Gemini not capturing blacks. Help.

[Jason beaumont]

Now I know what your going to say, yes I black shaded. I was in a dimly lit room and the Gemini would not capture any information in the shadows correctly, or the highlights. it didn't just look like I was shooting in a dark room, the picture itself is completely unusable, and the shadows look distorted. The room was not pitch black though, there was light.
I had to add a bunch of light to the scene. Can someone tell me what I did wrong, or has this happened to them. My camera just started doing this. There is quite a bit of noise in the picture. Then there were other scenes we did that didn't come out as bad, but anything that required it to be dark the camera completely crashed in quality, could not get any blacks. Even when I lowered the iso the highlights started coming out weird. Maybe im just exposing these scenes the wrong way, but I feel like something is wrong with the camera, in the same situation my scarlet W wouldn't have looked like this. The day before when we were in bright lighting conditions, everything looked great (last picture).

 

[Michael Tiemann]

Post a link to a frame of the R3D in question.

 

[Jason beaumont]

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tgww3rp003gv7tw/AADX2j0bcYjA9EBRHdGar305a?dl=0

I know your going to look at the histogram and say, this was super under exposed, but I guess what im saying is the room had plenty of light, it shouldnt have came in so dark.

 

[Chris McKechnie]

Your shots are severely underexposed, but make sure you have 2 black shading calibrations - one for Low Light Mode, and the other for Standard. I'm guessing, you were using your black shade from the standard calibration as opposed to LL, which will drastically reduce exposure.

 

[Les Hillis]

Looking at the Metadata -

Shot # A001_C001_07128C.0000704F

Resolution 5120x2170
Record Frame Rate 23.976
Shutter (ms) 10
Shutter (1/sec) 96
Shutter (deg) 90
ISO 800
Aperture F4.4
Sensor Sensitivity Name - Standard
REDCODE - REDcode 8:1


Shot # A001_C012_0712C4.0000253F

Resolution 4096x1728
Record Frame Rate 23.976
Shutter (ms) 21
Shutter (1/sec) 48
Shutter (deg) 180
ISO 1600
Aperture F3.5
Sensor Sensitivity Name - Low-light
REDCODE - REDcode 2:1


The differences in those settings could explain why the first shot looks darker.

 

[Jason beaumont]

I felt like everything I was doing was under exposed then, because it only looked decent when I added a bunch of light. otherwise the blacks and highlights looked super weird. So how do you expose for a night shot and keep it dark? In this shot the actor was breaking into the house at night time.

 

[Jason beaumont]

Looking at the Metadata -

Shot # A001_C001_07128C.0000704F

Resolution 5120x2170
Record Frame Rate 23.976
Shutter (ms) 10
Shutter (1/sec) 96
Shutter (deg) 90
ISO 800
Aperture F4.4
Sensor Sensitivity Name - Standard
REDCODE - REDcode 8:1


Shot # A001_C012_0712C4.0000253F

Resolution 4096x1728
Record Frame Rate 23.976
Shutter (ms) 21
Shutter (1/sec) 48
Shutter (deg) 180
ISO 1600
Aperture F3.5
Sensor Sensitivity Name - Low-light
REDCODE - REDcode 2:1


The differences in those settings could explain why the first shot looks darker.

I know I changed the settings between the 2 shots, I guess what im saying is that the room had a good amount of light and it was showing up dark like this, but not just dark, completely under exposed which make all the highlights and shadow funky. I just feel like in that same situation my Scarlet W wouldn't have clipped light that, that first shot is completely unusable.

 

[Michael Tiemann]

I felt like everything I was doing was under exposed then, because it only looked decent when I added a bunch of light. otherwise the blacks and highlights looked super weird. So how do you expose for a night shot and keep it dark? In this shot the actor was breaking into the house at night time.

Here's a posting to get you started: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showth...-Dark-Scenes&p=1847815&viewfull=1#post1847815

You can read the whole thread, or just the one posting.

 

[Michael Tiemann]

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tgww3rp003gv7tw/AADX2j0bcYjA9EBRHdGar305a?dl=0

I know your going to look at the histogram and say, this was super under exposed, but I guess what im saying is the room had plenty of light, it shouldnt have came in so dark.

Assuming there were no lighting changes at all between these two images, the differences I see are Standard vs. LL (2 stops), f4.4 vs f3.2 (1 stop), and 90 degree shutter vs. 180 degree shutter (1 stop), for a total of 4 stops under. Given that the second image is about 3 stops underexposed, the additional four stops of exposure reduction leads to the conclusion that your shot is 7 stops underexposed. If there was a change in lighting, then you might be even worse off than that.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I felt like everything I was doing was under exposed then, because it only looked decent when I added a bunch of light. otherwise the blacks and highlights looked super weird. So how do you expose for a night shot and keep it dark? In this shot the actor was breaking into the house at night time.

It's possible to crush the overall image in post to create a "night feel" to the image, but a lot depends on keeping the light spill off the background and having pockets of light for the actors to walk through in the room so that it's not pitch black. Great reference books like David Mullen's Cinematography and the American Society of Cinematographer Handbook go into detail about key-to-fill ratio and how to create a night look on set.

https://www.amazon.com/Cinematography-Third-Kris-Malkiewicz/dp/074326438X

https://www.amazon.com/American-Cinematographer-Manual-Vol-Michael/dp/1467568317

The best thing I can tell you is to always shoot tests before situations like this and experiment as far as how far you can go in terms of exposure and fill. My standard line in final color is "darker is easy... brighter is hard," particularly when it comes to adjusting exposure in post. Many, many shows that lean heavily on night scenes, like Walking Dead and Stranger Things, have gone with what I call a "stylized night look," where everything important is still fairly visible, but there are pockets of darkness and light here and there that help sell the idea that it's night and it's believable. Where this can get dodgy is when you cross the line into muddiness, and then you wind up with noise and viewers straining to see images that carry the story. (The recent complaints on Game of Thrones fall into that area.)

 

[Les Hillis]

Starlight, moonlight, streetlight, lamplight, light shining out from inside a window, car headlight, torchlight, candlelight, cigarette-lighter light, phone-light, television light, regular domestic-looking interior lighting...these can all be used to convey night-time.

On an interior with no windows (underground or deep inside a building), day or night becomes ambiguous (like it is in real life) and other details need to be included to convey the time of day (clocks, clothing, activities).

So funnily enough, it's the light itself that sells the idea of night just as much as it is the darkness.

It's a creative thing too, so while there are common approaches and conventions (eg. blue highlights and black shadows for moonlight) there are no real rules for it.

When it comes to exposure though, regardless of your creative lighting choices, you obviously still need to stay within the limits of your sensor.

This is arguably most challenging when you're not actually using night-style lighting, but just making everything darker in-camera or by lowering your actual light level to suggest the darkness of night.

When taking that approach, it's better to rely on darkening the image in post as much as underexposing, as underexposure alone can only get you so far before it starts degrading the image.

 

[Michael Tiemann]

Starlight, moonlight, streetlight, lamplight, light shining out from inside a window, car headlight, torchlight, candlelight, cigarette-lighter light, phone-light, television light, regular domestic-looking interior lighting...these can all be used to convey night-time.

On an interior with no windows (underground or deep inside a building), day or night becomes ambiguous (like it is in real life) and other details need to be included to convey the time of day (clocks, clothing, activities).

So funnily enough, it's the light itself that sells the idea of night just as much as it is the darkness.

It's a creative thing too, so while there are common approaches and conventions (eg. blue highlights and black shadows for moonlight) there are no real rules for it.

When it comes to exposure though, regardless of your creative lighting choices, you obviously still need to stay within the limits of your sensor.

This is arguably most challenging when you're not actually using night-style lighting, but just making everything darker in-camera or by lowering your actual light level to suggest the darkness of night.

When taking that approach, it's better to rely on darkening the image in post as much as underexposing, as underexposure alone can only get you so far before it starts degrading the image.

All true, but could be said even more clearly. Put this image from the series "The Americans" on your waveform monitor:

The image contains a fully dynamic range from white-white to black-black. The (luma) histogram shows strong peaks in the blacks and the shadows, but the histogram has information all the way from black to white. And it's the whites that make the blacks look so black. The beauty of projecting venetian blinds onto a blank wall is that they can give you the full contrast from highlight to shadow and then the rest of your image can be read against that range. You can then make choices so that the set reads as daytime or nighttime, and you're good to go. But using exposure alone as a way to convey time of day is worse than "challenging". It's simply wrong.

Post-processing a correctly exposed image might get you there if your set and lighting is leaning in the right direction and just needs an extra push. But it's a nightmare to try to re-light a scene in post that wasn't lit right when it was shot.

 

[Aaron Green]

Did you use the LL sensor setting for any of these?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I’m confused as to what you wanted — you wanted the scene to be darker? You wanted it to be lighter? There are two separate issues, one technical and the other artistic. You pick an ISO level and a display gamma for the noise level, highlight retention, and contrast/saturation level you want. Then you light for the mood you want. So are you unhappy with the lighting or the noise/black level/contrast?

As for a dark scene where no lights are on and there is no flashlight involved, you can go a number of ways, from the soft, flat, and dim ambient look to the shadowy, contrasty moonlight/streetlight look. Or a mix from room to room.

One issue though is this is hard to do well in a room with white walls unless you’re willing to let the person go silhouette — the amount of underexposure that a white wall needs to look dark is much higher than what the subject needs.

 

[Dan Kanes]

So well said David!

I’m not seeing any camera issues here - mainly the notion of Contrast in Lighting.

Personally I like to shoot night scenes or Low key scenes rating the camera between 250 and 500. The sensor still receives the same amount of light as rating it at 800 and things “look” darker. Thankfully this is also mostly a metadata setting when shooting raw.

 

[Jason beaumont]

Thank you for your help. Im shooting a night time city scene tonight for the last shot. Wish me luck.

 

[Jason beaumont]

This was from last night, it got better. I still felt like there is a lot of noise in the shadows in standard mode in some of the shots (not this one in particular) I donno. but all the information you guys gave me definitely helped a lot. I incorporated a lot of it. But in the second Photo at iso 800 the picture completely crashes without lighting. I guess we should have changed it to low light mode in this instance but my DP didn't. I just feel like in this same situation my Scarlet W wouldn't have looked like this. Anyways live and learn. I attached the files to drop box if you want to take a look, files starting with A004 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tgww3rp003gv7tw/AADX2j0bcYjA9EBRHdGar305a?dl=0

 

[Nick Gardner]

completely crashes without lighting

Duh. "I think we found your problem..."

 

[Jason beaumont]

Duh. "I think we found your problem..."

Lol. well this low light gemini seems more light sensitive than my old scarlet w. All good those the pictures came out beautiful.

 

[Sabovic Adis]

Damn...she hot!
Who is she? :001_tt1: