Jon Fairhurst
August 20th, 2009, 01:00 PM
Over the past months, I've read a number of posts from people claiming that the LCD on the 5D Mark II is pretty good for setting exposure. My gut feel was that this was wishful thinking, but after our 48-hour shoot this past weekend, I've confirmed it. For best results, do not rely on the LCD screen.
This isn't to say that the display is bad. It's not. It's just that humans see things on a relative basis. Also, the LCD screen seems to crush the blacks.
On our 48-hour shoot, we used Magic Lantern's zebras with excellent results. We used 0xf000 for the highlights, and 0xb000 for light-toned skin. In the end, we touched the exposure of five clips in post for matching purposes. A simple luma curve adjustment took care of some accidentally, slightly underexposed shots. (In addition to the five clips that we matched, we did some grading for special effects. These don't count, as the topic is proper exposure.)
FWIW, we were shooting with the Faithful picture style, contrast and sharpness at minimum, and saturation one tick below mid scale.
By comparison, when we shot The Last Outpost in the snow, we had to do grading from shot to shot just to get exposure matching. Same thing with our Dirk Snowglobe short, which was all shot indoors under controlled lighting. Those were done with Nikon lenses, auto mode, AE lock, exposure compensation, and the original firmware.
Keep in mind that the 5D Mark II applies a curve when going from 14-bit RAW to 8-bit h.264. If you get the exposure wrong, not only do you clip the highs or lows, but you potentially push faces and other critical objects out of the linear range, risking contours when you compensate for a poorly exposed shot. So, don't expose to the right; expose to the faces or other important areas.
The other thing we discovered is that the LCD crushes the blacks. We did an outdoor shot, looking into a white van. We added a light (tungsten with blue gel) inside the van, but couldn't see a thing on the screen. We removed the gel, barely saw some light, and shot like that. We figured that it was helpful to get the background out of the noise. The final picture shows everything in the van clearly, though at a low level.
When we shot in a theater, the background was rarely seen on the LCD, but was almost always seen in when played back on a TV or PC monitor. On the other hand, we had one shot with a totally black background, when we would have liked some light back there. Having the blacks crushed on good scenes let us take our eye off the ball on a bad shot. We should have done some VERY low zebra tests to ensure that we didn't lose dark backgrounds.
Anyway, I highly recommend using ML zebras for setting up your lighting. You can disable it when shooting to eliminate distractions when framing. The LCD is good for framing, but won't guarantee that you've exposed consistently, shot to shot.
This isn't to say that the display is bad. It's not. It's just that humans see things on a relative basis. Also, the LCD screen seems to crush the blacks.
On our 48-hour shoot, we used Magic Lantern's zebras with excellent results. We used 0xf000 for the highlights, and 0xb000 for light-toned skin. In the end, we touched the exposure of five clips in post for matching purposes. A simple luma curve adjustment took care of some accidentally, slightly underexposed shots. (In addition to the five clips that we matched, we did some grading for special effects. These don't count, as the topic is proper exposure.)
FWIW, we were shooting with the Faithful picture style, contrast and sharpness at minimum, and saturation one tick below mid scale.
By comparison, when we shot The Last Outpost in the snow, we had to do grading from shot to shot just to get exposure matching. Same thing with our Dirk Snowglobe short, which was all shot indoors under controlled lighting. Those were done with Nikon lenses, auto mode, AE lock, exposure compensation, and the original firmware.
Keep in mind that the 5D Mark II applies a curve when going from 14-bit RAW to 8-bit h.264. If you get the exposure wrong, not only do you clip the highs or lows, but you potentially push faces and other critical objects out of the linear range, risking contours when you compensate for a poorly exposed shot. So, don't expose to the right; expose to the faces or other important areas.
The other thing we discovered is that the LCD crushes the blacks. We did an outdoor shot, looking into a white van. We added a light (tungsten with blue gel) inside the van, but couldn't see a thing on the screen. We removed the gel, barely saw some light, and shot like that. We figured that it was helpful to get the background out of the noise. The final picture shows everything in the van clearly, though at a low level.
When we shot in a theater, the background was rarely seen on the LCD, but was almost always seen in when played back on a TV or PC monitor. On the other hand, we had one shot with a totally black background, when we would have liked some light back there. Having the blacks crushed on good scenes let us take our eye off the ball on a bad shot. We should have done some VERY low zebra tests to ensure that we didn't lose dark backgrounds.
Anyway, I highly recommend using ML zebras for setting up your lighting. You can disable it when shooting to eliminate distractions when framing. The LCD is good for framing, but won't guarantee that you've exposed consistently, shot to shot.