Tungsten Lighting and Scarlet: white balance vs. 80c blue filter?

[Daniel Stone]

Hey guys,

We're shooting green screen on a Scarlet in a studio stocked with tungsten. We have two options:

1. White balancing the camera to tungsten
2. Putting an 80c blue filter in front of the lens and balancing daylight (or close to)

Thoughts?

And I know what you're thinking, but bringing in a truck full of HMIs is not in the budget for this one (I wish).

 

[Stephen Williams]

Hey guys,

We're shooting green screen on a Scarlet in a studio stocked with tungsten. We have two options:

1. White balancing the camera to tungsten
2. Putting an 80c blue filter in front of the lens and balancing daylight (or close to)

Thoughts?

And I know what you're thinking, but bringing in a truck full of HMIs is not in the budget for this one (I wish).

Any blue will be beneficial, I would lower ISO to 640 & 6:1 compression NOT more!

 

[Christopher Barrett]

The blue channel gets jacked up so fast I've been thinking about experimenting with 80 series lately, myself. You could always add B to the tungsten to make it more sensor friendly.

 

[Rodrigo Prata]

To my experience, the best green screen you can get with a CMOS sensor is to gel the units that are actually lighting the green screen with green chroma gels (I don`t remember the number, but rosco makes gels specially for green screen). The chroma gel will only let the light wavelengths you want, even with tungsten lights and it will make for a perfect green screen. If you use chroma gels on the units lighting the green screen, don`t use any in camera filtration, set the camera for 5500K and gel your other lights with CTB.

If you don`t have the option to use chroma gels, I would use a Blue filter (a 82C if you don`t have too much light, or an 80A if you have lots of light)in camera, instead of white balancing it in camera)

Even with a blue filter, I would also lower the ISO a little bit, 640, or vene 500, but be careful not to clip your highlights.

And of course, use the lowest compression possible!

 

[Daniel Stone]

This is excellent info, thanks!

I would love to use the green Kino bulbs but the screen is 35'x24' and the client doesn't have the budget to line the length with Kinos. So, we're using the studio's 6K space lights (tungsten). The studio manager tried to wrap the space lights with gels but immediate meltage ensued.

I got an 80c and a DIT, which I hope will help.

 

[Randy Kline]

What if I were to show you an LED solution?
These are prototype fixtures.
We have a 100 Watt Daylight LED High Output COB Light engine, 5600K with a CRI 95
We have a 300 watt Tungsten LED High Output COB light engine. 3200K with a CRI 98. with a 90 degree lens.


I hope the link worked.

Our 100Watt COB illuminates equal to a 350 Watt HID. Our 300Watt to a 1000Watt HID.


Located in Huntington Beach , CA

 

[Jeremy Hildebrant]

Keep in mine mired shift. 80C will get you to about 4200K - 4400K from what I've experienced

 

[Danai Chutinaton]

I did my recent tungsten shoot on my Scarlet with a 1/4 CTB filter from schneider, rated the camera at ISO 320, kept a VERY close eye on the highlights and used as much fill as possible to avoid noise in the shadows. This yielded excellent results for me. I don't have experience with the 80c, but I can vouch for the Schneider 1/4 CTB working quite well for shooting with tungsten lights. I ended up white balancing the camera around 4200k if I remember correctly.

https://www.schneideroptics.com/ecommerce/CatalogSubCategoryDisplay.aspx?CID=1707

 

[david_winters]

I've shot an endless amount of greenscreen on M and X sensors, since the beginning. I aways try for daylight, but on bigger stages when its a tungesten only, I have an 80C but I'm more likely to rate the camera at 500 and shoot unfiltered.

 

[Rodrigo Prata]

I Think the problem with overexposing for compensating the weaker blue channel, is that you tend to overexpose your red channel, this may cause problems with skin tones. I would try to use filtration whenever as possible... If you can`t afford the light loss of an 80A, go 82C .

 

[David Battistella]

I did my recent tungsten shoot on my Scarlet with a 1/4 CTB filter from schneider, rated the camera at ISO 320, kept a VERY close eye on the highlights and used as much fill as possible to avoid noise in the shadows. This yielded excellent results for me. I don't have experience with the 80c, but I can vouch for the Schneider 1/4 CTB working quite well for t think to shooting with tungsten lights. I ended up white balancing the camera around 4200k if I remember correctly.

https://www.schneideroptics.com/ecommerce/CatalogSubCategoryDisplay.aspx?CID=1707

this is exactly what I would do and have done and have seen done on a few large green screen sets. Shoot some charts, but the best thing to do is leave it all tungsten and filter the lens. Filter lights if you are mixing sources and want more control.

For the shoot you are describing a 1/4 blue will do the trick and you won't have a ton of light loss.

david

 

[Daniel Stone]

Hey guys,

Thanks again for the awesome input.

We used an 80C filter with Zeiss Ultra Primes and this is some of the cleanest-keying footage I've ever seen. Even single hairs keyed. Very impressive!

 

[Jeremy Hildebrant]

Hey Daniel, curious what your camera settings ended up being with the 80C, kelvin, ISO, etc?