This only works under a given set of circumstances, outside of them it's mostly useless.
I regularly shoot a day long conference and need to get it all onto 2 DVDs to save costs. By some good fortune the background is all blackout curtain. With a bit of care and a lot of luck I'm able to get the lighting to not fall on the curtain. All lights are or are gelled to daylight.
Firstly shoot for the encode. I set the pretty basic DSR250 camera into auto everything, just too much effort to ride focus and exposure all day long. Only thing I change is to set exposure for Spotlight and EE Offset to -1. This keeps the background pretty black and there's still enough light on the talent to get separation of black suits against the background. If your camera has zebras then the brightest skintone should just activate the 70% zebras. Try to avoid blown out highlights from shiny mics and water jugs. If at all possible keep camera gain as low as possible. The cheaper cameras might not tell you how much gain is being applied or let you control it. More light on the subject always helps.
Having edited this I then apply a color curve FX whilst watching the waveform monitor. My aim is to crush the blacks of the blackout curtain to kill any noise while still keeping the suits and hair from merging into it. As all vision is on a single track I apply the FX to the track header. I then encoded to mpeg-2 2 pass VBR at an average bitrate of 2.5Mb/sec. Result looks pristine with no noticeable blocky noise etc. Of course with 60% of the frame solid black that really helped the encoder as does the mostly locked off camera.
A couple of frame grabs of the waveforms and Color Curve are here.
If you have a fancier camera then controls like master pedestal enable much of this to be done in camera. Just be careful doing that if you're not monitoring what's truly happening to the image. I've fallen into a trap once that nothing in post could rescue.
Bob.
I regularly shoot a day long conference and need to get it all onto 2 DVDs to save costs. By some good fortune the background is all blackout curtain. With a bit of care and a lot of luck I'm able to get the lighting to not fall on the curtain. All lights are or are gelled to daylight.
Firstly shoot for the encode. I set the pretty basic DSR250 camera into auto everything, just too much effort to ride focus and exposure all day long. Only thing I change is to set exposure for Spotlight and EE Offset to -1. This keeps the background pretty black and there's still enough light on the talent to get separation of black suits against the background. If your camera has zebras then the brightest skintone should just activate the 70% zebras. Try to avoid blown out highlights from shiny mics and water jugs. If at all possible keep camera gain as low as possible. The cheaper cameras might not tell you how much gain is being applied or let you control it. More light on the subject always helps.
Having edited this I then apply a color curve FX whilst watching the waveform monitor. My aim is to crush the blacks of the blackout curtain to kill any noise while still keeping the suits and hair from merging into it. As all vision is on a single track I apply the FX to the track header. I then encoded to mpeg-2 2 pass VBR at an average bitrate of 2.5Mb/sec. Result looks pristine with no noticeable blocky noise etc. Of course with 60% of the frame solid black that really helped the encoder as does the mostly locked off camera.
A couple of frame grabs of the waveforms and Color Curve are here.
If you have a fancier camera then controls like master pedestal enable much of this to be done in camera. Just be careful doing that if you're not monitoring what's truly happening to the image. I've fallen into a trap once that nothing in post could rescue.
Bob.