DV, lights, and beautiful shadows

I notice in a lot of films and music videos, sometimes people have extremely dark shadows on the left side of their face while the other half is lighted. The black and grey shadowing look very impressive. Can dv cameras like the vx2000 or higher acheive just as nice black and grey shadows as in films and music videos.

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Yes, to an extent.

I prefere to do it in post, which requires me to shoot with this in mind. This means that the exposed image shown on the monitor when shooting doesn't look as "spiffy" as the end result. I try to shoot so i do not clip too much. Since i can "scale" the remaining information in any range i want (black-mid-white levels) but if its clipped, then it's lost forever and anything above the clip will be a unison grey when lowered/heightened.

Now.. scaling like this works to an extent.. if you have very little contrast and only soft shades everywhere (extreme fog/underwater footage of blue/green water) you will soon notice banding, ie. the resolution of the gradients will not be enough so you see the borders of the different shades as bands going along the gradient. If that is the type of images you want to shoot, you need to do more work in camera, or shoot at a higher resolution (such as HD).

Regards,
Henrik "HuBBa" Bengtsson
DocuWild

i watched your music video you shot, I was wondering what you used to create that over exposure type flash, the blurring, and the tv static animations in the video. I have final cut pro and after effects, which ones can produce such effects and which is better.

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Those effects are actually quite simple to get.

I used the FCP transitions film-dissolve, blur across and flash across found at http://www.digitalfilmtree.com/Eureka.html.

to make a flash in the middle of a clip, you just knife it and add the transition. both left & right clip are timed identically so the flash works like a charm.

the TV static is a combination of a noise filter and a animated gaussian blur in the horizontal axis. Made in AFX.

Which one is better? Its hard to tell really. i opted to do most of the effects in FCP because it was convinient and fast to work with. And since most of my effects is transitions, doing them in AFX would need something like Automatic Duck to convert the FCP project into a AFX project. It did however require me to do a few nested sequences since filters & transitions in FCP cannot calculate compositions. Ie. you need to composite it first, THEN do transitions.

/Henrik