LIGHTING/EXPOSURE

Ken

I shoot with a Canon GL2. Recently I have been covering stage performances, generally at schools, and I am not pleased with the results. The lighting is harsh, spotty, and contrasty. I have not been able to figure out how to adjust for this on the camera and all I can do in editing, is make it darker. If I were shooting with an HD camera, would that make a difference or am I looking for the answer in the wrong place? Thanks.

Hi Terrance,

Shooting stage performances is always difficult because the lighting is so very uneven, regardless of the camera used. Also, spots are used to light the talent but other parts of the stage can fall into darkness or be much darker than the talent. You will have problems capture both the well lit areas and the dark areas at the same time.

All you can do in the camera is to be sure that the important parts of the image, like the talent, are properly exposed.

There are things that you can do in post, one thing is that you can lower the contrast and you should be able to lighten or darken the image. You can also use mattes to lighten or darken certain areas while leaving other areas unaffected, but this can be labor intensive.

--ken

Stage lighting is the thorn-in-the-side of every event videographer. Here's a couple things you can try. First, if your camera has an automatic exposure control, pull it down. My sony 150/170 will go down 4 steps, and that helps a lot, and you can adjust it on the fly. Second, go to manual and pull the iris down (to a higher number).

Of course, you should be monitoring these changes as you make them, so have a decent monitor with you. There are some on this forum that would insist on having a studio monitor (costing at a min of a thousand bucks) at every event. Not that what I do matters to anybody else, but I take a 19" Dynex, $150.

IMHO,
DD

Shooting recently in Brasil's jungle (often showing similar high contrasts) I tried around with the limited settings of my Canon H-30 (Vexia), as I always got overexposed skies (the zebra pattern indicator!).

This could be avoided by using the cine mode setting - here the gamma setting seems to be altered in such a way that shadows and even trees under cloudy sky came out as well as the sky itself (without zebra pattern). So there is much more choice when to go into postproduction.

I don't know to what extent this helps in your case.

H

The fundamental problem is that some subjects are blown out and lost detail is irretrievable. Of you set your camera so that those portions don't blow out, then other areas are too dark.

Newer cameras by Sony and Panasonic (probably Canon as well these days) offer gamma and "knee" controls which allows a gentle roll off of the bright areas and may boost the dark areas. These features in other cameras may be called cine mode in some consumer cameras although they don't have the fine control.

With cameras that don't have such settings you may be left with trying to ride levels (iris) manually or maybe using an auto exposure offset (a minus number for example).

Of course if those hiring you really care about the video they may put you in touch with the lighting director and I've been lucky enough to be able to do that for a scarce few events.

Fixing this stuff is post is difficult because once the detail is lost when something is blown out to white, you can't bring it back. If something is too dark, bringing it up may introduce really bad noise.

In Final Cut Pro one can have a bit of control by using the 3 way Color Corrector to control the gamma. Also using overlay modes can help. In general though there is a limit to what you can do if areas are too dark or bright so getting it right in camera is best.

Another thing that helps a little, is to get Neat Video's noise removal plug in. It is absolutely magic and you can remove
grain which is introduced by the extra 'gain' that many cameras need. I use this plug in EXTENSIVELY when I film
stage performances. I do multiple camera shoots, and one of my cameras is a little consumer Cannon with auto
everything.....it gains up and has a lot of grain in the picture. The Neat Video plug in takes all the grain out without
introducing ANY mush at all, it is absolutely amazing..it is also reviewed here on Ken's great site under software plug ins.