Forum Replies Created
-
Replies
-
This brings up another question which maybe you can answer. I know many digital cameras have problems with blue light clipping too easily. My plan was to use daylight balanced LEDs and gel them blue. Would that avoid the issue?
gabj3 is right, usually it is a problem of the transform, not the blue channel itself. ACES historically has that issue. But if your colorist is tech-savy enough, he will deal with it with no problem.
But I, as a colorist, would advise against using harsh blue light (gel or not) as a single source of lighting in the scene. It is quite hard to make this image colorful and natural in post. But it is much easier for a colorist to make daylight-lit scene naturally blue.
This is a very interesting topic. I do not think that adjusting exposure to the middle gray is a necessary step in the pipeline. I work in DaVinci Resolve.
If I work with different cameras, I convert them to DaVinci Wide Gamut / Davinci Intermediate, so middle gray of each Log is correctly remapped.
That said, I do change exposure and sometimes rather dramatically – but only after I discuss this change with the director. It happens with student films a lot, because students sometimes try to create all look in-camera and do not do it correctly.
Recently I had a film with heavily underexposed dark scenes and overexposed bright ones. I had to use noise reduction and change exposure rather dramatically, so the viewers can just see and understand what is happening in the first minutes. If these scenes were shot with correct exposure, I could have easily lower exposure in post, getting clean looking shadows and a lot of details.
The second reason for changing exposure in post is look creation. Usually look for the film is built around middle gray or midtones. We keep healthy contrast in midtones and add roll-offs and split toning in the highs and the lows of the image.
So, if an image is overexposed and is pushed in the highs, color contrast of the look dissapears. To avoid that, I sometimes increase contrast of the image by using Lift, so some part of it ended up in the lower region. And changing exposure also helps with getting the image “look-ready”.
