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On many shows, the dailies colorist gets the footage, either shot raw or something like ProRes, converts it from raw if necessary, applies the LUT being used on set for the monitors, applies any shot by shot image adjustments to the LUT sent in by the DIT usually as ASC CDL values, probably applies any letterboxing needed, and outputs in the deliverables that editorial needs and whatever is used for streaming dailies. They will also back-up the data.
The softness of a light (i.e. the blurriness of the shadows created by the light) is determined by its size relative to the subject, that’s basically it.
What different bounce surfaces and diffusion materials control is the degree to which you can fill that surface evenly to maximize the size of the source, versus getting a hotter spot in the center for example, or some specular light mixed into the soft light (which is desirable sometimes to give the soft light some “texture”.)
So putting grid cloth over UltraBounce isn’t going to do much other than maybe give you a bit more of a hot spot in the center (or wherever your lamp is aimed) because grid cloth has a tiny bit more shine to it. You could try putting bleached muslin over the UltraBounce, it’s maybe slightly more matte. But it’s not additive, you’re basically swapping an UltraBounce for a bleached muslin. With the grid cloth idea, it’s a bit more additive in the sense that bouncing off grid cloth alone is less light efficient since so much passes through the cloth, so adding an UltraBounce from behind will improve the amount of light you get off of the bounce.
But it’s not going to make the UltraBounce light “softer” and less sourcey. To do that you either need a larger UltraBounce (and be able to fill the larger surface) to create a larger bounce — or have the room to “book light” the bounce by passing it through another frame closer to the actor but then basically now the closer diffusion frame is the “source” in terms of the size determining the softness. But book-lighting would make it easier to fill that diffusion frame more evenly.
Now it’s possible that the reason the UltraBounce is not soft enough for you is that you aren’t filling it evenly, so it may help to hit it with multiple smaller units rather than one larger unit.
Test, test, test is all I can say…
Check out “Lost Highway” for some of the very dark scenes in the apartment — it’s quite underexposed with lifted blacks, so has somewhat of a foggy “head cold” sort of feeling. Perhaps a hazed set would help create some of this nebulous quality. To me it sounds like you want very dim underexposed detail under soft light, at least in some areas, so you can still see some movement through space. Pure black or milky blacks (grey) with no detail (i.e. no real image detail) would make it hard to sense motion.
I’m all for poetic language to get at the feeling desired but at some point, you have to get into specifics. Do you see anything of the scene, the action, the set, etc.? Is it very dim with low-contrast or shadowy with large areas of blackness but a few highlights? Do you want noise? Do you want true blacks? There are no right or wrong answers.
The problem with very dim underexposed imagery is that it plays differently on a large theater screen where it commands attention and is still the biggest & brightest thing in your field of view, versus a TV monitor where it is smaller in your field of vision and competing with the rest of the room lights.
Generally what they mean when they say they don’t use negative stock is that they don’t use camera negative stock, which is much higher in ISO (and grainier) than lab intermediate and print stocks.
Intermediate dupe stock is a “negative” stock in the sense that it creates the opposite density of what it is copying, unlike a reversal (aka slide) stock. So one can create a positive or negative intermediate depending on what you record from digitally. So it’s not really accurate to call it a “positive” stock, it’s either. It can create a positive image if it’s a copy of a negative image. Same goes for print stock — the image is positive only because it’s a copy of a negative so naturally the densities get reversed.
Any lighting package should always contain some CTO, CTB, Plus-Green, and Minus-Green gels even if just in scraps.
Whether you used HMIs or tungsten with gels, or Kinos, with or without gels, just depended on the situation, the scale of the shot, your lighting package, etc. Keep in mind that you generally lose more output shifting tungsten towards daylight with blue gels than you do shifting HMIs towards tungsten with orange gels, plus HMIs are already more energy-efficient. So for a larger space where you are aiming for balancing to a Cool White fluorescent color (more like 4700K with some green), you would be more likely to use HMIs than tungsten. However in a small space, you might try tungsten with gels (the color tends to be “richer” from gelled tungsten in some ways but that is subjective.)
If you have to get closer to 3200K, then tungsten makes more sense (and HMIs gelled to 3200K never look quite right to my eyes compared to tungsten.)
There are too many variables to give you a definitive answer. My only caveat is that I tend to avoid mixing techniques for whatever the key light is on the face, I wouldn’t use gelled HMIs in one spot and then gelled tungsten in another for a key (fill or backlight is less critical.)
Not Roger, but I think muslin is slightly more “matte” (definitely a rougher surface) so the bounce off of it might be a bit softer; otherwise the difference might be that unbleached muslin has a warmth to it compared to UltraBounce.
A “perfect” theoretical mirror allows you to increase the distance the light travels and thus get a slower fall-off near the subject.
But nothing in life is perfect, if the mirror is dusty and some light is bounced off of the dust, then that light in essence “originates” from that point and the fall-off rate is calculated from there. So what results is a mix of light, some from the original source reflected off of the clean parts of the mirror, and other light reflected off of the dust of the mirror. I suspect that the resulting fall-off rate is also a mix.
It’s a similar issue to the sun shining through a dusty window, some rays have long fall-off rate while others have a faster rate starting from the window as the source, not the sun as the source, so it’s sort of a mix. At least, that’s my theory…
Each lab calibrates their printers to whatever range between 1 and 50 for each color they want, 25-25-25 will not be the same at another lab. And film stocks rarely are printed at the same number value for each color to get to neutral, so having one color at 29 and another at 31 is not significant.
Plus there are some day to day variations from the processing despite what the lab tells you. And there are some roll variations despite what Kodak tells you. And DPs themselves often expose within a 1/3-stop variation because we’re not perfect.
Some DPs just printed everything at the same set of numbers mainly to show them their exposure variations, the processing variations, the stock variations… which to some degree is educational but would also drive you nuts, plus the director and editor would be cutting dailies with these variations visible.
But even if there were zero variations on everyone’s part, it still doesn’t mean that to get to neutral that the film would print at the same number for each color.
It’s always easier to fill a diffusion frame evenly with an LED softlight or any multi-bulb unit like a Maxibrute when you lack the space to back-up a hard light. But if you have the space, then you can evenly fill a diffusion frame with one hard source if it is full-flood and backed-up enough. Or use multiple hard sources in an array…
I wrote an entire chapter for the 11th Edition of the ASC Manual on this topic so it’s a bit broad to cover in one post. It all depends on the look you want. DFN works best when the moon is the only source of light in the scene because real daylight, whether sunny or overcast, will be much brighter than any other light sources in the frame like campfires or streetlamps. If there are other sources, dusk-for-night works better so that they expose realistically.
If I could post images on this forum, I’d show you my photos of real moonlit landscapes and how much they look like day-for-night shots other than you can see stars in the sky.
Black density in a film print off of a negative depends on the printer lights used.
Let’s say you shoot a roll with the lens cap on or just develop an unexposed roll… in the printer light scale of 0-50 points for RGB, with 25 being the middle, so in theory 25-25-25 would be the printer lights used to print something normally exposed to look normal in brightness (in reality, it’s not exactly that, for lots of reasons), as you go higher and higher, like 40-40-40 let’s say, the blacks will be denser in the print until you reach maximum possible for the stock (D-Max), which you can only go past if you leave silver in the print.
So if you expose a scene so that it needs to be printed in the high 30’s or low 40’s as opposed to the mid 25’s, then the blacks in the image will be denser unless you have some factor that is lifting them like base fog density from push-processing. Or if the overexposure is causing more flare in the image, like from an overly hot sky. There are limits because at some point if you put all of your information on the shoulder of the characteristic curve, where contrast flattens out, the image will look a bit flat with clipped highlights even if in theory the blacks are blacker. But in general, if you rate a color negative stock slower in ASA than recommended, so that it generally prints in the high 30s / low 40s, it will have richer blacks in the print, which means a bit more saturation and feeling of contrast, “snap”.
But with digital color-correction and digital projection, it’s different. You can set any shadow area to “0 IRE” which is pure digital black… but whether it looks natural or artificially crushed depends on the image. And black level in digital projection depends on the technology used — today, laser projection is capable of black levels we used to see in film prints (if not more so) but before that, we’ve been living with somewhat grey-ish blacks with typical digital projection even if the signal is “zero”.
Thicker and denser mean the same thing.
With more exposure and/or more development, more exposed silver halides get developed into silver — with color film, this means more color dye is also formed in those layers before the silver is removed in the bleach step.
The difference in look between getting more density by exposure versus only doing by pushing the development is in the grain and contrast.
Pushing increases the contrast and also the base fog level (which in some ways can give the illusion of contrast loss due to lifted blacks); it also increases visible graininess because the unexposed silver halides (smaller/ slower) still get washed away eventually, leaving only the larger/faster grains. If you had exposed the negative more, then the smaller/slower grains (in the shadow areas) would have filled-in the gaps, giving the impression of a tighter grain structure.
Density on the negative increases with:
- Exposure and/or
- Development (time and/or temperature)
So any number of combinations are possible — you could overexpose the negative and develop it normally, you could expose normally and push-process the negative, you could even, for example, underexpose by -1/3 stop but push by +1 stop, resulting in a theoretical +2/3 stop extra density (push-processing however is not that precise.)
