Getting exposure right

Hi all,

I recently switched cameras (Panasonic G85) and now have access to zebra stripes showing over exposed areas. In many outdoor scenes with trees and sky etc, the sky often has zebra stripes. If I under expose, I feel the footage is rather dark and it is difficult to get a good exposure in FCP. It's not so dark as to be unusable and perhaps looks like an aesthetic choice; but still . . .

Should I just allow highlights to be blown in the camera and ignore the zebra? What do most people do?

Cheers

Waddo

Check your zebra bar settings. I don’t know the G85 specifically, but usually it’s possible to set a percentage number to your zebra stripes, which controls the point at which they appear. Two common settings are 75% and 100%. Some cameras allow you to have two sets of different colour zebras in the view finder simultaneously.

If zebras are regularly appearing in your skies your bars maybe set to 75%. This is a good setting to judge skin exposure. As a very general rule, your exposure is good if 75% zebras are just beginning to appear on faces. A bright sky will show zebras too, but won’t necessarily be blown out.

Anything showing zebras when set to 100% IS overexposed.

A good policy is to use 75% zebras, keep your eye on exposing faces properly, and let everything else take care of itself. A bit of blown-out sky occasionally isn’t usually a problem.

Hope this helps

Thanks very much. That was a big help. Also, I think I set it at 70% so I will change it.

Also, a good ND filter helps a lot, too.

waddo wrote: …Should I just allow highlights to be blown in the camera and ignore the zebra?…

That is first of all an artistically decision, isn't it?

blown-out parts in frame show no detail… and no CSI-Miami tech on earth can bring back those.

So, that's where the LOG-curves come to help… they squeeze Dynamic Range into a much narrower = 'saver' range, clipping is much more avoided… and a 75% zebra tells you in-camera, where clipping happens. The in-cam Histogram tells you too…

A plain, no-detail white sky… probably. It gets 'ugly' when highlights in subject (clothing, eyes, a fat-glare forehead) show zero detail.

zebra for 'live'-recordings, histogram for 'staged' contents… and, test your cams several LOG profiles… that 'artificial DR-enhancement' can get tricky when you do a lot of grading…

Unless the viewer is specifically supposed to be looking at the sky for hot air balloons or UFOs, having blown out sky shouldn't be a concern. Most likely you'd rather people be looking at other areas in the frame. Everyone knows what's supposed to be there so they'll fill in the missing details of clouds and birds and color from memory. That's what I do when I see there's nothing there. I expose for what I want people to notice, not what I don't.

VTCmedia wrote: … Everyone knows what's supposed to be….

That is a very steep thesis, I'd say! :lol:
Aside you kill any chance to 'fix it in post' allowing clipping, the overall impression of a pic is very different, as an example:



(and no, this video is not about the blue Bavarian sky… )
I'm old enough to remember all those gradient filters we used on our analogue cameras, just to get the sky right…

I'm with you about 'leading the audiences attention' … by framing, exposure, or shallow DoF for instance, … but 'the audience will fill the gap'? … in a wrong/over exposure pic? And the watchers can probably not put the finger on/name it, but are surprisingly well in identifying flaws…

my 5¢…

Blown out skies are not natural for people to look at, they will notice, they DO in fact get distracted. People do NOT fill in missing detail in a visual image like that. It is not something to just be ignored. Wow, that's really not responsible filmmaking.