Capturing In (DV) Camera or leave it to Post???

[wburke]

i love capturing as much of the final look in camera as possible , but when it comes to DV cams is this the best approach??

with some dv cams alot of the image can be manipulated in camera, heres an example i found..

the following is quoted from Mr Eric Gustavo Petersen (a great music video DP) and he was shooting on a Panasonic SDX900 Camera..

you can set-up some great looks in camera by creatively using filters, white-balance, gain, shutter speed, and the matrix and/or color correction features of the camera. For the Stone & Ivy music video, I spent several hours the night before setting up the camera for my use and working on the "look". For the most part we used two looks: a green/cyan look for the mannequin factory and a slightly desaturated and higher contrast image for the rest. For the green/cyan look, I started by white balancing to a 1/2 minus green gel over the gray card. This gave me the green I wanted. Then I went into the controls and changed the gamma, pedestal, and knee. What I wanted is lots of highlight information with slightly crushed blacks and med-tones. For the other look, I pulled back the saturation of the colors and only crushed the blacks a bit. We also shot with a 1/250 shutter and for one of the performance shots we used 1/1000. Then each setup was saved to a SD memory card for recall while on set.


..so is this the best approach, compared to say getting a Clean image; ie: with No Manipulation of the actual Camera Settings,
(i am not saying the lighting is not fancy/bad ass!)


will

 

[wburke]

!! i meant bad a s s as in good lighting

 

[David Mullen ASC]

There's no definitive answer here,and it also depends on the tools you'll have in post production.

I would say that with the more compressed recording formats like DV (or HDCAM!), the best approach is to get half the look in-camera and use post just to tweak the final look, because there are limits to how far in some directions you can push a neutral "flat" image in post for some extreme look and not pick up artifacts. So you should go into post with the look halfway "baked in" to the original, knowing you can finish the look in post.

For example, when doing a blue-ish day-for-night effect, I may filter the camera for a partially blue look and underexpose a little for a dark look, but I don't want to make the image recorded TOO blue and TOO dark because then I'd have little information in post to make adjustments.

Something like shutter-speed effects are probably better done in camera.