Recently I?ve been doing some interior real estate videography work. The problem is with the sunny views through windows. As you can guess, when I set the exposure for the view (a big selling point, so it can?t be blown-out), the interior of the house becomes shadow. When I expose for the interior, the window is blown out. When I first started doing this, I was shooting stills, so I could take one exposure at each stop setting and mask them together in a final image. That?s impractical with video.
Working in film, I?ve always used ND rolls to gel the windows for the proper look. On the real estate shoots, however, that?s prohibitive in time and money (if even possible given some locations). While I have daylight-tuned lights, so color temperature isn?t a problem, there just isn?t enough light to overcome the stop-gap.
I currently correct in post-production as best as I can with curves and filters. The result is less than ideal and fairly time consuming. Does anyone have a technique they use (preferably in-camera) to overcome/minimize this problem?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Dan Rahmel
Author: "Nuts and Bolts Filmmaking"
http://www.cvisual.com
Really the only two ways to do it properly are, as you say, ND sheets on the windows or lights in the house... video cameras don't have the contrast range of film, unfortunately.
quote:
When I first started doing this, I was shooting stills, so I could take one exposure at each stop setting and mask them together in a final image. That?s impractical with video.
Actually, that was going to be my next suggestion :). If you're shooting on a tripod you can probably achieve that with a matte, but if you're moving the camera you're pretty much stuck.
If someone does have a better idea, I'd like to know too, because it's been a common problem in low-budget movies that I've worked on!
Yeah, it's a difficult problem. I've looked many places and I haven't seen anything besides the common solutions (which don't really fit my needs).
Since I've had so much luck with the still photographs, I'm considering attempting to build a mini-motion control tripod mount. Then I could just do the 2 camera pan passes at different stops and mask them together. I was just hoped someone had come up with something better that would save me more work ;-).
Dan Rahmel
Author: "Nuts and Bolts Filmmaking"
http://www.cvisual.com
