Shooting candle lit ceremony with A1 question
 

This evening we are shooting a candle lit ceremony, but the front altar will have some incandecent lighting. I is an evening wedding just before sunset. This client is one that bought an SD package prior to us going HD. I'm wondering if the A1 does better in low light when shooting HDV rather than setting it up to shoot SD, or is there no difference. Secondly, we've used auto gain a few times and have been surpised at the accepibility of the footage, although the situation was borderline and didn't really need a lot of extra gain. I'm wondering if at some point the auto gain will gain up too much and the grain would be unacceptible. Sorry for this late post, but we just found out at rehearsal how little light there will actually be in the church. Originally, there was to be more support light due to the guidelines of the church. I guess the Priest caved last night and is allowing less light.

Thanks for any insight and advice.

Jan-Arden Petersen
Artistic Video Productions

Well, too late at this point but how did it go?

Results of shoot
 

In the end, the Priest wouldnt allow the church lights to be turned totally off. The aisle was lined with tall candle holders every other row. They placed a multitude of votive candles on any flat surface they could find around the altar area. In the end, it was a non issue. We were prepared to use a different, more light sensitive preset than the vivid we usually use, which was a good buffer in the end as the evening robbed what light we did have coming in throught the windows. There were only twe areas that were under- lit to the point that it was too dark to get clean footage. One was the front pews and the other was at the back of the aisle for the recessional. All in all it was a good test and I took the latitude of having four cameras on site to push the envelope. I shot some with auto gain. I had thought auto gain would gain up to the maximum, but is seems that it only gains up to where the camera considers the image correctly exposed. In one case it was just slightly under exposed so I used the auto gain and it turned out acceptible. We also shoot outside for the drive away in the dark with only street lights. On one of the A1s we used a light, and the other I shot with out any auxillary lighting. Once again, quite acceptible, though not ideal. We do have another wedding coming up that will be candle lit. It is on the family farm and they are converting an old barn for the ceremony. It will be a December wedding. Luckily, we have shot two of the families weddings so far and they look to us for advice and guidence, but ultimately want the candle lit atmospher. I am open to any thoughts on how to approach that one since we have some latitude.