Leonard Levy
July 1st, 2011, 11:23 PM
I'm wondering on a practical day to day level how you guys use the cinegammas.
Which ones do you prefer in which situations and how does it affect your exposure? Mostly I'm curious about uncontrolled documentary sunny exteriors where you might be both front and backlit facing real extremes of contrast.
I'm asking because I had a job the other day as a one man band shooting on farm where people where going in and out of shadow and bright sun, inside chicken coops where the shade was even darker than usual etc. Had some backlit run & gun interviews with old guys in white hair etc. I'm used to shooting 709 on the EX-1 but didn't want to deal with the unpleasant color effects with overexposure. On the shoot I tended to go more with Cine 3 as a compromise between favoring highlight and shadow detail, but after testing later I found I often liked the look of cine 1 more even if it made the shadows darker. That's frankly a little confusing to me.
I did some tests the other day and noticed that for front lit, mixed and even some backlit general exteriors I liked Cine 1 however for heavily backlit situations, especially interviews that I didn't have the ability to add fill to, then cine 4 raised the shadow area quite a bit so I could lower the exposure and hold more of the sunlit parts of the background. So what do you do when you're running between back and front light (other than get Slog. )
Any general rules of thumb? Do you alter them with Black levels , black gammas or gamma levels etc?
By the way I have read all the general info about the differences between all the cine gammas and the std ones from Alister, Alpha Cine etc. etc. I think with these clients its probably better to give them WYSIWYG but not if it compromises the material too much. That's always a hard call.
lenny
Which ones do you prefer in which situations and how does it affect your exposure? Mostly I'm curious about uncontrolled documentary sunny exteriors where you might be both front and backlit facing real extremes of contrast.
I'm asking because I had a job the other day as a one man band shooting on farm where people where going in and out of shadow and bright sun, inside chicken coops where the shade was even darker than usual etc. Had some backlit run & gun interviews with old guys in white hair etc. I'm used to shooting 709 on the EX-1 but didn't want to deal with the unpleasant color effects with overexposure. On the shoot I tended to go more with Cine 3 as a compromise between favoring highlight and shadow detail, but after testing later I found I often liked the look of cine 1 more even if it made the shadows darker. That's frankly a little confusing to me.
I did some tests the other day and noticed that for front lit, mixed and even some backlit general exteriors I liked Cine 1 however for heavily backlit situations, especially interviews that I didn't have the ability to add fill to, then cine 4 raised the shadow area quite a bit so I could lower the exposure and hold more of the sunlit parts of the background. So what do you do when you're running between back and front light (other than get Slog. )
Any general rules of thumb? Do you alter them with Black levels , black gammas or gamma levels etc?
By the way I have read all the general info about the differences between all the cine gammas and the std ones from Alister, Alpha Cine etc. etc. I think with these clients its probably better to give them WYSIWYG but not if it compromises the material too much. That's always a hard call.
lenny