it is certainly good enough for me B)

I really love those videos on his site, incredible work, except it does make me want to give up shooting video

i just wish i could watch those vids...

or knew what the hell Drew was talking about.. hahaha

Well, in low lights conditions, like here in Scandinavia, we almost always need extra light, and most of the time, it's impossible to use MWB below say 5 meters.

 

So my favorite technique is to use the automatic whitebalance, and then just fill the subject close to the camera with color using the lights. Back in time, when I shot still photography, we used to call that Closeup-wideangle shots.

 

I must say, that sometimes I feel, that you guys are spending way too much time on the tech stuff, and then forgetting, that the ordinary viewer would never notice, if the footage is included in a good story.

 

To me it looks like this is the method that Howard Hall uses most of the time Howard Hall 20007 HD demo reel, and if it's good enough for good old Howard, it is certainly good enough for me B)

Well Skaw

It takes a lot to come up with a good production. Bad production value shows, esp on 35mm projection and now HD projection. Without the understanding of post production, you can have the best story line and shots and still look bad. The same in reverse.

Look at the film Deep Blue, the cinema release of the Blue Planet series. A lot of those shots were done on DV and uprezzed to 2k. And no, it wasn't just a drop it in the timeline and let the editor do the work. Post production gave the film a look that it could not have achieved with story or spectacular shot.

Howard couldn't have switched to HDCAM without becoming a bit of a technogeek to understand the technology and the limitations involved. Both are important in productions. And with all due respect, no one is immune from bad shooting, either by conditions or errors, even the greats ones like Hall, Cranston, Allan etc.

As for your situation, it's obvious if you don't have enough light, you add light. Physics demands it. The look of lights with natural daylight is an aesthetic quality that sometimes works but also doesn't work. There's no one absolute way to shoot, except to illuminate scenes that are too dark or cut out light when there's too much light. Otherwise it's purely an aesthetic quality which may not please everyone.

Well Skaw

It takes a lot to come up with a good production.

Agree, on all what you say, the only reason I responded in the way that I did, is that it sometimes frustrate me, when the debate is ending up into conclusions like: "the only way is the MWB way", when the conditions I am filming in dictates, that the only way to get the shots I want is by adding artificial light.

From time to time I also read (both still photo and video) that it is impossible to shoot good wide angle, if the viz is under 5 meters. Rubbish I say, if that was true, you would never see anything but makro from temperate waters.

So as you can see, there is nothing personal in my respond, it's more like an automatic reaction

The look of lights with natural daylight is an aesthetic quality that sometimes works but also doesn't work.