Tough lighting gig. LCD Monitors everywhere.

[Steven Digges]

There is a chance I may have a gig in a couple weeks shooting in a country western dance club. The main feature of decor in this place is 60" monitors everywhere. They are on the walls, they are suspended in square banks from the ceiling, and they are mounted edge to edge all the way around the rectangular bar just over the bartenders heads. This is a high end club. There is about thirty of these monitors. At night when the place starts to rock they turn the ambient tungsten down so low the monitors become the light source. The room light is at a level just bright enough to keep the place from flickering because of the ever changing monitors. To the naked eye some flicker is there (because I looked for it) but the tungsten fill keeps most of it in check. Needless to say it is a very dark situation to be shooting in.

I don't want to be that guy running around blasting everyone with a camera mounted light, plus I hate that look. I think my lighting skills are pretty decent but I have a lot of questions about this one:

White balance? Even though the monitors are changing at 60 htz are they emitting a constant color temp or is it changing as fast as the image? I am an old school manual white balance guy. But I don't know what progressively scanned LCD TV monitors are putting out?

Speaking of scan rates....I am much better versed in the effects of interlaced monitors being in a shot than I am progressively scanned LCDs. Especially 30 of them on different channels! I will bring myself up to date on that. Is banding and scan rates even an issue? Am I better shooting at 30P or 60P? The monitors are less than two years old. I will check them but for now I am guessing they are set to refresh at 60P.

The extreme low light is going to be tough, especially with the fast motion of dancing. I will be shooting with Sony EA50s. They are only two years old but far from being a king of low light by todays standard of what is out there. I will deal with that. My big concern is the monitors. I do not want them to be ugly blowouts in the background either.

Any input will be appreciated!

Steve

[Charles Papert]

Color temp--obviously as the image changes, there will indeed be shifts, but overall the displays are daylight balanced, so if they are indeed the dominant light source, 5600 will be a good place to start.

Refresh rate--LCD's/LED's shouldn't flicker at any of the typical shooting speeds. Plasmas are trickier but pretty rare this days.

[Paul R Johnson]

Do you mean the rig is pixel mapped and controlled from the lighting desk? So they can change colour and do weird stuff? Most of the newer lighting controls can have a pixel mapped output. If so, colour balance will be unimportant as if they're red, then the amount of blue and green makes traditional colour temp impossible to calculate. I tend to agree with charles - set something mid way and just leave it. It's so uncontrolled faces will never be normal anyway.

when I do this kind of thing - beware of the dreaded flickers - many of these displays also have considerable latency, and some brands will switch to the next colour quicker than others. Some so bad they are visible to the eye, let alone the camera. We usually run show relay, with a camera out front, and on stage watching this picture can really confuse - all kinds of nasty flickering and pulsing.

[Steven Digges]

Charles, Daylight balanced....that is what I needed to know! Thank you. Its a good thing I will not be dealing with the ugly banding of interlaced refresh rates.

Paul, No lighting desk. There is a matrix switch that controls which TV channel goes to which monitor. No fancy images or effects, just sports stations of different types playing all the time. No audio or closed captioning.

Thank You.

Steve

[Jon Fairhurst]

Calibrated TVs target the D65 white point (6500K).

Monitor Calibration: D65 White Point for Soft Proofing | Color-Image.com

Some TVs are much bluer than that - up to 13000K or so! - as LED LCDs are more energy efficient with blue light. That helps some TVs meet Energy Star specs, get their EnergyGuide numbers low, and still deliver competitive brightness.

In any case, I'd shoot for 6500. That will make the images on the screens look natural. And if the screens show full screen red for a few seconds, the patrons will be bathed in that same red during that time, regardless of color temp. With 6500, it should let the bath of light extend away from the white point to blue, green, and red to roughly the same extent, depending on the TV source content.

Personally, I like mixed color temperatures. When shooting tungsten, I really like blue gels on hair lights, especially on dark hair. When source lights color skin this way or that (like when a kid's face is near Christmas tree lights), it can make things interesting. As long as the color temp changes are somewhat motivated, it can work well. The TV screens certainly provide motivation.

Regarding flicker, most LCD TVs scan their backlights at 120 fps or faster. Some are 240 and a few go up to 960. If you set your shutter to 1/30, 1/60, or 1/120 (yeah right, it sounds too dark), you shouldn't see any flicker. The main problem I see with TV screens occurs when the focus plane hits the TV color mask. That can show aliasing (even with anti-aliased cameras.) That shouldn't be a problem when shooting from a distance, but you still might find yourself needing to clean up an aliased monitor here and there in post when the focus was right on the screen. Some masked blur would do the trick - assuming that you weren't shooting straight at the screen. (If the TV is at an angle, you'd just get a line of aliasing. When perpendicular, the whole thing can alias.)

Let us know how it goes!

[Steven Digges]

Thanks for the input everyone. I should know in a few days if this project goes or not.....

Steve