Paul Bettner
December 31st, 2003, 03:49 PM
Hey guys,
Anyone know how important the matte box is in use with the mini35? I recently had one on my XL1 (from a rental house), to test the kind of footage I could get from it. I was using a set of Zeiss superspeeds (T1.3) and did most of my shooting outdoors WITHOUT a matte box - just the bare lens. Almost all of the shots, even those where my back was to the sun, are very washed out with a light gray/white mist over the whole image.
I also shot a few scenes in low-light indoors, and they also exhibit this effect to a lesser extent. Another thing I noticed in the indoor shots was a soft, large white glow around any lights in the scene, if they were overexposed.
Now, I'm aware that a reduction in contrast is a desirable effect when using the mini35, but the "washed out-ness" of this footage seems much more than would be desired to achieve a film-like contrast.
So, could this have been caused by the fact that I didn't have the matte box attached? (it was hand held, and that adds like 10 pounds ;-) Or is this the "normal" output that requires correction in post.
I am able to get the footage to look pretty good by applying a tweeked-per-shot reverse S curve to up the contrast in the lows and highs, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't go back and ask the rental house to let me give it another go, this time with the matte box attached, to see if I can't get more clean looking footage straight from the camera.
BTW, it does seem to be exposure-dependant and I'm wondering if the setup isn't just a lot more sensitive to overexposure than the stock lens. For instance, if I stopped the relay iris down until there was no clipping, most of the washed out look went away, but then the scene appears too dark most of the time (although that's correctable in post as well.) The mist appears to "eminate" from the bright (sometimes overexposed/clipping, but not neccessarily) parts of the scene which "glow", suffusing the whole frame with the gray/white mist.
An example might be a wide shot that includes the sky (facing away from the sun), where the exposure is set to just barely overexposing the sky, keeping some foreground objects visible (not silhouetted), and keeping a bit of blue still in the sky. In this example, the sky's brightness would seem to spill glow over the whole frame, washing out the contrast. Keeping in mind that, like I mentioned, the matte box was not present, nor was any kind of filter on the lens.
I'm thinking that this may be due to my inexperience in dealing with cine lenses and how they react to different exposure conditions... perhaps this kind of thing I describe is a common occurance shooting 35 and takes careful use of the matte box and filters... well, that's what this is for, a learning experience, so any advice is very welcome (and I know I should study my ACM more :-)
paulb
p.s. I can post some grabs later if it'll help - at the moment I'm on a modem.
Anyone know how important the matte box is in use with the mini35? I recently had one on my XL1 (from a rental house), to test the kind of footage I could get from it. I was using a set of Zeiss superspeeds (T1.3) and did most of my shooting outdoors WITHOUT a matte box - just the bare lens. Almost all of the shots, even those where my back was to the sun, are very washed out with a light gray/white mist over the whole image.
I also shot a few scenes in low-light indoors, and they also exhibit this effect to a lesser extent. Another thing I noticed in the indoor shots was a soft, large white glow around any lights in the scene, if they were overexposed.
Now, I'm aware that a reduction in contrast is a desirable effect when using the mini35, but the "washed out-ness" of this footage seems much more than would be desired to achieve a film-like contrast.
So, could this have been caused by the fact that I didn't have the matte box attached? (it was hand held, and that adds like 10 pounds ;-) Or is this the "normal" output that requires correction in post.
I am able to get the footage to look pretty good by applying a tweeked-per-shot reverse S curve to up the contrast in the lows and highs, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't go back and ask the rental house to let me give it another go, this time with the matte box attached, to see if I can't get more clean looking footage straight from the camera.
BTW, it does seem to be exposure-dependant and I'm wondering if the setup isn't just a lot more sensitive to overexposure than the stock lens. For instance, if I stopped the relay iris down until there was no clipping, most of the washed out look went away, but then the scene appears too dark most of the time (although that's correctable in post as well.) The mist appears to "eminate" from the bright (sometimes overexposed/clipping, but not neccessarily) parts of the scene which "glow", suffusing the whole frame with the gray/white mist.
An example might be a wide shot that includes the sky (facing away from the sun), where the exposure is set to just barely overexposing the sky, keeping some foreground objects visible (not silhouetted), and keeping a bit of blue still in the sky. In this example, the sky's brightness would seem to spill glow over the whole frame, washing out the contrast. Keeping in mind that, like I mentioned, the matte box was not present, nor was any kind of filter on the lens.
I'm thinking that this may be due to my inexperience in dealing with cine lenses and how they react to different exposure conditions... perhaps this kind of thing I describe is a common occurance shooting 35 and takes careful use of the matte box and filters... well, that's what this is for, a learning experience, so any advice is very welcome (and I know I should study my ACM more :-)
paulb
p.s. I can post some grabs later if it'll help - at the moment I'm on a modem.