My friend and I will be filming a lot of snowboarding this year and I was wondering if there are any good tutorials/tips on getting real good quality video. Like so the snow isn't just plain white but all of the shadows are clear. My friend has a pretty nice camera right now, and he said he would have to use the manual settings to get a good picture, but does anyone know a site that has some good info on this?
Here's an example film quality that we'd like to get close to. http://naptimefilms.com/ Two words....
Manual Control.
I hope your camera allows manual control. The auto controls of most cameras will see the white snow and iris way down, leaving the subjects as masses of shadows. With you in control you can set the iris to expose correctly for the subject, and not the snow. But be careful, you don't want to totally 'blow out' the highlights in the snow, as once highlights are blown out, you can't recover them. The problem of course, is getting both the subject, and the snow exposed correctly. If you need to, I'd underexpose the subjects maybe a stop or half a stop, you can tweak it in post if it is underexposed, but once you loose the highlights to pure white, there is nothing there to recover.
alaska is right, you need manual controls or your camera will not capture the snow correctly. underexposure is better than over exposure, and try to get angles that dont point directly into the sun, so you wont get as much reflected light from the sun off the snow
i'll come in and third that with the manual control - dont forget white balancing - with white as a min colour if you white balance on an off gray it will help with finding better tonal range on the snow.
Anyone have specific tutorials/tips on what settings to change? My friend and I are both new to this so it would help if someone had some good info on what kinds of settings to change to get what picture. Thanks for everyone's input so far.
If you are new to this then the biggest tip i can give you is to not expect the best results. Dint take that in a bad way. The chances are that by playing around with the camera, with angles and stuff you will get some great stuff.
Alot of the learning process is doing. Trial and error. Play around with your cameras and your angles and see what works. take notes of what does and what deosnt but most of all - enjoy it and have fun with it. the last thing you want is for it to become a chore.
| irishmark wrote: |
If you are new to this then the biggest tip i can give you is to not expect the best results. Dint take that in a bad way. The chances are that by playing around with the camera, with angles and stuff you will get some great stuff.
Alot of the learning process is doing. Trial and error. Play around with your cameras and your angles and see what works. take notes of what does and what deosnt but most of all - enjoy it and have fun with it. the last thing you want is for it to become a chore. |
Ha, alright I guess we'll just go with that. Of course we won't get the best results but I hope we can get something that looks better than most of the home-made snowboard videos on youtube.Thats a great attitude. You sound like you have a passion to do well and this will really work in your favour. Be patient with it aswell and you will see some great results.
One of the other things to remember iis colour correction in the edit. So many people make videos and dont bother with this. Even a simple tweak of the 'brightness & contrast' or the 'colour curves' makes a dramatic diffrence.
