What do i do if i want a low lighting scene. For instance, my camera does bad below a certian lighting level, it looks gray and grainy. But what if i want a dark city night scene, with deep blacks and a few bright starts. Or I want an acotr almost hiden in darkness in a still high quality shot. Help?

yeah, this is where video and ccds have problems.
I just had this issue with a project that's in post right now. The best thing I've found is to shoot it brighter than you want the finished product to be and crush the blacks in post. If you have a histogram filter in your NLE, try raising the black input and lower the white output. Then adjust the gamma to where the mids look good. Otherwise, look for a "setup" filter to raise or lower the black level.'

all the best
joren

Good stuff Joren. Another option is to only light specific aspects. For example, you could throw a hard edgelight/backlight with a bluish tone (accomplished through gels or in post color correction) so you atleast have an outline of your subject. Then use small controlled lights to create "pockets" that your actor may walk/lean/drift into. The 50w halogens in domed clamp lamps are great for this because the light level is already so low, and the dome helps concentrate it. Of course diffusion, and gels will help you control the amount and color. Best of luck.
R. Michael

"Luck, is when opportunity, meets preperation." "There are 3 sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth, and none of us are lying" -Robert Evans

Would an HD filter help here?

To avoid grain all together, go into the manual f-stop function in your camera(hopefully it has it) and set the gain-up to none or 0. With the f-stop at it's lowest (1.6) you'll have no grain in your video, and you should light it from there.

Can you adjust the shutter speed on your camera? If you can crank it up high enough, the room will look dark at high noon, and you can fake the "night scene' and shoot it during the day.

I do this to shoot "wake up in the middle of the night after a bad dream" shots. Just crank up the shutter speed and the room will look dark.


This should help.

Of course, if you CAN'T adjust the shutter speed, then I don't know what to tell you. As they said, this is where a lot of cameras have problems. You would think that if your eyes pick up the light in the dark, a camera would be able to; but you have to "over-light" everything with a camera . That makes it hard to do night shots.

Such is life.

Hope this helps.

Sony TRV950

Yes, it's very important to light for night. With that said, I've found that video cameras have trouble recording clean, darker images... even with 0dB of gain. I think most cameras won't record anything darker than 7.5-15 IREs--I think it's called superwhite or something. So after you do all your creative lighting and adjust the camera , go slightly brighter than you want the image to look.

Here's an example from a bar scene that I wanted to look dark:

This is a raw image (after it was heavily compressed via jpeg).


This is after I crushed the blacks. Note: As you can notice, I also deinterlaced, adjusted colors, blured highlights and adjusted the gamma curve. But I think you get the picture. If I wanted to potray night, I'd go even darker.

joren

[This message was edited by joren on August 01, 2003 at 03:58 PM.]

i personally feel that both the pictures sent by joren look like night. what you are trying in the modification by changing the gamma etc is increasing the contrast, which also works as it makes it look darker. whatever look you want you should try to get it during the lighting and in this case by cutting the light from certain areas to make them look dark and correctly exposing some parts. it is better to control it while you are shooting.
as for the greyness in night scenes. if you cut down on the aperture so that the grey of the night becomes black and at the same time keep some strong hightlight areas it will solve the problem.