Anyone know a good preset that would resemble the matrix effect?

white balance to an orange card and set your exposure slightly low (1/2 to full stop down).

white balance to an orange card and set your exposure slightly low (1/2 to full stop down).

What? Please explain settings again... Not sure what an orange card is mate

He means you deliberatly throw the white balance out by holding up a card that is orange (in colour) then set the white balance to it so you tell the camera that orange is white, this I asume will throw everything green which is what the matirx is graded as.
Lowering the exposure will make the green cast stronger.

You can do this in post of course with a half decent colour grading tool.

Uhm, so 1/2 stop would be what then? Also I want the settings like red green blue, gamma, knee etc.. etc... Thanks for all the help, I'm still learning.

if your camera allows for manual adjustment of exposure, dial it one click lower than optimal. I'm a big proponent of slightly underexposing all digital footage...not alot, just a touch.

This will bring the whites closer to happy exposure and compress the blacks a bit for you. Andy gave a perfect description of the orange card...I went to a scrapbooking store and bought a series of 8x10 hard paper in various colors (blue, green, orange, purple, yellow, red - all the primaries and secondaries) as lightly colored as possible...nearly white, but tinted slightly. I then zoom in on the piece of paper and set my white balance which will throw the whites of the camera to the complimentary color of your card...this will tint your whole image.

don't forget to shoot stuff that is dirty, dingy and has lots of character...the look you get is usually more about what you put in front of the camera than what you do inside the camera. Costuming, casting, set design and color palettes are "the film look"...the rest is just capturing that correctly in camera whether video or film.

Uhm, so 1/2 stop would be what then? Also I want the settings like red green blue, gamma, knee etc.. etc... Thanks for all the help, I'm still learning.
Hi Scott as we are in the XL2 Forum I would assume thats the camera you are using if you use one of the setting on the main dial A, TV, AV, M etc set your white balance as described above then under the carry handle there is a dial called AE shift thats where you can alter the stops it lists +2, +1 +0.5 0 -0.5 -1 -2.

Basically you are over riding what the camera is reading by how ever much you adjust the exposure on that AE shift dial.

Hope that helps.

The best way of doing this BTW is just shooting normally then in your edit or compositing software depending on how advanced it is you could then add your green look via colour correction / grading.

What you usually do is do a main grade the basics so to speak, to match up the footage such as the exposure and the look is correct then once all the footage in the edit line is corrected you then give it the final grade when you add your green/bleach bypass look. this will also help in blending in any CGI / SFX you have into the final finished footage as well.

If you are just starting out BTW I advise you to get hold of this book

Stu Maschwitz "The DV Rebel's Guide"
An ALL DIGITAL Approach to Making KILLER ACTION MOVIES on the CHEAP
ISBN 0-321-41364-4

Great tips! Thank you for the tip on white balance on orange. Tested it on several pieces of colored paper just now and found out som astonishing effects.

What white balance thing would I use? Tungsten lighting is that what ur talkin bout

can't take credit for the white balance on orange...I learned about it from the folks at http://www.marlathemovie.com

scott, to white balance (WB) your camera, hold up the card you wish to balance to (or a white shirt, or anything else) and zoom to fill the frame...the thing you're balancing to should be lit by the main light you're using (key light). If you WB to a white card lit by the sun, indoor lights will look really orangy yellow...conversely, lit by an interior tungsten light, sunlight will turn blue. Flourescents have a green spike in them which WB stuff a bit toward magenta.

make sure your WB dial on the side of the camera (pictures of lights around it) is set to one of the custom settings (1,2 or 3...the others are tungsten, sunlight and auto)...then press the WB button next to that dial (little caret pushing through a line) for a second or two, you should be able to watch the color change before your eyes.

When you zoom back out, the scene's colors will have changed. In the film world, you have daylight film and indoor film...they are precorrected (like the two non-custom, non-auto settings on the WB dial) to blue and yellow-orange. If you want to shoot more like film folk, use those two settings exclusively, then filter your lights to give you the onscreen colors you want.

I recently did a wedding in one of the worst lit places I've ever worked. My WB knob got a work out as I would turn to the left, I'd have to reframe and set to sunlight, then change as I turned back to the right...Eventually, I just set it to auto (which I don't like) and locked longer onto my subjects in a given lighting environment...very colorful footage.

Scrapbooking store? That's brilliant. And obvious, now that I think of it. I know where I'll be off to buy single sheets of colored papers for balance cards.

Thanks, Cole.

Martin

I have a bright orange shirt that'll work great, bwhaha! Thanks guys!

Perfect...always:

use what you have,
make what you don't,
buy what you can't!

Cole, thanx a lot for the link. It was a beautiful film they had made. Especially since I do speak french (well...almost... :) )

Unfortunately I totally forgot to use w/b at todays shot (on auto) but next time...

heat of the moment, it happens...I use a checklist on set:

http://www.yafiunderground.com/checklist.html

This one doesn't have white balance, but I put that mentally under exposure for my purposes...you can add it to yours and run down it every time you shoot...every time you roll action, you should have gone through your list!

adjust it to fit your work flow.

Cole;

The checklist is really good and could be helpful in the future when there will be someone else besides me on my sets :)

Btw and totally off topic: My gf is a fencing instructor (commenting the film on your website) and the balloon trick was totally new to her :)

off topic: http://www.fencingbooth.com

We've been doing that for quite a while ;) makes it approachable for kids and nervous adults.

on topic: The checklist is almost more important with a smaller crew as you have so much going on alone, you need to have that reference for yourself so you can focus on the stuff in front of the camera more fully and leave the other technical bits up to the checklist...better productions that way. Just reconfigure the list to suit yourself and your shooting style.

I would not underexpose, you can turn down the master ped and set-up level. It will be contrasty but not look under lit.



ash =o)

Make sure if you are exposing by the meter that you never let it hit 100% (to allow for some error, I use 90-95%. It pushes the picture very slightly dark, but I tend to crush my blacks in post anyway...so I'm doing it in camera here to save time in post...and I like the aesthetic better...I find it less "I'M VIDEO!!!" than letting whites shine through at 100%.

If you are talking zebras, I put them on 80 and make sure that there are no zebras on peoples faces.



ash =o)