Correct exposure on a camera tilt shot

MartinE wrote on 4/20/2017, 7:00 AM

I'm an amateur with no formal video camera training and this has been bugging me for some time. OK I'm shooting a tilt shot of a nice old church on a cloudy but bright day. Its a wide shot and starts on the top of the spire (mainly sky with pointy spire) and finishes with the whole church (mainly dark building and very little sky). OK if I expose for the starting frame and lock it, the end of the shot will look very dark and if I expose for the end frame the start will look blown out. If I leave it on auto iris the look of everything changes as you go down. How would a pro shoot this? I've seen shots where everything looks constant right through the shot, how do they do this? Is it sorted in post. Is it something to do with rolling off the highlights to such an extent that you can up the exposure without blowing out the sky too much, perhaps in the camera picture profiles? Or do we just go for a compromise exposure which looks just about OK at both ends? Hope this makes sense.

 

Comments

NickHope wrote on 4/20/2017, 10:26 AM

Difficult to find a compromise exposure which looks OK at both ends for that sort of shot. Expensive cameras with higher dynamic range help. An animated FX in post can help even things out, but don't overdo it and get used to using the waveform scope in Vegas to monitor where your levels are through the shot.

In many cases I think it's OK to just let the auto-exposure adjust it, especially if your production is more of a "video" style rather than "cinematic" style. I think this is becoming more acceptable. Some cameras allow the speed of auto-adjustment to be set, and a slower speed can look better.

I would generally try to avoid tilt or pan shots that cause that sort of problem and find a different way to do it using separate shots.

If you really want to do it and don't want the camera to automatically adjust exposure then in general I think it's best to expose for the end of the move, not the start. In your example that works better because it's the spire and church details you want to show, not the sky. People will forgive some blown-out sky if they're studying the church details and can see that the shot is moving towards a more balanced exposure.

There are other creative tricks you could try, like tilting upwards then losing a blown-out sky in a fade-to-white.

MartinE wrote on 4/20/2017, 5:15 PM

Thanks Nick and all understood. As you say best avoided if poss.