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Best Practices. Obtaining Proper Exposure. Share your methods please.

Troy Bakewell

Troy Bakewell

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As someone who is new to RED and about to be proud new owner of a Scarlett, I'm trying to wrap my head around the Raw/metadata concept. It seems to me to be quite different from what I'm used to. It's not a floating ISO exactly but from what I've read so far, choosing the ISO to rate your exposure at can be counter intuitive sometimes. To protect highlights rate and expose faster for example?


I don't have my Scarlett yet so I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet. For the benefit of us RED newbies, please share your method of obtaining proper exposure.
 
Exposure setting with the in-built exposure meters and stop lights is easier than making babies. Once you play with it for 1 minute you will realise it is very intuitive and you have great control if/what you clip or how much noise you are going to have in the shadows. Don't worry about it.
 
False Color is my best friend and what I use constantly to know exactly what is happening to the image. It goes beyond just "stoplights", and allows me to choose what I'm losing, or how to best expose without losing anything at all.

If you expose the RED correctly, the possibilities are endless in the grading suite...
 
I'll second what Hutson just said.

The one bit I can note is the interesting aspect of adding HDRx into the mix is that you have a bit more flexibility in extreme situations. For instance if you have a hard shadow covering a building and a bright sky yet exposed for mid tones, flip on HDRx and over expose a bit to reveal more deep shadow detail and through your grade you have a lot of flexibility. Play around at 4 and 6 stops HDRx and you have a lot more room to play in those tough shots.

It's still on the plate that we might get HDRx at 4k on Scarlet X at 24fps.
 
I've been shooting 320 ISO and just watching my histogram. False color is too slow and awkward imo to turn on/off for documentary/travel so I just watch the histogram. It'll tell you everything you need to know about what the highlights are doing.
 
Playing with ISO in the camera just helps you to see how far the sensor is looking into highlights and shadow, but it can be deceiving.

Rely on the stop lights (they are always RAW), expose to the right and check the histogram, everything else can be done in post.
 
q
Gavin Greenwalt said:
I've been shooting 320 ISO and just watching my histogram. False color is too slow and awkward imo to turn on/off for documentary/travel so I just watch the histogram. It'll tell you everything you need to know about what the highlights are doing.
Click to expand...

IMO False color is good for some things like putting a green screen at the level you want and getting it lit even, but otherwise FC is too much info and an extra step that's tough to look at and generally not needed. The histogram "goal posts" and stop lights are great exposure tools and tells you most things you need to know (except how does it look?). I also add zebra at 70% which gives me a general idea where I might want a face to land and I can leave it on without getting in the way (this is important when working fast).

When in doubt have a good monitor and some faith in what you see. There is nothing wrong with a burned out sky or window if you like the way the image looks.....there is nothing wrong with a black hole if there is no detail there of interest..... Black and white is beautiful also. "How do you want it to look" should always be considered rather then just looking at exposure tools. If you cant get where you want to go with the light controls you have on location is where the Raw recording and exposure science can assist you and more education/testing the edges will help your cause.
 
Uli Plank said:
Playing with ISO in the camera just helps you to see how far the sensor is looking into highlights and shadow, but it can be deceiving.

Rely on the stop lights (they are always RAW), expose to the right and check the histogram, everything else can be done in post.
Click to expand...

Thank you :)
 
Erich Roland said:
q
There is nothing wrong with a burned out sky or window if you like the way the image looks.....there is nothing wrong with a black hole if there is no detail there of interest.....
Click to expand...


I tend to be more wary of this approach. Though I agree that those looks can be stunning, I prefer to achieve them in post and start with a full, unclipped file. Digital sensors blow out very differently than film does and that transition is just ugly if you clip the sensor... it becomes much more filmic if you push it in post (not by clipping really, but by keeping the whites just below clipping and pushing the highlights way up there in the curve). Also, if you let a shadow turn into a black hole, that black area will be fine, but the deep (3/4) shadows will be noisier than normal.

Of course that's a perfect world scenario and we don't always have the luxury of an accommodating contrast ratio in our scene... so as mentioned above... protect the shadows and turn on the HDRx!


I mostly keep an eye on the stoplights and the noise warning. When I get nervous I pull out the Sekonic.

CB
 
Shoot at 800 ISO.

I'll say it again. Shoot. Eight Hundred. ISO.

That's the native ISO of the sensor. Think of it this way; if you're shooting with film, and you want to change your ISO, you have to swap out your film stock. What most people don't realize, is it's the same for digital sensors. The sensor is always taking in the same range of light, and the ISO setting is just dictating how that data is then viewed on output. It DOES NOT ACTUALLY CHANGE THE DATA YOU TAKE IN.

We've had shoots done at 125 ISO, where all the highlights were waaaaay clipped. Because the assuption by the camera crew was that they were actually changing the ISO, not just a metadata tag. We've also had shots done at over 1200 ISO, same mentality, and the images came back super, super noisey. To the point that I was in RedCine-X for over an hour trying to get the image looking at least decent for the edit. Did not work so well.

So, if you want the best results, you have to understand that with the MX sensor, it takes in roughly 6.5 stops both above and below 800 ISO, regardless of how you set the ISO metadata tag.
 
If I know exactly what I am getting, I'm totally fine with keeping my aperture open and changing my ISO to 500 (sometimes ISO320), while making sure nothing is clipped.

We can beat the "800ISO is the only proper way of shooting" horse to death, but I think it's up to the one who is shooting to decide what he wants out of the image and whether or not he is comfortable/confident about what he is doing.
 
Nick Pasquariello said:
Shoot at 800 ISO.

I'll say it again. Shoot. Eight Hundred. ISO.

That's the native ISO of the sensor.
Click to expand...

I disagree. The concept of "native" ISO really doesn't mean much when it comes to most digital image sensors, especially RED's. Yes the color science for MX was designed with the ISO800 setting as a starting point, but that curve scales for other FLUT/ISO values quite well. The ISO800 rating is not nearly as useful as understanding the range of the sensor relative to that rating. By all means do use ISO800 on a light meter to get a sense of light levels and use it when doing carefully designed lighting setups while keeping the highlight and shadow range of the sensor relative to that rating in mind. But I think I would hardly recommend sticking to ISO800 as a camera setting as a rule at all.

My take is that for most for situations it is best to set exposure by the stop lights to avoid clipping but set ISO depending on desired "video levels". It is a waste of the the best/cleanest range of the sensor if you underexpose your sensor just because you feel tied to ISO800. For example in a particularly low key night interior, where the image you want has most of your redcolor/video histogram info far to the left, you could easily get a lot of noise if you leave your camera at ISO800 and light for that, whereas if you adjust your stop/ND/lights to increase your RAW exposure and then lower your ISO as far as possible while still keeping your practicals or speculars not clipping, you'll be using a much cleaner range of the sensor, because your raw histogram is exposed to the right and the ISO setting is adjusting your curve to place redcolor/video levels where you want them more toward the left of the histogram in this low key situation.

Why reinvent the wheel, this is a common practice in digital image aquisition, "expose to the right", and the software ISO/FLUT settings are great because you can expose RAW to the right and still use the ISO/FLUT to give you your look in camera and put your "video" levels right where you want them.
 
Antony M said:
Changing ISO setting in camera will usually confuse most new users into incorrectly exposing.
Because although you can change the "ISO setting", you can't actually change the ISO (unlike in some other cameras).
Click to expand...

How are you defining "change the ISO"? If you define ISO through white saturation point, then no you cant, but if you define ISO through video level midpoint then yes you can. But then that is essentially the case on all image sensors, even if some implement their ISO differently. I think that its not changing the ISO that will confuse people, its not understanding how the camera works that will confuse them. If you do not understand how your camera settings and ISO, WB, etc. adjustments are affecting your RAW or what they mean and what your exposure tools are actually indicating, you may be just as likely to "incorrectly" (suboptimally?) expose by changing ISO as you are by having to always use the same ISO.
 
I'm sure this question has been asked but:

Does changing your ISO change your Depth Of Field?

Example:
Im shooting a scene where I want minimal DOF, so I set my ISO to 200 and open up to my 2.8.

Is my DOF different at 200/2.8
than 800 at an 11?
 
Justin Marx said:
I'm sure this question has been asked but:

Does changing your ISO change your Depth Of Field?

Example:
Im shooting a scene where I want minimal DOF, so I set my ISO to 200 and open up to my 2.8.

Is my DOF different at 200/2.8
than 800 at an 11?
Click to expand...

DOF is determined by focal length, F-stop, camera-to-subject distance, and viewing scale. Nothing else.
So the answer to your question is no, changing your ISO has no effect on your DOF.

But your example changes your f-stop as well as your ISO, so of course DOF is different at f:2.8 than at f:11.
 
Nick Pasquariello said:
Shoot at 800 ISO.

I'll say it again. Shoot. Eight Hundred. ISO.

That's the native ISO of the sensor.
Click to expand...

Native if you want to use every last bit. But I disagree. The bottom stop is too noisy in my opinion and I can play with the highlights more at 320iso. They clip 'unnaturally' soon at 800. I'll be shooting 800 and the histogram will be registering white. I'll only change it to 320 iso and they'll drop below white. That tells me that 800 is a slight gain beyond what the sensor is actually registering.
 
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