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Are you still filming with your eyes closed?
No me! You say.
But listen up. The problem is your video camera can only capture a very small range of the brightness value that are present in most scenes. Even if you’ve check your camera’s histogram and zebra (if it has them) and decided you are nailing the exposure you may be wrong.
There may be important shadow or highlight details that are going off the ends of your histogram. Are you consistently exposing your talent’s faces? If you are using green/blue screen to substitute a different background do you know if you are exposing it right?
Chances are you are not getting the exposure you need. But you ask, “How can I possibly know until I get into the edit suite?” This is a big problem for many indie filmmakers whether they know it or not. The Hollywood films and TV shows shot on video take advantage of banks of video monitoring scopes to ensure that exposures are right and consistent between takes. But those scopes cost tens of thousand dollars. What’s a poor indie to do?
If you’re filming with DV or HDV there is a solution you probably can afford. More about that in a minute.
A couple of years ago I produced a DV comedy short that used a lot of blue screen to help put my actors in elaborate settings trying to reproduce the look of old films. I ran a few tests before I started production and realized I just couldn’t get the exposure accurate enough to pull a clean mask. DV is a terrible format for shooting blue screen because of the limited color information in the images under the best of circumstances.
In most of my tests I discovered that my blue screen exposures were too bright and washed out or too dark and gray to get anything close to a good mask. I invested in a software product named DV-Rack (since bought by Adobe and sold as OnLocation). This program takes the fire-wire signal from the camera and performs a real-time analysis in order to reproduce the look of a full set of video scopes on the display of your computer.
Without going into a lot of detail those scopes allowed me to see all the important details about my video signal and adjust the lighting and exposure for the best results possible.
OnLocation is a Windows only product at the moment but can be run in BootCamp. A Macintosh version is in the works or, if you are in a hurry, a similar product for the Mac is Scopebox.
Are you still shooting your films blind? Get one of these products and your eyes will be opened.
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