Lighting Advice

[SupaMusk]

Hey guys, Looking for advice on lighting bureau type live shots. You know the ones where the reporter is standing outside in the cold on a roof with a shot of the capitol as a back drop. any advice beside the obvious 3 pointer will be extremely helpful

- J

[The Daywood]

Use a green screen?

No seriously...The main thing that I have heard and seen is that the light must be balanced. You can't throw up 1k worth of light on the subject and hope to see the background at night. Use some diffusion, use some lower wattage lamps...Depending on the camera, you can probably go pretty low with your wattage...

Just my two cents...There are some gurus here who can give better advice than me, but I just figured I'd see what they said about my suggestions too...

[vidiot]

There's no real formula. It depends all the factors involved. Are you inside, outside, are there windows behind you, is it night or day? If your outside, what is the natural light situation? Where is the sun in relation to your camera and the subject? There are many ways to control light and make your shot look good, but like I said, you have to take all factors into account.

[SupaMusk]

interesting

[goodfoot]

If you have a bright background, you should use a double stop black net to knock it down. The more you can lower the background video temp, the less you will have to blast the talent with light to compensate.

[2000lux]

I generally try to expose for a background like that since I can't really control (unless I have access to the above mentioned net, which can be kind of hard to work with in the wind) it, and then light accordingly.

If you don't have HMIs you can gel your lights and or use reflectors. Both of my reflectors are the 5 in 1 kind with a silk inside a reflective shell. This can be used to diffuse the sunlight or as a light source if it's close enough. Gelled lights are useful, but the lights you have are probably not powerful enough to make much difference vs full sun. That's where the HMIs and Reflectors come in handy.

At night, same thing, expose for the background and light accordingly. You may need to put the extra baffle in you Chimera (if you have one) and or add some heavy diffusion to knock the power down to get the appropriate light level. You can also move the light back to cut down it's strength or even turn it a little so your only hitting them with the umbra of the cone of light.

As Vidiot said, there is no formula. You have to figure out how to get the job done with the tools at hand every time.

[svp]

Set the cams iris for the background and then get the talent in front of the cam and adjust your lights until the talent looks right. I've found that actually moving the lights forward and back to adjust the intensity actually works better than trying to use dimmers or the cams iris. Depending on the location, that may not be an option though.

[TexasDave]

I liked using umbrella to give a nice bright look with little to no shadows. Easy to set up, and you can take SVP's idea of moving the lights rather then the talent. And use color corretion gels to account for the setting sun etc...