Safe ISO settings

[wshultz]

I had a brief conversation with a DP who is getting ready to shoot a low-budget feature. He was asking me about settings for the Red. I told him I understood that a lot of DPs used 320 for inside and possibly 500 for outside to protect the whites a little more.

He said to me 2 or 3 times he thought he could set the camera as low as 200. I told him I thought he might be in danger of over exposing. Am I wrong here? I can't think what his reasoning would be and I don't want to see him do something like that outside. Is he thinking film where he might do that for a denser negative?

 

[Zakaree Sandberg]

over exposing if in post he changes back to 320 or 500...
but whatever iso he exposes for, and stays there,he will be fine.
I shoot 250 for tungsten all the time and get amazingly clean results.

 

[Harry Lipnick]

Like Zakaree said, he just needs to expose for whatever ISO he ends up selecting. What he might need a friendly reminder of (especially if, like you said, he shoots a lot of film) is that with digital, a blown highlight is completely gone. There's just no information there that you can kind of ease back in like you can photochemically. So there's no inherent danger of overexposing at 200 ISO any more than there is at 500 ISO, but with both, protecting for the dynamic range of the chip is going to be very important.
Peace,

-Harry

 

[Graeme Nattress]

As 320 is the native ISO, it's also the best place to start. If you always try to expose to the right, you shouldn't go too far wrong unless you really need shadow details at the expense of some blown highlights.

Graeme

 

[Paul Hazlett]

just let him know also that its all metadata sitting on top of the raw footage, that is always recorded at the native settings of the camera and heed the advice from the other posts as well.