Getting things right in camera

[FHDcrew]

In a world where you can push and pull a camera’s image to your hearts desire, I’ve found that getting things nailed in-camera is not only under minded, it almost is becoming a lost skill. Shooting log and 10 bit made me lazy with white balance for example. I can correct it in Davinci Resolve to such a great extent that I don’t worry about nailing it on set. 
 

Let’s chat about tips regarding nailing things in camera. A lost art if you will. It’s something I’m trying to get better at. I shoot more and more in 8-bit internal on my NikonZ6 because of the convenience of internal recording. But I have to really nail my exposure and white balance to have a pleasant grading experience. 
 

Here’s my question:  what’s a good method to quickly dial in white balance that is as accurate as possible, when in a run and gun mixed lighting environment?  And you are stuck with 8 bit colors too. And you are doing it by kelvin only. I don’t find myself shipping custom white balancing very often during run and gun. 

[PannySVHS]

For a while I used to film in vivid profile, the most contrasty one, with bumped up colors on the 8bit marvel that my GX85 is, contrary to make it pseudo flat. On my LX15 it works best for grading anyway. The tamer profiles seeming to kick out too much color information on the LX. It's a 709 camera after all.

Different cameras different tricks. My G6 fared best when everything at -2. Not ooc but for grading. GX85 was the first Lumix camera for me with good ooc color.

Mixed lighting. Give 4300K a try or 4800k. Could be your camera sensor is better tuned to 3200 or 5600k. S1 and S1H and other Panny hybrids seem to like 3200k temperature better. Going beyond 5600 does not look good on them ooc. My og Bmpcc and Bmmcc are the other way around. Looking forward to your findings. cheers:)

 

[MrSMW]

Being a hybrid wedding/event shooter, I don’t have the time to be setting WB every single scene so it’s 5600 outdoor and 4000 in and adjust in post if needs be.

Otherwise indeed trying to get as much SOOC internally as possible.

Works for me.

I shoot log these days/this last year, but no issues with shooting a flat profile and do so for all low light/after dark stuff.

[kye]

There's a school of thought that says you just set a fixed WB of (IIRC) 5500K, which will make day seem on the bluer side golden hour / sunset warmer, blue hour cooler, and incandescent lights warmer.  The idea is that this is sort of intuitively how we experience the world on some subconscious level, so the final result will seem right intuitively.

Personally, I set auto-WB because it's more likely to get closest to correct than I will, because I don't shoot at a lightning pace rather than a snails pace, and gives me the least amount of adjustment required to do.

In terms of getting it right in-camera, you should absolutely do it if you have time to.  I don't, so adjust in post, but the better you can get it in-camera, the more potential your footage has in post.

[MrSMW]

33 minutes ago, kye said:

Personally, I set auto-WB

Awful in my line of work as any change/changes mid scene is near impossible to overcome in post. Just a headache.

But otherwise yes, fixed WB of ‘5500’ works nicely and is my go to (not 5600) as it’s the recommendation for the conversion LUT I use.

I also meant 4500 indoors not 4000, so 4500 and 5500 are my two programmed default options.

[kye]

1 hour ago, MrSMW said:

Awful in my line of work as any change/changes mid scene is near impossible to overcome in post. Just a headache.

Absolutely.  My situation is that I don't record long clips much, and in the edit I almost never have a shot more than 4s long.  Also, I have a lot of time to edit compared to the footage I capture, so having time to fiddle with the footage isn't the problem, having the skill to do it well is!

[Jedi Master]

I use a Sekonic C-500 color meter. It reads directly in degrees Kelvin.

[PannySVHS]

Coolest thing is a well lit set making many cameras look good. Some ooc looks are still lackluster. I found the G6 had to be graded, no matter what. But what 709 beauty it revealed. It was only after some grading tricks that I built into a powergrade and later into my first own worthwhile lut creation. We should or could do an 8bit ooc challenge. But noone has been liking a challenge for years now:(

[BenEricson]

15 hours ago, kye said:

Personally, I set auto-WB because it's more likely to get closest to correct than I will.

Years ago, I used to work on these Walmart commercials. They were all shot on the Canon 5DMk3 set to Auto WB. Every market all over the country shot on the same camera, lens, and settings so the commercial spots would always look the same. It also sped up post product. EOS Standard I think? Or whatever was available on that camera. It's been a while. 

You will get the most accurate skin tones if you do a proper manual WB off of white. I sometimes use auto WB to read the scene, then lock my WB to whatever it tells me is correct. 

For studio stuff, I really like to shoot with baked in color, typically EOS Standard. I will often tweak the color matrix based on the setting but that profile on the Canon Cinema cameras is really really nice in my opinion. It gives you a very honest reading of the scene. Really nice for lighting fill ratios on set etc. 

Shooting with baked in color doesn't mean you can't grade or tweak the image. You can still shoot plates to control a blown out window away from the subject, etc. You can also add vignettes or tweak colors. I just find this to incredibly accurate and better than most people can do without a proper color workflow.

[kye]

9 hours ago, BenEricson said:

Years ago, I used to work on these Walmart commercials. They were all shot on the Canon 5DMk3 set to Auto WB. Every market all over the country shot on the same camera, lens, and settings so the commercial spots would always look the same. It also sped up post product. EOS Standard I think? Or whatever was available on that camera. It's been a while. 

You will get the most accurate skin tones if you do a proper manual WB off of white. I sometimes use auto WB to read the scene, then lock my WB to whatever it tells me is correct. 

For studio stuff, I really like to shoot with baked in color, typically EOS Standard. I will often tweak the color matrix based on the setting but that profile on the Canon Cinema cameras is really really nice in my opinion. It gives you a very honest reading of the scene. Really nice for lighting fill ratios on set etc. 

Shooting with baked in color doesn't mean you can't grade or tweak the image. You can still shoot plates to control a blown out window away from the subject, etc. You can also add vignettes or tweak colors. I just find this to incredibly accurate and better than most people can do without a proper color workflow.

Sure.

Perhaps the important part that I didn't mention is that I often miss moments because I was a second or three late to get the camera pointed in the right direction and rolling, so to say I don't have time to do a manual WB before hitting record would be an understatement because often I have a negative amount of time I can devote to such things!

Doing what you can to get it right in-camera is definitely preferable, but in how I shoot, getting it into the camera at all is something that is by no means guaranteed.  Of course, I am in a very tiny minority of all the people who shoot and know how to change the WB in post, but while my process doesn't apply to the majority of shooters, I still think there can be things learned by sharing 🙂 

[Ty Harper]

I think the idea of nailing it in-camera is in and of itself not that big of a deal nowadays - if you have a basic color workflow and most importantly, know how to really nail the story you're trying to tell.

That statement isn't meant to dismiss the importance of nailing it in-camera - but to say that imo nailing it in-camera has always been less about hitting a fixed target dead on - and more about a ballpark. And that ballpark is so much easier to hit thanks to the aggregated knowledge base of spaces like this, and of course YouTube. To the point where asking someone with experience for assistance is usually not as prudent as simply typing the question in YouTube's search engine! But that ball park around the target of perfection is also much wider than ever before, thanks to the corrective tools we now have within Resolve, Premiere Pro, Finalcut, etc. Not to mention basic in-the -field tools like a color chart and/or Sekonic C-700 or C-800.

I was a deejay for most of my life, and I still pride myself on knowing the basic theories of bar-counting and melody-matching and taking the time to know the unique bar construction of every single song I was gna play, so that when I hit the party and got on the 1200s, my 'in-camera' settings were pretty good. But then Serato came along with other recent mind-blowing advances - and now in 2023, a deejay simply does not need to have/understand those 'in-camera' settings. 

Is it something deejays like myself lament? 100%!!! But the REAL deejays of those past generations also understand that the actual mission, first and foremost, was always: to tell a great story.

So while there are deejays I know and admire, who still love to do 'all-vinyl' parties as a way to exercise/show-off the skills they HAD TO developed in the past, as a means to the ends of telling great stories, again, the REAL ones within that cohort also understand they are doing those parties for the sake of nostalgia, which is also very important and life affirming.

All that to say, hopefully when we are in passionate pursuit of getting it right in-camera (as I am myself, to a degree) we aren't losing sight of the more important plot of getting the story right in our minds - which is a whole other skill that still demands that we strive to master it at the highest of levels.

 

[PannySVHS]

I wouldnt highten one skill on the expense of another. I wouldn´t label a certain skill set as nostalgic just because off the point in time it was working wonders. But then you know about your art and skills of DJing and can put it into context, which both I am unable to. Getting things right in camera is not about story but about the ooc image.

[Ty Harper]

2 hours ago, PannySVHS said:

Getting things right in camera is not about story but about the ooc image

Well that's where we disagree philosophically, which is obviously totally fine. But I wouldn't be shooting something or even caring about the image if I wasn't trying to tell a particular story first and foremost.

[PannySVHS]

Don´t mix whine with chocolate or that kinda famous international saying. I don´t disagree with you. Neither do I have an opinion to share about the story first and foremost thing, as it is running circles. We both are talking about different things in this thread. My emphasize lies on the headline. I think your second sentence applies for anyone except formalists or dadaists or architects shooting flowers with their leica cam and glass.

[Clark Nikolai]

I can dig both approaches. Some things having manual everything on a camera allows you to get the shot looking really nicely. (If the camera responds to that and gives a great image because of it.) It takes more time though and just won't be fast enough to record certain events. Other cameras that are automatic, have image stabilization, auto everything are great for events where you don't have control and just have to record stuff. It gives a different look but that's still appreciated footage.

We live in a golden age of so many very good cameras that for a relatively low cost we can shoot something. (It does also mean more people are shooting and producing so there's more competition at festivals, etc. ) The choice people have now is no longer whatever they can get their hands on or can budget for but what look they want or what type of situation they're going to be shooting in.

[Jedi Master]

I always endeavor to get as much right in camera as possible. Focus comes first, of course, followed by framing, then exposure, and anything that just can’t be fixed in a program like Premiere or Resolve. 

I’m also careful to get the camera as stable as possible on a sturdy tripod and shield the lens as much as possible from flare-inducing light. 

Most of my subjects move in geological time, so I have plenty of time getting things set up and dialed in. Your mileage may vary.

[kye]

The issue at hand is "getting things right in camera".

Should I expose for the highlights, the shadows, or for the skintones?  The answer depends on what "getting things right" actually means.  The only "correct" way to use a camera is to understand the objectives of the project first, then use the camera to "get things right" in that context.

Here's a recent interview with ARRI, taken in their technical testing facility in Canada.  The place is literally a location for testing equipment.  How do ARRI think about the tech?  "It starts with the story".

 

[PPNS]

getting things right in camera is one of those things im not sure how to interpret. Ive posted this still before on here, to put it in context, it was shot around blue hour, but it wasnt quite as blue as it was here. I maxed out the white balance, to get it this blue. is that getting it right in camera or am i being a hack? 

[PannySVHS]

Astonishment by the sheer sensation of a blue hour magical moment, dreamyness, a story possibly to unfold or having end. You got that right in(front) the camera. 🙂 @PPNS

[kye]

2 hours ago, PPNS said:

getting things right in camera is one of those things im not sure how to interpret. Ive posted this still before on here, to put it in context, it was shot around blue hour, but it wasnt quite as blue as it was here. I maxed out the white balance, to get it this blue. is that getting it right in camera or am i being a hack? 

In the real world (as always) things are more complicated.

Getting things right in camera is normally considered good advice because it's assumed that the results will be higher quality than not getting it right in camera and then adjusting afterwards.  It can also be good advice from the perspective that depending on the situation it can take significant time / effort to process in post, and there's a risk that the desired results can't be obtained, and by then a re-shoot might be very difficult.

On the other hand, some situations will be made better by getting in wrong in camera, but in some way that provides an advantage.  ETTR is getting it wrong in camera, and can improve the image once adjusted in post.  There are other situations where this might be the case, depending on the situation.

Your shot might have benefited from being exposed normally and then be pulled down in post, assuming nothing was clipped.  Your shot might also have benefitted from being shot at a normal WB, and then having the red and green channels pulled down to make the image blue (ETTR but only of those channels).

Good old fashioned "movie magic" involves trickery from time to time, sometimes by a huge margin (e.g. shooting day-for-night) and sometimes getting it wrong in camera can be advantageous to aid in the illusions.