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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Ask David Mullen ANYTHING

Simon Dean said:
David,
Do you mostly judge the balance between key, fill and background lighting by eye, or are there certain ratios you like to work to? I.e. do you use your light meter just on the main light and then adjust by eye, or meter everything to get more precise ratios?
Click to expand...

I used to test stocks at different ratios then meter everything but I soon gave up on metering the ratios -- for one thing, it slows you down, and the second, it makes lighting too technical and boring. Besides, every shot lit to the same ratio would get rather boring.

I tend to only meter the key on the face and balance by eye.

Now with lighting for HD, you see most of this on the monitor so there is less guesswork anyway. But even then, you don't want to be fooled into thinking you have more fill in the shadows than you really need in post to get good blacks. So I tend to slightly crush the blacks on the set monitor to make sure I am lighting with enough fill so that I can crush the blacks a little in post as well.

Otherwise, my general philosophy is to use as little fill as I can get away with, so I am always setting up some fill light and then knocking it down to almost nothing. Fill is a rather technical light and if I can get enough ambience into the shadows from the natural bounce in the room, or by hiding some white cards, then I'd rather not have another source by the camera lens unless I am trying to get a nice glint in the eye.

However, I still test stocks for the mount of fill I need before things go black -- you should always know about which point an underexposed face would go black or burn out to white -- just to have that info.

But generally lighting should be about using your eyes. I've had scenes that seemed right to my meter but wrong to my eyes... and in the end, it looked wrong. So learn to trust your eyes -- the main thing the meter is telling you is if you have enough level for the camera format or stock, but the balancing really should be something that feels right for your eyes.

With HD, I tend to only pull out my meter to tell me I am working at a high enough level for the speed and f-stop I want to be working at. Otherwise you may find yourself setting everything by eye only to find that you need to shoot at f/2.0 and your lens only opens to f/2.8.
 
ariel1234 said:
Hi david. Great thread. Thank you very much.
I would be interested in your opinion about this frame, shot on red, nikon nokt- nikkor 58 mm f 1.2 wide open. What do you think of the lighting and composition? Thanks alot, ariel weiss.
Click to expand...

It looks nice. I can't say much more out of context. For example, maybe in the course of the scene, I may find that f/1.2 is distractingly shallow focus as the actor moves. As for the lighting, it looks attractive but without the dramatic context or seeing the wide shot of the room with the sources in frame, I don't know if it's too low in contrast or not.

Composition seems fine, headroom is good (maybe a bit too cropped for my tastes, but it's a popular way of framing these days), eyes are in a good spot -- it's a close-up with an out of focus background so there are not a lot of visual elements to balance within a frame.
 
Hey David,

I've been researching how to get the tunnel effect Roger Deakins used in the "Assassination of Jesse James..." I started a general thread about it in cinematography.com, but I was hoping if you could possibly give me a more practical perspective on it.

I understand one way is to use an old Kinoptic 9.8mm without its front lens group. Another method was to mix and match different front elements in front of a 50mm or 60mm Macro lens. I was actually wondering what I needed to do to get these lenses, if I needed to buy them and modify them or if it was something a rental house could do.

I am not a DP and I am in Korea working with a Korean DP and would love to understand how to achieve this effect in the most practical sense. If I need to actually purchase these lenses and modify them is there a less expensive route to go? And finally, can I use these methods on the Red?

Any advice would be great. Thanks David!

- Seung
 
Deakins had Otto Nemenz do the work, so perhaps you could talk to your rental house, but since it involves taking apart lenses (in the case of the 9.8mm), they might not want to do it. It sounds like they also used the ARRI Macro lenses with some elements in front from an old wide-angle lens -- again, it all depends on how much work the rental house wants to do for you. Otherwise, you'll probably have to buy lenses and do it yourself. Deakins says in the AC article that he used to do a similar effect by putting a lens element in front of another lens. I've shot through store-bought magnifier glasses for something similar in effect but it worked only for macro shots and tight close-ups. Find some cheap large lens elements, like from an old projector or something, maybe even a slide projector or overhead projector, anything, and play around with it in front of a normal camera lens.
 
Thanks David. I'm going to do some footwork now. I appreciate it!
 
David, advise on green screen suits and puppet shooting

David, advise on green screen suits and puppet shooting

Hi David!

We are shooting puppets with puppeteers in green suits, against a very evenly lit green screen, and table with green cloth for the puppets to interact with props, and ground surface. Right now, we are experimenting with quite a few variables, but we have green fluorescent kinos lighting the screen, and some daylight kinos, and softboxes lighting the subject. We're looking into additional lights for our complete set up (which will eventually involve more elaborate live action sets as well).

My questions are:

- Do you have any creative ideas about how to work with green suits that are in close range to the puppet, and have you shot anything like this before?

- In a green screen scenario, what would be your ideal lighting kit, for lighting the screen, and for lighting the subject with flexibility for different needs. And do you have any staple tricks for lighting green screen?

Thanks in advance...
 
I would normally use Kino greenscreen tubes for greenscreens because they put out such a narrow bandwidth that you get a very saturated perfect green for keying.

However, you can't shine them on the subject in the f.g. and if that object has a green support (or puppeteer in this case) above a green surface like a table or floor, then that green will have to be lit with the same color temp lamps as the subject -- so I wonder if it would be better to also light the background greenscreen with the same lighting so the shade and intensity of the green is more consistent.

Anything that doesn't need to be green because the subject does not cross in front of it, I'd perhaps consider making black and just garbage matting it out because you want to reduce the amount of green bounce back onto the subject.

Testing would be a good idea to see what composites well.
 
Reducing light

Reducing light

David,

To reduce the amount of light, normally we use ND filters of varying strengths.

However, I was wondering how practical/sensible it would be to use 2 polarising filters and rotate one of them to provide the precise amount of light reduction required.

Antony
 
Well, for people using a light meter, that's sort of the opposite of precise compared to an ND filter of known density, but that may work -- though I'd worry about some of the effects when panning around. There may be some color shifts too. Worth testing.

Rosco now makes a Pola material for putting on daytime windows to work in conjunction with a Pola on the camera so that you can control the degree of darkening.
 
hi mr. mullen.
hi want to ask you same tips for Lighting f and shooting for High-Speed.
a:wich kind of light is safe to use and what is your suggestion to avoid fliker(i have read in a forum that also the distance of the light from the subject and the use of diffusion can help to avoid fliker)
b:what shutter angle is possible and better to use(also 360°?)
c:other tips from your experience on set
thanks
ivan
 
I have spent my professional life shooting EFP and studio video as well as still film. I am curious about shutter angle, how does this work? Is it related to FPS and how does it affect exposure settings?

Much thanks

Gregory Lopez
 
shiny said:
hi mr. mullen.
hi want to ask you same tips for Lighting f and shooting for High-Speed.
a:wich kind of light is safe to use and what is your suggestion to avoid fliker(i have read in a forum that also the distance of the light from the subject and the use of diffusion can help to avoid fliker)
b:what shutter angle is possible and better to use(also 360°?)
c:other tips from your experience on set
thanks
ivan
Click to expand...

If you are talking about extreme high-speed, like 1000 fps, you need to use big tungsten units, 5K to 20K, because the large bulbs have a slow decay time on the filaments. Using a multi-bank light like a MaxiBrute is more risky because it's a bunch of small globes. Putting it through some diffusion may help slightly, I don't know. Kinos apparently are safe at that speed.

Fiddling with the shutter may help with certain frame rates, but at those high rates, probably not enough.
 
Gregory Lopez said:
I am curious about shutter angle, how does this work? Is it related to FPS and how does it affect exposure settings?
Click to expand...

Shutter angle is related to a spinning mechanical shutter like in a film camera.

The shutter is a spinning disk with a pie slice cut out to let light pass through and expose the film; the rest of the time, the solid part of the disk is blocking the light so that the film can be advanced in the gate to the next frame, at which point the shutter spins to the open portion to expose the frame.

Since a circle is theoretically 360 degrees, a circle cut in half is a 180 degree shutter "angle" -- so as this disk spins, half the time it is closed and half the time it is open.

This is why the combination of the shutter angle and the frame rate equals the shutter speed. If the camera is passing 24 frames through the gate every second and the 180 degree shutter is exposing each frame for half the time, then each frame -- in the gate for 1/24th of a second -- is being exposed for 1/48th of a second.

Close that shutter by half again, from 180 degrees to 90 degrees out of 360, and the frame is exposed for 1/4 of the time (half of that half) so at 24 fps, then exposure time is 1/96th of a second.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_disc_shutter
 
sir .i m presently working associate cameraman here in (india)mumbai film industry i just got the project on red camera .please tell besic setting about that i should have to be carefull about that and how much light sensitive it is ?and how we can change white balance(color temprature) for out and indoor shooting .
and is there any scope to work with you at any position . i am just mad about hollywood lights setup in films just want to learn with the world best technicle team.
thanx
prahlad k.
 
If I were you, I'd just shoot some different ASA ratings and color temp ratings and look at the results, hopefully on a large screen, and through frame grabs.

Optimally, it's in the 250 to 320 ASA range, close to daylight balance (around 5000K), but you can shoot it at higher ASA ratings like 500 ASA (at the risk of more noise) and lower color temp ratings like 3200K (at the risk of more blue channel noise). If you have enough exposure, some pale blue camera filters will help reduce the noise in tungsten-lit situations.

Remember, any setting you select other than frame rate, shutter speed, and REDCODE compression rate does not affect the recording, it's just metadata on top of the recording that can be pulled up when processing the footage. It also affects the monitor output for onset viewing.

Test, test, test.
 
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