Shooting a horror film for my school, curious about gl2 settings

[Matthew Robertson]

I will be using a gl2 and i'm wondering what settings will be best for it. I'd like to have kind of a darker tone to it, although I can do this is post of course. I'm planning on using the frame mode, and shooting in 16x9. I'm going to use the manual focus, but I wasn't really sure about the shutter speed.

[Tim OBrien]

Everybody wants to do things electronically these days or with plugins.

Watch some old films, concentrate on the lighting and think like the OLD horror movie directors: Use less (but strategically placed) lights!

[Dale Guthormsen]

Good afernoon,

With Frame I would shoot at 1/60 for general motion, If I wanted blurred I would slow to 1/30th.

Of course, if you want shallow depth of field you then have to shoot faster to be able to open up the aperature.

Obviously you will be in manual, if in tv mode it may flip the aperature on you in the middle of a shot, not good.

make a list of shots and then practice and expirement, do not forget to write it down when you got it the way you want, assuredly you will forget as you end up trying so many different things for visual effect.

I personally believe the more you can do with your camera the better, and I love working in the lab.

[Cole McDonald]

to get shorter DoF, you can also add an ND filter to knock down the light coming in. Polarizer will knock down a little light as well along with helping to saturate the colors a little more in sunlight.

1/60th is a good shutter speed, agreed there, faster (bigger bottom number) gives a more staccato look (28 days later - zombie attacks), slower gives the "drunk walking through a party cam" look.

as far as the 16x9, I personally frame for 16x9 using the guides (I have an XL1s), then letterbox in post. Depending on how you release, you'll probably need a 4x3 version anyway, even if it's a 16x9 letterboxed version. I like to have the ability to slide clips up and down to adjust screwed up headroom and eyelines on shots (which we always seem to have due to lack of crew/limited time to spend much attention in any one area). After editing, I nest the sequence in another sequence, then apply a widescreen matte to the outer sequence. This allows me to adjust the up/down position of the clips within the nested sequence (I'm using FCP, not sure how that would be done on other packages). Either way, you'll matte out the same amount of pixels, but shooting 4x3, you'll see an accurate frame instead of an horizontally squished frame in the view finder.

[Todd Clark]

I shot a video with frame mode and regretted it ever since. Just remember that you can NOT convert frame mode (30p) to 24p. If you want 24p you need to shoot 60i and then convert in post.

Of course this is my taste. Other people will have different opinions but I definitely like the look of 24p over 30p.

I highly recommend you do testing before you choose.

Also make sure you turn down the sharpness in the custom preset. This will also help get rid of the soap opera look.

Good Luck!

[Alex Sprinkle]

Wait, why can't you convert 30p to 24p?