High contrast/low key lighting from DSLR to Scarlett

[M.Sweeney]

Hello Red folk,

I am a recent inductee to the Red family. I have been hired to shoot a high contrast film, and coming from the DSLR environment, I found that my first day on the Scarlett was spent under-exposing (since i was used to a WYSIWYG kind of lighting scenario - full frame sensors have their advantages.

How would you light a high contrast scene with the immense HDR (not HDRx, but regular mode) of the Red? I have found that when I view my footage in Cine-x, I am blown away with the fact that myself and the crew lit to the eye and our meters, but the Scarlett makes the shot look WELL li, and almost over lit. Do you have any suggestions on how I might achieve that high contrast look with the Scarlett?

...and yes, I did search the forums, in fact, found an amazing thread on exposure here: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?70891-Best-Practices-Obtaining-Proper-Exposure-Share-your-methods-please

....but I want to pick your brain. We all gotta start somewhere in Red land, so any help would be great!


Thank you in advance!

[Joseph Coleman]

Red built their cameras to give you the most options in post. The RAW image will always have very little contrast especially when viewed with RedLogFilm gamma curve. If you view your footage with the RedGamma3 gamma curve you will get the most contrasty out of the box image. If I were shooting something that was meant to be high contrast I would go into the camera settings (I own a scarlet not a Red One so I'm not sure if they are the same) Settings > Look > Curves, and adjust the black point and Toe until I got the look I was going for. I would also make sure that I had a preset button that I could easily hit to show RAW view because in my opinion that is the best way to know how well I'm exposing the sensor.