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Stills from 4K blu-rays can be misleading since if it is an HDR version, you can only simulate how they might look when viewing on an SDR monitor.
DVDBeaver.com reviews of 4K discs always have this warning:
“It is likely that the monitor you are seeing this review is not an HDR-compatible display (High Dynamic Range) or Dolby Vision, where each pixel can be assigned with a wider and notably granular range of color and light. Our capture software if simulating the HDR (in a uniform manner) for standard monitors. This should make it easier for us to review more 4K UHD titles in the future and give you a decent idea of its attributes on your system. So our captures may not support the exact same colors (coolness of skin tones, brighter or darker hues etc.) as the 4K system at your home.”
Strong artificial backlighting dates back to the 1910-20s when carbon arcs started being used on sets. The technical reason was that it provided separation in b&w but the most common aesthetic reason is that it is beautiful. There are other reasons it might be used depending on the context.
It happens — ultimately filmmaking is an expensive business and you were hired to deliver a certain level of work within a budget for time and equipment. That’s the reality.
You fight for the quality of the shot when it matters, when you think a drop in quality will be noticeable and everyone in post will be trying to make the problematic shot work and forgetting soon why it was not shot as well as it should have been.
It’s frustrating and depressing when you no choice but to roll cameras on something below your standards but you try and move on because there will be other battles coming up that need your concentration. A producer once said to me (regarding a perfectionist director we were dealing with): “If you make everything equally important then nothing is important”. The other common phrase is “Perfect is the enemy of good.” You have to realize that if you take another ten minutes to make a shot better, you may be robbing yourself of ten minutes later in the day on something even more important.
Ultimately there is always a time element to lighting, which is why you plan your wide-shot lighting with how you will get into your close-ups. Lighting a tight shot by itself is often easier than lighting a wide shot. But when you get around to lighting the close-up, you are running out of time (plus if the actors have reached a certain momentum in the performance, you don’t want to kill it by taking too much time lighting the coverage) so you have to have a plan from the start for a simple way of adjusting the wider-shot lighting if you want to soften it further but maintain the same f-stop.
As a general rule:
1. You light the wide shots first to establish the look (color, contrast, and angle) of the lighting. This means it’s a judgement call based on your taste and experience as to how far you can later alter the light for the tighter shots.
2. If the tighter shot is along the same axis as the wider one, just a tighter view, you often adjust the wide-shot lighting, not re-light from scratch. For one reason, even if you adjust the lighting of the subject, you don’t want to have to re-light the background… so if both the subject and the background was lit with the same light source, you try and find a way of adjusting the foreground without changing the background.
You generally don’t switch to lighting a wide shot after you’ve lit the close-up — you light the wide shot first, which determines the feeling of the lighting, the direction & softness. Once you go in closer, you can decide how much you can alter what was established in the wide shot.
Skipping the bleach step leaves silver where there is color dye density, so if done to the negative, the highlights get denser (hotter) and if done to a print, the shadows get denser (darker).
So it is not unusual to underexpose by a stop when doing it to the negative to avoid too much overexposure in the highlights. Black level is a digital setting in digital color-correction. The only issue is how much shadow detail you want if you set black to zero.
Some monitors will allow you to darken the area outside the frame lines without resorting to blacking it out. There are reasons why a DP/Operator would want to see outside the theatrical frame lines, like to protect a larger area for either TV or VFX/post work or a taller IMAX version… or to simply see things about to enter the frame before they do.
Kurosawa shot deep focus with longer anamorphic lenses in the 1960s — it’s just a matter of stopping down the lens. The depth of field with anamorphic is just lower because the focal lengths are longer, but jumping up from Super-35 to FF35 is not a big difference — in terms of anamorphic, if the 35mm sensor area was 18mm tall and the FF35 area was 24mm tall, that’s a 1.33X difference so that is also how much you’d have to stop down to match depth of field once you matched field of view and distance. So getting more depth of field in anamorphic is not insurmountable either by using more light or a higher ISO.
With 35mm film, the advantage of anamorphic over cropping spherical was the larger negative area for less grain, better resolution (though at wide apertures, often spherical lenses are sharper) but that’s less of an issue with digital where the main reason to shoot anamorphic is the anamorphic look (flares, stretched bokeh, some barrel distortion.) If you want a shallow focus or deep focus look, then you can shoot either spherical or anamorphic.
Think of it this way, in the days before digital when film was printed, if we did a lighting contrast ratio test, we printed and projected the results. So we were picking a lighting ratio based on, or factoring in, the contrast of the print stock. The equivalent today would be the viewing display LUT.
Soft lighting was not uncommon in the Silent Era, between natural sunlight being used through cloth on outdoor stages to later when the Cooper-Hewitt lamps were being used. But first Cooper-Hewitts disappeared when sound came along (they were noisy) and to get enough exposure, multiple tungsten lamps were used which had larger bulbs in them (Mazda globes) so a push was made to make tungsten more “precise” in fresnel fixtures, less of a floodlit look was desired. And as film stocks got faster (about 32 ASA for Pan-X in the 1930s until 64 ASA Plus-X came along in 1938), one could do more careful projected lighting effects along with achieving more depth of field. So the classic studio style lighting evolved in the 1930s by choice, not because they didn’t know how to do soft lighting. And it worked well with b&w where you are trying to create depth and separation.
But soft lighting started to appear again in the 1960s on color films when the stock was 50 ASA. But it wasn’t easy to light larger spaces with soft light as opposed to just some close-ups. David Watkin famously lit the set for “Marat/Sade” with one big soft light window — which had 26 10Ks behind a frame of muslin. The African landscape set in “2001” was lit with hundreds of 1K globes. Even today if you ask for a couple hundred of space lights, tungsten or LED, to light a large set for overcast daylight, you will be fighting with the production manager to spend that much money.
Sure, there are differences in color rendition from using bi-color, RGB, RGBW, etc. LEDs and tungsten light — you can see that by looking at spectrum chart, the cheaper LEDs have a “spikey” RGB plot. As they add more color LEDs outside of RGB, they fill in some of the gaps and create a smoother range. On skin tones, you may see the effect of less saturation from LEDs or too much saturation in some wavelength range (some lean towards adding too much magenta to skin for example). When a source light is not continuous-spectrum enough, you lose some color complexity and richness — that can lead to a somewhat blander “band-aid tan/pink” rendition in Caucasian skin for example. But as I said, LEDs are getting better all the time in addressing this.
Practically-speaking, sure, LEDs are far too useful to be ignored and most of the time, the effect on skin tones is not noticed unless one does a side-by-side comparison with tungsten.
Tim Kang does a lot of research into this:
