Stoney
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May 12, 2006, 2:34 PM
Post #3 of 5
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Re: [Corsair] FX1 for Dance Recital
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I've shot a lot of dance recitals but not with the FX-1 yet. For your first one, letting the camera do the work may be a good way to go, but this is what I usually do:
1. White Balance: Manually balance on stage with the main stage lights on. If I can't do that do to restrictions on getting to the stage or something like that, then I use the indoor white balance button. (This will give you consistent color levels that can be tweaked in post if needed. If you let the camera do an automatic reading you can run into problems with ambient light and the different color lights over saturating your video)
2. Run the shutter at 1/60 and run the iris manually. In my experience if you run automatic iris, it will blow out faces when you go wide when things like spots are used. Example: If you have a full stage of dancers, but the one centered has a spot light on them, if you zoom in for a tight shot of that dancer she or he will look great. But if when you go wide to show the whole stage, the spotted dancer will be blown out to compensate for the rest of the lighting. If you manually adjust the iris you can find that sweet spot where you can see the spotted dancer and see the rest of the stage.
3. Gain. I usually end up running around 6 or 9db gain. Why? It gives me range in the iris to be able to adjust to the different lighting situations. Some people will say to run without gain and pump it up in post. Either way, you will be inducing some form of electronic gain. I've had very good luck and I'm used to running the iris manually. By the way, I read a tip once that the videographer suggested to help lessen grain when using the gain on camera, white balance with the gain already on instead of with it off. I'm not really sure if it helps, but I do know that it doesn't hurt.
4. When all else fails. Do what you feel most comfortable doing.
I currently shoot recitals with a DVC80. At my day job I have a Z1u, so I do have experience with that camera. If I were to use the Z1u, would run it exactly like I posted above.
Good luck,
Stoney
LE 6.1, DVC-80, GL-1 & TRV900
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