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Shooting in Haiti! Some questions...

Eric Lin

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Hi all. I'm shooting a feature on the Red and we have a few days in Haiti and are currently down here prepping. I shot one feature on the Red last year and loved it. This is my second go. I did some searching but couldn't find good answers to address my particular questions.

I'd love your advice on two situations:

We are shooting a few scenes in bright exterior, harsh Carribean sunlight and we may have to shoot sometimes in the noon sun (our schedule is super tight and I can't avoid it) with Haitian actors (very dark complexions). We will fill as best we can but...

In terms of the monitor path, I usually view on Redspace gamma and redspace colorspace but monitor off of the RAW histogram and set my exposure on that. Just to avoid annoying questions on set from video village (we can't see their faces!) and for the QT proxies they will edit off of (I assume the settings for color and gamma and curves will carry over), are there any settings you recommend to adjust the curves for Redspace gamma setting so the blacks are not crushed so hard? I'm looking for settings you might have used on the camera viewing and in the monitor path that has a wider dynamic range? Is it better to just set it to Rec 709 gamma and build in a touch more contrast (but the rolloff is harsh)? Or should I use Redspace gamma and go into the curves and monkey around with the toe x and toe y settings (which I haven't done) to give me more room in the blacks. Do these settings carry over to the QT proxies?

The camera doesn't get here until a couple more days so I won't be able to test for a while.

Secondly, I'm lighting some night exteriors to play as moonlight again with actors with dark complexion. With film, I'd be comfortable underexposing it to what I think it should look like. With the red, is the better bet to expose to the right (be a lot brighter than what I want) and just bring it down in post or expose at what I think it should feel like while monitoring in RAW with my light meter?

I'd love any advice you all could give. Thanks in advance.

Best,
Eric Lin
NYC
DP
 
Hi Eric,

In my experience you are thinking the correct thoughts. For the daylight monitor in Red Space, probably at 200 or 250 iso, if the sky is hazy and white that will likely define the upper end of your exposure, otherwise white objects in frame. Redspace gives you quite a bit of headroom over raw, so if it looks OK, or even a tiny bit clipped in Redspace you are fine.

You can tweak the curves a bit, but you are stretching the monitoring image ( remember it's always raw ) At some point it's going to get noisy. If the appearance of more toe leads you to underexpose, it would be totally counterproductive.

At night: If Haiti is like other poor caribbean nations that I've shot in there will not be much in the way of streetlights, it's gets really dark. Depending on how big your lighting package is do what you can - try not to crank the ASA way up... if you can make things look good @ 250 or 320 you are fine ! Super Speeds would be a good idea.... It also might be good to open the shutter from 1/48 to 1/32. Gives you a precious 1/2 stop with just a little motion artifact.

Good Luck and feel free to contact me if any of this does not make sense.

Matt Uhry
www.mattuhry.com
 
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