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Opal, Half Soft Frost and Quarter Grid Cloth are all pretty similar in softening and light loss but produce slightly different shadow textures since when you start getting into very light diffusion, particularly light silks, the way that hard light leaks through and blends with the soft light, the way the light is spread is different. You just have to test, there isn’t a right or wrong choice. Opal, for example, is nice in a 4’x4′ or smaller but can’t really be used on a larger scale and rattles in a breeze. Quarter Silk is interesting because some sharp light comes through so you can still get some feeling of specular highlights and retain some texture on the skin, which may or may not be a good thing.
Most films mastered in the 2000s at 2K are not going to get re-scanned and re-color-corrected for 4K, they are going to up-sample the 2K master to 4K (as what happened for the 4K “Lord of the Rings” remastering, I think only a few shots were redone at 4K from scans of the negative). On a UHD disc, though, you could see some difference if it is an HDR version since the old masters still have a log version to work from. In particular, movies with extensive 2K visual effects work or time-consuming image manipulation are unlikely to have the budget to redo everything at 4K (even Peter Jackson couldn’t do that.) However, movies that had a more normal color-correction process using a 2K D.I. might be redone in 4K if the studio feels that they are preserving it for archival reasons and the title was profitable enough to be worth the investment.
I think in particular it would be a challenge to re-do “O Brother Where Art Thou?” again at 4K from new scans of the original negative because of the extensive color-correcting involved. However, I could be wrong — David Fincher has been talking about a new 4K remastering of “Seven” from the original negative, but that isn’t a movie that had a lot of post manipulation or VFX other than the original prints using a silver retention process.
As a point of reference, a lot of money was spent remastering all seven years of the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” TV series to HD even though the live-action was shot on 35mm film, because it was a VFX-heavy show that originally saved time and money by doing the work in NTSC video. So all the VFX had to be redone in HD. In the end, it seems that the studio has not recouped its investment yet, so a similar remastering to HD for “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and “Star Trek: Voyager” have been put on hold. Which is ironic considering all these shows were shot in 35mm partially to “future-proof” them for HD! So it’s the same problem for VFX-heavy features mastered in 2K – the non-VFX shots in 35mm could be rescanned and remastered in 4K but few can afford to redo all the VFX work at 4K. So in some cases, it’s simpler to just upscale the 2K master to 4K. Most of the color-correction work at this point would be spent in making a HDR version if they have a master in log gamma to work from.
I don’t think softening a light has to always be motivated. If you light a set with a low orange hard light raking across the room to simulate a setting sun… but for a face in the foreground, place a frame of Opal just off-camera to soften it slightly, I don’t think most audiences are going to notice that the light is harder in the background than it is on the face, it is still directional. But even in real life, the sun can pass through things that alter the hardness, maybe one window is a bit blocked by a leafy tree or that window is dustier while in the background, the window is open and clear, etc. Natural light in a room has textures and variations to it.
One of the most common cheats is to use soft light in a candlelit situation — candle flames are fairly sharp point sources. Multiple candles in a candelabra will soften the effect a bit, the light bouncing off of the ceiling will lower the contrast and add more softness, so we justify using soft light for candle scenes but often the lighting is much softer than real candlelight would produce. Same goes for moonlight, which in real life is a hard source, and on a heavily overcast night, hardly exposes anything in actuality, and yet many movies use big soft boxes for moonlight.
In this angle you can see the Source-4 Leko follow spot with the 1/2 CTB on it and a dimmed PARCAN on the right side.
The Gaslight set was lit with black tungsten fixtures in the ceiling — 1K fresnels and 1K PARCANs with medium globes, often at 50% on the dimmer board. Sometimes I had to add a full scrim to knock them down further.
There was one tungsten Source-4 Leko with a 36 degree lens (I think) hung from the ceiling with an electrician in costume on a wooden ladder to operate it as a follow-spot. It had 1/2 CTB (blue) gel on it which is the bright light you are seeing in that still (on the right of it, you can see a PARCAN). Prop department made a simple cover for the Leko so it didn’t look so modern.
At that distance, the only way to come close to focusing just a slash of light on the glasses would be to use a Source 4 Leko with something narrow like a 19 degree lens, then use the leaves to create a slash.
Though painting a face isn’t politically correct, so to speak, that’s how Gregg Toland solved the problem in “Ball of Fire” of only seeing Barbara Stanwyck’s eyes in a dark room where her face wasn’t supposed to be visible to the other character played by Gary Cooper. So Toland asked the make-up department to paint Stanwyck’s face black in the morning when she arrived — she phoned the set back and said “what in the hell sort of movie are we making?!?” But it worked!
There’s no way to answer this question in the abstract. Obviously if you had a ring of lightbulbs with enough space between them to put a paper lantern around them, you’d create a larger and thus softer source.
The rule regarding the size of a light source relative to the subject affecting softness still applies. In theory, a paper lantern is a bigger source than a bare light bulb unless the paper lantern is far enough away to be the same physical size relative to the subject as the bare light bulb. If you had a ring of paper lanterns the same distance away as a ring of bare light bulbs, thus larger in size as a source, the light would be softer, at least in one direction (if the bare bulbs were very close together then they would be soft in the direction of the ring but less soft at a right angle to the ring — it’s like comparing a bare 4′ fluorescent tube to a 4′ x 2′ LED soft light, the softness is the same in the long direction but not in the short direction.)
But the reasons you might build a ring light is partly (or mainly) related to size and weight, you are trying to create something with a low profile that can fit close to the ceiling and perhaps augment and spread the light from a practical lamp hanging from the ceiling. In this case, a ring of paper lanterns might hang down too low from the ceiling to be out of the shot. So the scenarios in which you’d use one approach versus the other are different.
When faking sunlight, the goal is generally to be convincing… the trouble is that typically in a real day exterior with sunshine, you wouldn’t be shooting at f/2.0, let’s say, you’re more likely to be stopped down to f/4.0 or deeper. So super shallow-focus is sort of a giveaway that the daylight scene is artificially lit.
When Sven Nykvist filmed “Cannery Row” (1982), which had indoor sets that were supposed to be outdoors in daylight, he knew this would be a problem so he tried to shoot his real day exteriors at a wide aperture and his interior day “exteriors” at a stop deeper than wide-open so they had a similar feeling.
Shining a flashlight at him will just create a bright spot in the eyeglasses and add fill light. Yes, diffusing a pair of mirror sunglasses might do the trick but it would be better to light the opposite direction of where the person is looking as brightly as possible, though it would have to be a large flat wall or building, something that had a chance of filling the reflection of the glasses. Then the face could be kept dark.
But if the reverse view does not lend itself to creating a bright reflection, then try dull-spraying a pair of mirrored sunglasses and hit them with some frontal light, just beware that you’re hitting the face with light.
You forgot #4: Use tungsten lights and dim them for more warmth
All of your choices are valid, it just depends on what is the more practical or efficient method, like whether there are practical lamps in the shot of “x” color temperature that cannot be changed and thus you have to consider whether to match your additional lighting to those.
I can’t answer that, it’s up to you! If there’s moonlight coming through the window behind him, haze in the room might do a better job of creating separation rather than a hair light. But if there’s no haze then some soft backlight motivated by the window in the background might be good in a very dark scene to see some shapes. But it’s really your call!
The main difference between doing it with color temperature camera settings versus gels on lights is that when you do it to the camera setting, it’s an overall shift — with gels on lights, or dimmers on tungsten lights, you can just warm up the lights you want to look warm. (Of course, you could do it by changing the color temperature setting on the camera except now you’d have to add blue gel to the lights you wanted to look less warm… it all depends on which approach is the most practical.)
If it’s motivated, it’s fine, especially in a night interior with multiple lights on — if that’s the look you want. In some environments like a nightclub or big restaurant with lots of sources, it’s even easier to justify one if you want it. It can add a touch of glamour or romance. You just want to be subtle and not overuse the effect.
But I avoid them in day interiors with no artificial lights on if the hair light would be coming from the opposite direction of the windows. And I avoid them when I don’t want to clutter the look of a single dominant source in a room. And I tend to play them on the dim side — if I wanted a true backlight, then I really go for it!
No hair light:
Dim hair light:
Big backlight:
In the early days of HD, Joe Dunton built a digital back for an Arri-SR16 I believe so one could switch between a film magazine or a S16-sized HD sensor block. And I think Aaton was planning on building a 35mm camera that was switchable to a digital back. One issue with Dunton’s approach was that 2/3″ 3-sensor HD cameras at the time delivered better images than a single S16 sensor with a Bayer pattern.
There are all sorts of reasons why these ideas never caught on, including optical viewfinders — which so many DPs insisted on as being necessary that ARRI made the Alexa Studio, only to barely sell any of them, and the rental houses that did buy one found it sitting unused. There are too many advantages to dropping a spinning mirror reflex system between the lens and a sensor, from weight to size to cost… and with more and more remote-head operating and Steadicam / gimbal work, most of the time the operator was looking at an electronic image anyway. I think Red Camera in the late-2000s basically dared the industry that if enough people ordered a camera with an optical viewfinder, they would build it.
As for the combo film/digital camera, there aren’t enough owner/operators out there who shoot both formats regularly, plus with digital tools improving every year or so, you have the issue of the film-side of the camera never needing updating but the digital-side of the camera needing regular updating. It’s like the trend of building VHS decks into TV sets back in the 1980s — at some point, the deck needed replacing before the TV did, or then DVDs came along and the VHS portion of the TV wasn’t being used.
This is pretty minor, but I wish an ND.30 filter was part of the filter wheel inside an Alexa… I’d rather the internal wheel went .30, .60, .90, and 1.2 and let me use glass ND above that when outdoors because in changing light, you are generally pulling or adding one-stop of ND. And indoors, I sometimes have to add a .30 ND in to reduce depth of field.
