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cinematography Day for Night
- Thread starter brianluce
- Start date
It's misleading, The correct phrase should be, Evening to night.
it works great to film around dusk and then push the blacks up with a color finesse curve customized per scene. Dont use magic bullet looks at all. That's not going to get you good results, and is more for quickie stylistics.
Especially if you are just using presets, and not tweaking.
The most effective way to do it doesn't really come from post processing, it comes from watching how night shoots look then replicating the contrast in camera first Proper technique in production will yield some nice results, but would typically be better suited toward certain projects. Sci-Fi, Fantasy, etc.
Funny you bring the topic up, though. I'm working on putting together visuals for our next broadcast job and I have to decide to either shoot day for night, all greenscreen (shudder), or pay for large units and a generator along with every other expense that comes with it.
I'm leaning toward Day for Night given that it's a Halloween themed production.
Well, consider this: how many night shoots [on major productions even] are shot beyond a 4~5.6 Split? Almost none. You tend to go wider lens and a faster stop if anything.
In our case, we'll be employing a Polarizer in the Mattebox, a 1.5 ND and mirror combo and a .6 for most of the production. Then dropping a light grad here and there for balance when needed.
That'll keep us at a fair stop, and it'll help me simulate a darker atmosphere in camera before hand.
Shooting RED MX, I'll always probably stay anywhere from 500-800 ISO, but it's only important in this case for netting the bottom end of the camera's usable range versus the top.