COMPOSITION
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Types of Film Lights and their efficiency – CRI, Color Temperature and Luminous Efficacy
Read more: Types of Film Lights and their efficiency – CRI, Color Temperature and Luminous Efficacynofilmschool.com/types-of-film-lights
“Not every light performs the same way. Lights and lighting are tricky to handle. You have to plan for every circumstance. But the good news is, lighting can be adjusted. Let’s look at different factors that affect lighting in every scene you shoot. ”
Use CRI, Luminous Efficacy and color temperature controls to match your needs.
Color Temperature
Color temperature describes the “color” of white light by a light source radiated by a perfect black body at a given temperature measured in degrees Kelvinhttps://www.pixelsham.com/2019/10/18/color-temperature/
CRI
“The Color Rendering Index is a measurement of how faithfully a light source reveals the colors of whatever it illuminates, it describes the ability of a light source to reveal the color of an object, as compared to the color a natural light source would provide. The highest possible CRI is 100. A CRI of 100 generally refers to a perfect black body, like a tungsten light source or the sun. ”https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-color-rendering-index/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index
Light source CCT (K) CRI Low-pressure sodium (LPS/SOX) 1800 −44 Clear mercury-vapor 6410 17 High-pressure sodium (HPS/SON) 2100 24 Coated mercury-vapor 3600 49 Halophosphate warm-white fluorescent 2940 51 Halophosphate cool-white fluorescent 4230 64 Tri-phosphor warm-white fluorescent 2940 73 Halophosphate cool-daylight fluorescent 6430 76 “White” SON 2700 82 Standard LED Lamp 2700–5000 83 Quartz metal halide 4200 85 Tri-phosphor cool-white fluorescent 4080 89 High-CRI LED lamp (blue LED) 2700–5000 95 Ceramic discharge metal-halide lamp 5400 96 Ultra-high-CRI LED lamp (violet LED) 2700–5000 99 Incandescent/halogen bulb 3200 100 Luminous Efficacy
Luminous efficacy is a measure of how well a light source produces visible light, watts out versus watts in, measured in lumens per watt. In other words it is a measurement that indicates the ability of a light source to emit visible light using a given amount of power. It is a ratio of the visible energy to the power that goes into the bulb.FILM LIGHT TYPES
Consumer light types
Tungsten Lights
Light interiors and match domestic places or office locations. Daylight.Advantages of Tungsten Lights
Almost perfect color rendition
Low cost
Does not use mercury like CFLs (fluorescent) or mercury vapor lights
Better color temperature than standard tungsten
Longer life than a conventional incandescent
Instant on to full brightness, no warm-up time, and it is dimmableDisadvantages of Tungsten Lights
Extremely hot
High power requirement
The lamp is sensitive to oils and cannot be touched
The bulb is capable of blowing and sending hot glass shards outward. A screen or layer of glass on the outside of the lamp can protect users.Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide lights
HMI’s are used when high output is required. They are also used to recreate sun shining through windows or to fake additional sun while shooting exteriors. HMIs can light huge areas at once.Advantages of HMI lights
High light output
Higher efficiency
High color temperatureDisadvantages of HMI lights:
High cost
High power requirement
Dims only to about 50%
the color temperature increases with dimming
HMI bulbs will explode is dropped and release toxic chemicalsFluorescent
Fluorescent film lighting is achieved by laying multiple tubes next to each other, combining as many as you want for the desired brightness. The good news is you can choose your bulbs to either be warm or cool depending on the scenario you’re shooting. You want to get these bulbs close to the subject because they’re not great at opening up spaces. Fluorescent lighting is used to light interiors and is more compact and cooler than tungsten or HMI lighting.Advantages of Fluorescent lights
High efficiency
Low power requirement
Low cost
Long lamp life
Cool
Capable of soft even lighting over a large area
LightweightDisadvantages of Fluorescent lights
Flicker
High CRI
Domestic tubes have low CRI & poor color rendition.LED
LED’s are more and more common on film sets. You can use batteries to power them. That makes them portable and sleek – no messy cabled needed. You can rig your own panels of LED lights to fit any space necessary as well. LED’s can also power Fresnel style lamp heads such as the Arri L-series.Advantages of LED light
Soft, even lighting
Pure light without UV-artifacts
High efficiency
Low power consumption, can be battery powered
Excellent dimming by means of pulse width modulation control
Long lifespan
Environmentally friendly
Insensitive to shock
No risk of explosionDisadvantages of LED light
High cost.
LED’s are currently still expensive for their total light output -
Photography basics: Camera Aspect Ratio, Sensor Size and Depth of Field – resolutions
Read more: Photography basics: Camera Aspect Ratio, Sensor Size and Depth of Field – resolutionshttp://www.shutterangle.com/2012/cinematic-look-aspect-ratio-sensor-size-depth-of-field/
http://www.shutterangle.com/2012/film-video-aspect-ratio-artistic-choice/
DESIGN
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The 7 key elements of brand identity design + 10 corporate identity examples
Read more: The 7 key elements of brand identity design + 10 corporate identity exampleswww.lucidpress.com/blog/the-7-key-elements-of-brand-identity-design
1. Clear brand purpose and positioning
2. Thorough market research
3. Likable brand personality
4. Memorable logo
5. Attractive color palette
6. Professional typography
7. On-brand supporting graphics
COLOR
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Photography basics: Why Use a (MacBeth) Color Chart?
Read more: Photography basics: Why Use a (MacBeth) Color Chart?Start here: https://www.pixelsham.com/2013/05/09/gretagmacbeth-color-checker-numeric-values/
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-color-checker-tool/
In LightRoom
in Final Cut
in Nuke
Note: In Foundry’s Nuke, the software will map 18% gray to whatever your center f/stop is set to in the viewer settings (f/8 by default… change that to EV by following the instructions below).
You can experiment with this by attaching an Exposure node to a Constant set to 0.18, setting your viewer read-out to Spotmeter, and adjusting the stops in the node up and down. You will see that a full stop up or down will give you the respective next value on the aperture scale (f8, f11, f16 etc.).One stop doubles or halves the amount or light that hits the filmback/ccd, so everything works in powers of 2.
So starting with 0.18 in your constant, you will see that raising it by a stop will give you .36 as a floating point number (in linear space), while your f/stop will be f/11 and so on.If you set your center stop to 0 (see below) you will get a relative readout in EVs, where EV 0 again equals 18% constant gray.
In other words. Setting the center f-stop to 0 means that in a neutral plate, the middle gray in the macbeth chart will equal to exposure value 0. EV 0 corresponds to an exposure time of 1 sec and an aperture of f/1.0.
This will set the sun usually around EV12-17 and the sky EV1-4 , depending on cloud coverage.
To switch Foundry’s Nuke’s SpotMeter to return the EV of an image, click on the main viewport, and then press s, this opens the viewer’s properties. Now set the center f-stop to 0 in there. And the SpotMeter in the viewport will change from aperture and fstops to EV.
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What causes color
Read more: What causes colorwww.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/5.html
Water itself has an intrinsic blue color that is a result of its molecular structure and its behavior.
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OLED vs QLED – What TV is better?
Read more: OLED vs QLED – What TV is better?
Supported by LG, Philips, Panasonic and Sony sell the OLED system TVs.
OLED stands for “organic light emitting diode.”
It is a fundamentally different technology from LCD, the major type of TV today.
OLED is “emissive,” meaning the pixels emit their own light.Samsung is branding its best TVs with a new acronym: “QLED”
QLED (according to Samsung) stands for “quantum dot LED TV.”
It is a variation of the common LED LCD, adding a quantum dot film to the LCD “sandwich.”
QLED, like LCD, is, in its current form, “transmissive” and relies on an LED backlight.OLED is the only technology capable of absolute blacks and extremely bright whites on a per-pixel basis. LCD definitely can’t do that, and even the vaunted, beloved, dearly departed plasma couldn’t do absolute blacks.
QLED, as an improvement over OLED, significantly improves the picture quality. QLED can produce an even wider range of colors than OLED, which says something about this new tech. QLED is also known to produce up to 40% higher luminance efficiency than OLED technology. Further, many tests conclude that QLED is far more efficient in terms of power consumption than its predecessor, OLED.
When analyzing TVs color, it may be beneficial to consider at least 3 elements:
“Color Depth”, “Color Gamut”, and “Dynamic Range”.Color Depth (or “Bit-Depth”, e.g. 8-bit, 10-bit, 12-bit) determines how many distinct color variations (tones/shades) can be viewed on a given display.
Color Gamut (e.g. WCG) determines which specific colors can be displayed from a given “Color Space” (Rec.709, Rec.2020, DCI-P3) (i.e. the color range).
Dynamic Range (SDR, HDR) determines the luminosity range of a specific color – from its darkest shade (or tone) to its brightest.
The overall brightness range of a color will be determined by a display’s “contrast ratio”, that is, the ratio of luminance between the darkest black that can be produced and the brightest white.
Color Volume is the “Color Gamut” + the “Dynamic/Luminosity Range”.
A TV’s Color Volume will not only determine which specific colors can be displayed (the color range) but also that color’s luminosity range, which will have an affect on its “brightness”, and “colorfulness” (intensity and saturation).The better the colour volume in a TV, the closer to life the colours appear.
QLED TV can express nearly all of the colours in the DCI-P3 colour space, and of those colours, express 100% of the colour volume, thereby producing an incredible range of colours.
With OLED TV, when the image is too bright, the percentage of the colours in the colour volume produced by the TV drops significantly. The colours get washed out and can only express around 70% colour volume, making the picture quality drop too.
Note. OLED TV uses organic material, so it may lose colour expression as it ages.
Resources for more reading and comparison below
www.avsforum.com/forum/166-lcd-flat-panel-displays/2812161-what-color-volume.html
www.newtechnologytv.com/qled-vs-oled/
news.samsung.com/za/qled-tv-vs-oled-tv
www.cnet.com/news/qled-vs-oled-samsungs-tv-tech-and-lgs-tv-tech-are-not-the-same/
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What is a Gamut or Color Space and why do I need to know about CIE
Read more: What is a Gamut or Color Space and why do I need to know about CIE
http://www.xdcam-user.com/2014/05/what-is-a-gamut-or-color-space-and-why-do-i-need-to-know-about-it/
In video terms gamut is normally related to as the full range of colours and brightness that can be either captured or displayed.
Generally speaking all color gamuts recommendations are trying to define a reasonable level of color representation based on available technology and hardware. REC-601 represents the old TVs. REC-709 is currently the most distributed solution. P3 is mainly available in movie theaters and is now being adopted in some of the best new 4K HDR TVs. Rec2020 (a wider space than P3 that improves on visibke color representation) and ACES (the full coverage of visible color) are other common standards which see major hardware development these days.
To compare and visualize different solution (across video and printing solutions), most developers use the CIE color model chart as a reference.
The CIE color model is a color space model created by the International Commission on Illumination known as the Commission Internationale de l’Elcairage (CIE) in 1931. It is also known as the CIE XYZ color space or the CIE 1931 XYZ color space.
This chart represents the first defined quantitative link between distributions of wavelengths in the electromagnetic visible spectrum, and physiologically perceived colors in human color vision. Or basically, the range of color a typical human eye can perceive through visible light.
Note that while the human perception is quite wide, and generally speaking biased towards greens (we are apes after all), the amount of colors available through nature, generated through light reflection, tend to be a much smaller section. This is defined by the Pointer’s Chart.
In short. Color gamut is a representation of color coverage, used to describe data stored in images against available hardware and viewer technologies.
Camera color encoding from
https://www.slideshare.net/hpduiker/acescg-a-common-color-encoding-for-visual-effects-applications
CIE 1976
http://bernardsmith.eu/computatrum/scan_and_restore_archive_and_print/scanning/
https://store.yujiintl.com/blogs/high-cri-led/understanding-cie1931-and-cie-1976
The CIE 1931 standard has been replaced by a CIE 1976 standard. Below we can see the significance of this.
People have observed that the biggest issue with CIE 1931 is the lack of uniformity with chromaticity, the three dimension color space in rectangular coordinates is not visually uniformed.
The CIE 1976 (also called CIELUV) was created by the CIE in 1976. It was put forward in an attempt to provide a more uniform color spacing than CIE 1931 for colors at approximately the same luminance
The CIE 1976 standard colour space is more linear and variations in perceived colour between different people has also been reduced. The disproportionately large green-turquoise area in CIE 1931, which cannot be generated with existing computer screens, has been reduced.
If we move from CIE 1931 to the CIE 1976 standard colour space we can see that the improvements made in the gamut for the “new” iPad screen (as compared to the “old” iPad 2) are more evident in the CIE 1976 colour space than in the CIE 1931 colour space, particularly in the blues from aqua to deep blue.
https://dot-color.com/2012/08/14/color-space-confusion/
Despite its age, CIE 1931, named for the year of its adoption, remains a well-worn and familiar shorthand throughout the display industry. CIE 1931 is the primary language of customers. When a customer says that their current display “can do 72% of NTSC,” they implicitly mean 72% of NTSC 1953 color gamut as mapped against CIE 1931.
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THOMAS MANSENCAL – The Apparent Simplicity of RGB Rendering
Read more: THOMAS MANSENCAL – The Apparent Simplicity of RGB Rendering
https://thomasmansencal.substack.com/p/the-apparent-simplicity-of-rgb-rendering
The primary goal of physically-based rendering (PBR) is to create a simulation that accurately reproduces the imaging process of electro-magnetic spectrum radiation incident to an observer. This simulation should be indistinguishable from reality for a similar observer.
Because a camera is not sensitive to incident light the same way than a human observer, the images it captures are transformed to be colorimetric. A project might require infrared imaging simulation, a portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum that is invisible to us. Radically different observers might image the same scene but the act of observing does not change the intrinsic properties of the objects being imaged. Consequently, the physical modelling of the virtual scene should be independent of the observer.
LIGHTING
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9 Best Hacks to Make a Cinematic Video with Any Camera
Read more: 9 Best Hacks to Make a Cinematic Video with Any Camerahttps://www.flexclip.com/learn/cinematic-video.html
- Frame Your Shots to Create Depth
- Create Shallow Depth of Field
- Avoid Shaky Footage and Use Flexible Camera Movements
- Properly Use Slow Motion
- Use Cinematic Lighting Techniques
- Apply Color Grading
- Use Cinematic Music and SFX
- Add Cinematic Fonts and Text Effects
- Create the Cinematic Bar at the Top and the Bottom
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Composition – 5 tips for creating perfect cinematic lighting and making your work look stunning
Read more: Composition – 5 tips for creating perfect cinematic lighting and making your work look stunning
http://www.diyphotography.net/5-tips-creating-perfect-cinematic-lighting-making-work-look-stunning/
1. Learn the rules of lighting
2. Learn when to break the rules
3. Make your key light larger
4. Reverse keying
5. Always be backlighting
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HDRI shooting and editing by Xuan Prada and Greg Zaal
Read more: HDRI shooting and editing by Xuan Prada and Greg Zaalwww.xuanprada.com/blog/2014/11/3/hdri-shooting
http://blog.gregzaal.com/2016/03/16/make-your-own-hdri/
http://blog.hdrihaven.com/how-to-create-high-quality-hdri/
Shooting checklist
- Full coverage of the scene (fish-eye shots)
- Backplates for look-development (including ground or floor)
- Macbeth chart for white balance
- Grey ball for lighting calibration
- Chrome ball for lighting orientation
- Basic scene measurements
- Material samples
- Individual HDR artificial lighting sources if required
Methodology
- Plant the tripod where the action happens, stabilise it and level it
- Set manual focus
- Set white balance
- Set ISO
- Set raw+jpg
- Set apperture
- Metering exposure
- Set neutral exposure
- Read histogram and adjust neutral exposure if necessary
- Shot slate (operator name, location, date, time, project code name, etc)
- Set auto bracketing
- Shot 5 to 7 exposures with 3 stops difference covering the whole environment
- Place the aromatic kit where the tripod was placed, and take 3 exposures. Keep half of the grey sphere hit by the sun and half in shade.
- Place the Macbeth chart 1m away from tripod on the floor and take 3 exposures
- Take backplates and ground/floor texture references
- Shoot reference materials
- Write down measurements of the scene, specially if you are shooting interiors.
- If shooting artificial lights take HDR samples of each individual lighting source.
Exposures starting point
- Day light sun visible ISO 100 F22
- Day light sun hidden ISO 100 F16
- Cloudy ISO 320 F16
- Sunrise/Sunset ISO 100 F11
- Interior well lit ISO 320 F16
- Interior ambient bright ISO 320 F10
- Interior bad light ISO 640 F10
- Interior ambient dark ISO 640 F8
- Low light situation ISO 640 F5
NOTE: The goal is to clean the initial individual brackets before or at merging time as much as possible.
This means:- keeping original shooting metadata
- de-fringing
- removing aberration (through camera lens data or automatically)
- at 32 bit
- in ACEScg (or ACES) wherever possible
Here are the tips for using the chromatic ball in VFX projects, written in English:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bellrodrigo_here-are-the-tips-for-using-the-chromatic-activity-7200950595438940160-AGBpTips for Using the Chromatic Ball in VFX Projects**
The chromatic ball is an invaluable tool in VFX work, helping to capture lighting and reflection data crucial for integrating CGI elements seamlessly. Here are some tips to maximize its effectiveness:
1. **Positioning**:
– Place the chromatic ball in the same lighting conditions as the main subject. Ensure it is visible in the camera frame but not obstructing the main action.
– Ideally, place the ball where the CGI elements will be integrated to match the lighting and reflections accurately.2. **Recording Reference Footage**:
– Capture reference footage of the chromatic ball at the beginning and end of each scene or lighting setup. This ensures you have consistent lighting data for the entire shoot.3. **Consistent Angles**:
– Use consistent camera angles and heights when recording the chromatic ball. This helps in comparing and matching lighting setups across different shots.4. **Combine with a Gray Ball**:
– Use a gray ball alongside the chromatic ball. The gray ball provides a neutral reference for exposure and color balance, complementing the chromatic ball’s reflection data.5. **Marking Positions**:
– Mark the position of the chromatic ball on the set to ensure consistency when shooting multiple takes or different camera angles.6. **Lighting Analysis**:
– Analyze the chromatic ball footage to understand the light sources, intensity, direction, and color temperature. This information is crucial for creating realistic CGI lighting and shadows.7. **Reflection Analysis**:
– Use the chromatic ball to capture the environment’s reflections. This helps in accurately reflecting the CGI elements within the same scene, making them blend seamlessly.8. **Use HDRI**:
– Capture High Dynamic Range Imagery (HDRI) of the chromatic ball. HDRI provides detailed lighting information and can be used to light CGI scenes with greater realism.9. **Communication with VFX Team**:
– Ensure that the VFX team is aware of the chromatic ball’s data and how it was captured. Clear communication ensures that the data is used effectively in post-production.10. **Post-Production Adjustments**:
– In post-production, use the chromatic ball data to adjust the CGI elements’ lighting and reflections. This ensures that the final output is visually cohesive and realistic.
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