CINEMATIC SHOOTERS GUIDE: Part 1 (Cinematic Shooting Tips & Monitors)

What's going on guys, I'm very excited about this today. This is the first episode of my cinematographer series that I'm doing. I'm trying to take all of the information in my brain as a director in DP and pass it along to you guys in very simplified terms. It's going to be a series I'm going to be doing for a while this year, maybe this month, maybe for the rest of the year, maybe whenever I want to release them. But this is the first video and if you want to get to the information, the tips and tricks that I'm talking about today, then go to this point in the video. I really hate YouTube videos where they just talk forever and then you have to keep skipping guessing where they're going to talk about the tip. But I want to give you guys a little shortcut for that. But for my friends and whoever wants to hang out with me for the next little while, I'm just going to say happy new year. Hope you had a good Christmas. I hope you had a chill break. I know I did. I found my Dreamcast. This is not an advertisement. I dug this up this Christmas. And look at this CD-ROM. Love it. I played this all break way too much. I got addicted. Powerstone 2 is like my favorite game of all time or Virtua Tennis, which I had there. I don't even like tennis, but that game is amazing. I played it nonstop. You can ask my wife. I was like, we get up at like four in the morning to play it. I just don't play video games anymore, but found my Dreamcast and decided to get back into it. Let's get into things today. I want to talk about mainly false colors and shooting with LUTs. And that's because when you're lighting a scene like here in this room, you typically, now this is a principle. It's not always the case, but you typically want your subject, the thing that your person is supposed to be looking at it. So in this case, me, you want it to be the brightest thing in the scene or one of the brightest things so that people's eyes are drawn to it. And so that you have enough light to color correct that properly. So in this scene, I have me the brightest, the background's darker. Cause like, look at this, if I change the lighting here, suddenly you're looking at this light on the back because it is the brightest thing. But if I bring my light back up here, you're looking at me again, because I'm the brightest thing. So you, as a cinematographer, you're trying to control the light so that your subject is the brightest thing in the scene, or at least that the light is directing our eyes towards that subject. Now there's two ways to monitor this onset. That's with LUTs. It's a great way to see what your final color correct is going to look like. And I would say almost more importantly is with false colors or histogram. Now I can talk about histograms in another video, but I'm just going to talk about false colors right now. Cause I find them really easy to read and really quick to read. Now what is false colors? What am I actually talking about? Well, first you need to understand IRE. IRE is the luminance value of a video signal of a video image. So zero IRE is black. It's your shadows. There's no light hitting the sensor there, but 100 IRE is the maximum amount of light that your sensor can take. It's, it's actually what's usually clipped. What's like a bright window that's blown out. Or if you're shooting the sun, it would be a hundred IRE. This is the levels of exposure that are hitting your sensor. And what false colors does is it takes your image and overlays a color diagram of what the exposures are. And so each color coordinates with a level of IRE. So for example, if green is 60% IRE, then you look to anywhere in the image that's green and know, Oh, it's 60% of the value. But where if orange is clipping, if that is a hundred IRE, then you'll know, okay, that area is clipping. And so for me, when I'm on set, I get a monitor like my BM5 monitor here and I quickly toggle the, Oh, where is it? There we are. I quickly toggle on and off the false colors because then I can quickly look at the image and see is for one is my skin or is my subject, the brightest thing in the scene. And for two is anything clipping that I didn't notice in the image. Now, when you're shooting your person, I typically like to set their skin tone, their skin color to about 70% IRE. This is just kind of the basic principle that works for me. I like, I like it for a color correct. Typically when I find when you start going to 80% IRE on the person's skin, that's when it starts clipping, when it's becoming difficult to get kind of the subtle detail, you want to protect the skin tones. That's the most important thing when you're color correcting. So when you turn on false colors on your monitor, you're able to quickly determine if the skin tone is at 70% IRE. So I'm just going to pause the video right here and put this false color overlay on the video. And you can see here with the diagram that gray equals 58 to 77 IRE. That's kind of the area that you want your skin tones to be. And if we look over at the image, my skin correlates to that it's in that gray area. So if this was on my monitor on set, I could quickly glance at this, which I actually did. I had this overlay on my BM5 monitor and I was able to quickly know that I am in the proper exposure. So that when I take my LUTs in Premiere, it's going to look good. It's going to be easy to color correct. And the skin tones will still have all the detail and there'll be the right luminance value. Now I'll say this, I just got this BM5 monitor recently. I love that I can toggle false colors on and off. I'll say this, that the false colors on this monitor leave a bit to be desired. They're accurate, but it's such a wide range between 78 and 58% that I wish there was some more subtlety in their colors. The small HD false colors, I really like these because they show more of a gradient. Good thing though is false colors is just a software update. So I hope Portkeys updates that false colors because right now it leaves some room to be improved. But actually this monitor is pretty powerful. You can actually get a Bluetooth module and I could be controlling a lot of the settings on my camera with this, especially for Blackmagic cameras. This monitor does wonders that way and I like it. It lasts for a while. It's rugged. It has false colors and it has the ability to add LUTs. It's over four times brighter than my 502 that I'm currently using. And I think it's like a quarter of the price that I paid back when I bought that small HD. So I'm actually going to talk to you about LUTs now using them on the monitors. But first I hate pot lighting. I need to change the lighting right now. You can see I always have to stick out my hand and look at it on the back LCD to know what my image is going to look like because I'm using a Sony, which still the Sony has decided never to do flip LCDs. One day, Sony, you will. I couldn't do a video about cinematography and then just have bad household lighting. It was going to bother me the entire time. And this is one thing if you've watched my other videos, I always say the first thing you do when you're shooting in a house is turn off all the house lighting because house lights suck. Like look at that light back there. I'll never turn that light on because it is so hideous. I wish I could just light my whole house with film lights, which, you know, I kind of do. But anyways, let's talk about LUTs. I'm getting back to talking about using LUTs on set. And you know, LUTs are great in post-production, but they're for me the most powerful thing when I'm on set because I want to know what my image is going to look like for the color grade. So I'm constantly when I'm on set filming and doing cinematography, I'm constantly flipping between the S-log on my Sony or the log C when I'm on an Alexa or whatever the camera shooting, whatever the flat profile is. I'm constantly toggling between that and my LUT because I want to know what the camera is actually recording. But then I really want to know what it's going to look like for the color grade. So this is another reason why you want to have a monitor on set so you can do this. And so I'll show you a bit of what that looks like on my monitors that I have here. This is a scene I'm shooting for my new film. Just going to get it started here. Look at this. I just got this matte box today. I'm very excited about this. It's the Basecamp from PolarPro. Really excited to get using this. Variable ND built in here makes the camera look like a real cinema camera. Anyways, let's press play. Just had to turn off the lights here. So what I'm constantly doing on set is I'm toggling the LUT on and off. So here's the LUT off. As you can see, it's very bright. But when I put the LUT on, it's much darker because this is the way I'm going to color correct it. Same with here with my 502. You can turn that off. Here's both of the LUTs off. You can see very light. It's our actor there. Just this is seen as him going to the computer. With the BM5 here, it's just one quick button to turn it on. So here's what it looks like with the LUT off. Here's what it looks like with the LUT on. And what's great with the BM5 is I can load dozens and dozens of LUTs onto that via USB key. On the 502, it just sits there on an SD card. And you can just see how much brighter the BM5 is. Now, I know there's a lot more cameras like the Blackmagics that allow you to do this much quicker in camera. But again, you're working off a small monitor. So I want a big monitor when I'm doing this. So constantly looking at what it's going to look like for the final color grade. And it gives me an idea, too, to know what's going to be the brightest in the scene. Because right now, this entire scene looks like it's bright. But if I add my LUT that I'm going to be working with in post, you can see it's much darker, but it's way more moody. Here's with the LUT off. Here's with the LUT on. Much prefer, obviously, with the LUT on. And if you're interested in these LUTs, maybe I'll release some of them. I don't know. They're just ones that I've created over the years on my films. But I have to shoot with LUTs when I'm on set. Gives me an idea of what we're going to be doing in the final color grade. So I know I'm talking about things that are fairly expensive, like monitors. Although, like I was saying, the Portkeys here is $500. I bought my 502, the whole package for it, for like $2,000 four years ago. So much more affordable and much brighter. But I know SmallHD has released brighter monitors since. But all that to say, I love having a monitor on set. And it's my most important tool as a cinematographer to see what the camera is getting and to understand what the film is going to look like for the final color grade. Because I don't want any surprises. I don't want to be passing along to the editor and being like, oh my gosh, that looked way different when you put the LUT on. I want to know that the way I was designing it on set is going to look good in post-production. Oh, by the way, if you're liking the music in this video, which you can probably barely hear right now, because it's so quiet, I'll bring it up. You can get a free trial for that. It's from actually musicbed.com. I love Musicbed. My film, like Rescate, pretty much all of the music was from Musicbed in that film. I use it for a lot of my films. You can get a free trial right now in my description below. You can click on that. They have amazing cinematic music. Check out Musicbed if you haven't already. They are awesome at what they do. So just to recap everything, you want to make sure you're shooting your skin tones around 70% IRE. And to determine that, you want to be looking at false colors or a histogram. Personally, I prefer false colors because it's just a quick way to look at the scene. That's if it is really good false colors. Some monitors have bad false colors in the sense that they're not really accurate to look at. So a histogram is better. What's really cool with the VM5 is it has so many different waveform options and they're all very detailed. But in the end, I just prefer my false colors because I can quickly look at what's happening in the scene. So for you as a cinematographer, again, make sure your subject is the brightest thing in the scene. But sometimes too, you want your subject silhouetted. You don't want them to be the brightest thing. And in a way that actually makes them the most defining thing in the scene, your eyes are still attracted to them because you've shot it a different way where everything else is bright, but your subject isn't. But for you as a cinematographer, you're trying to control the light in the scene so that your subject is standing out. So I hope these tips helped. Make sure to get a monitor, guys. I know it's a really expensive thing to have, but you won't regret it. You'll really enjoy using it. I never shoot without having a nice monitor on my camera. Of course, there's times when I'm on a gimbal and I'm just throwing the a7 III up and I can't use that. But if you're gonna buy a nice camera, you should have a monitor to see the beautiful images that are coming out of it. And the BM5 monitor they're showing you is relatively priced. It's kind of mid-range. It's about $500. It might seem like really expensive, but really good monitors run for $2,000, $3,000, $4,000. I remember the first monitor I ever bought for when I was filming on set was like $3,000. It was a TV logic monitor. They're great, but I think they're just way overpriced. You can get a lot of good images out of other monitors, especially like this BM5. I've been really satisfied with it so far, and I'll put a link to it below. But thanks for watching, guys. I'll be doing lots more of these cinematographer series videos. I hope you have enjoyed them, and I'll see you guys on the next one.