New user, GH5 Mk2, Video exposure

[Mark Ogier]

Hi all

New to the forum and new owner of a Panny GH5 II.

I bought the camera to video our band playing live gigs. We have lighting bars with coloured pars and moving head spots on them. I am finding that the general exposure and colour of the recordings is great but the face and upper body (skin tones etc) of the lead singer, on whom the spots are trained, are very over exposed. The singer is understandably unhappy as she says she looks like ‘a boiled egg’ :)

Can someone suggest how to manage this please? I am a beginner when it comes to the hard core details of controlling such a complex camera. I have read the manual but it doesn’t really help by saying when to use the settings, just how to access and turn them on.

Any advice will be hugely helpful

Thank you
Mark

[Patrick Tracy]

Cameras generally have somewhat less capacity to deal with large differences in brightness (dynamic range) than the human eye, and the automatic settings can only "guess" what is optimum.

The two general directions you can go are 1) decrease the exposure so the bright parts aren't overexposed (possibly leaving the dark areas underexposed), or 2) revise your lighting so it's more even (which might detract from the dramatic effect for the in-person audience).

Decreasing the exposure would likely mean setting it manually (via F-stop, ISO, shutter speed, gain, ND filter etc.) so the brightly lit lead singer never gets overexposed under any lighting condition that will occur. It also could mean using a "spotlight" setting that tries to automatically prevent overexposure with stage lighting, assuming your camera has such a setting.

Revising the lighting probably won't be completely satisfactory without also having better control of the exposure.

[Ron Evans]

I have GH5S and GH6 and both have an auto exposure setting for highlights. I think the GH5 Mk2 has this too. With this setting the highlights will be used to set auto exposure so that clipping will not occur. You may want to try using shutter priority auto setting ( camera will manage iris and gain ) set the shutter for you frame rate manually. If in the menu you have set shutter to angle this will be set automatically. Set a max gain level too so that the auto exposure will not use too high a gain and induce grain. You need to experiment and set this to your situation. You can use the AE shift to bias the exposure level to your taste too. I shoot in the theatre and find this approach works well. There may be situation with large lighting swings that will cause a delayed response ( like full blackout to bright scene quickly but the camera will do it quicker than you could ever do manually ) but I find this is very quick on my cameras and nothing that a normal viewer would notice about.

Not sure what profile you are using or editing system but you may try V log picture profile as this will give you more opportunity in editing to recover dynamic range. You may then be able to bring up the shadows that will be at a lower level to expose the singer correctly with highlight auto exposure. I run both my cameras in V Log

You definitely want to have focus in manual though. There are lots of focus aids in the Panasonic cameras. If you are new then use manual focus with touch focus on the LCD to make sure that the singer is the main focus point. You can use expanded view to check.

[Mark Ogier]

Wow, awesome reply, thank you for taking the time.
My problem is, I am a musician, not a photographer/videographer. But I happen to be ‘the guy’ that gets the tech jobs (sound, light camera) etc. I play guitar in the band but spend more time on the gear than I do playing, not ideal, but it is what it is…
So this all boils down to me not having much of a clue about what you are saying! Sorry to be such a dummy but I am struggling. I will googlise all what you have said and try to make sense of it, so thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
Bottom line is, the camera came out of the box (after reading/watching hours of reviews to decide which camera) and was clipped to the tripod with record pressed. Totally vanilla factory setting. Power on,,press record. So I am sure the settings are way off what I need.
Back you Google and you tube :)
Thanks for the help
Mark

[Pete Cofrancesco]

This goes for any camera, its better to under expose in this scenario. You'll get more noise in the shadows, but you won't get unrecoverable clipped highlights. Because cameras have a more limited dynamic range than our eyes you have to make a judgement call what's more important the shadows or highlights. It the circumstance you described the highlights (especially of the lead singer) is most important.

One final thing that could cause the loss of detail in the face is LED lights are commonly used today for stage work. Unfortunately they often cause loss of detail in the skin tones despite not being over exposed and there is very little you can do to prevent that. I recently filmed a musical and the over saturated led light made them look like umpa lumpas Here's an image that shows what I'm describing (center) https://www.sunlightinside.com/wp-co...S-1200x424.jpg

[Ron Evans]

This a link to some useful info for you on the camera.

Panasonic Lumix GH5II Tutorial & Walkthrough Setup Guide - YouTube