Tuesday, August 14, 2007

More "Do Not Want"


So more "Things I Don't Agree With What Are Writ In Books". Although this is technically from a forum, it's also in a book.

From Stu Maschwitz' forum:

"Shooting a normal exposure and blowing out in post is advantageous in a number of ways.

It gives you the option to change your mind later.

It will let you tint the footage without revealing that you're missing detail in the highs.

It lets you control the nature of the roll-off into blowing-out, i.e. design your own "shoulder" with Curves.

It will facilitate transfer to film, where having extra highlight detail means mapping that detail up into the natural shoulder of the print stock."

Now it's not that I don't agree with Stu about this. There's a lot of merit in it. But the problem we have with that advice is that we tend to put the backlight source in the frame. The source is going to wipe out to 110%. So we're going to have levels which go all the way to the top and we won't be able to play with the shoulder of the light source. This is an issue -- but it would be an issue with film too.

I dunno. What. To. Do?

2 comments:

Chance Shirley said...

Tricky question. I've read the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA guys, shooting on Sony CineAlta cams (F-900s?), blow out some of their backlights, so it's not unheard of. I'd do some tests with your specific camera/lenses and see how it looks.

Andrew Bellware said...

The Galactica dudes really know what they're doing. They do some beautiful painting in-camera. They've really taken the potential of shooting on video formats and done something with it -- most guys shooting video just make everything look like crap (and then they say "Hey! Video looks like crap!")
My only worry is how are the highlights affected when we tint them in post? Of course, those highlights would be going right to 110% white even if they were colored, so maybe that's how we've gotten away with it until now.
Shootin' tests for the next two weeks, baby!