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LIGHTING FOR HD First off, lighting is not a symptom that needs to be cured; it is a craft that needs to be practiced. Every time a new media capture format is developed or promoted, the question as to how to light for it follows. Understanding how to light a scene when being captured to a chip is a bit different than lighting for a film format. This approach applies to filmmakers (video-makers), and still photographers who are now shooting on a digital format. Lighting for the chip takes a little bit of re-understanding lighting from what has been taught as the norm. Very few sales people behind the counter and even less lighting manufacturers really truly understand the lighting approach needed for High Definition formats. Sales people want to cling to what they learn from manufacturer ’s advertising especially when it comes to latitude and exposure range, which in many cases, are very misunderstood. When lighting for HD, it is important to preserve high light detail. Even if HD cameras have excessive latitude and 10 stops of exposure range, you are going to experience difficulty maintaining high light detail if you do not light a scene correctly. When you light a scene, whether it is indoors or outdoors, if you do not have detail in the bright areas when you shoot a scene, you will not have detail in the bright areas of that scene when you go to edit. Of course, if this is your intent then you are all set. If this isn ’t your intent, then you need to control the contrast levels with lighting before you shoot. One way to do this is to use a light meter as a way of referencing exposure levels in a scene. You may have heard or read that if you shoot video you don ’t need a light meter; the truth is it is called a light meter NOT a video meter. A light meter has nothing to do with the camera being used. Unlike zebras or a waveform monitor, a light meter will indicate how much over or under exposure a specific area is with-in a scene compared to the Key Light exposure. You can read more about the light meter further down in lighting tips, and there is a full chapter dedicated to using a light meter in our “Lighting For Video Film Style-DVD. ” Since the chip is made up of pixels, that are sharp and uniform in size and shape, they render detail of a scene with sharpness and high contrast. This sharpness effects detail of a subject and other objects within a scene. The pixel contrast is evident when a high light area meets a shadow area and the shadow line looks hard and sharp. It is also evident when the high light detail of a scene is totally blown out. I was recently hired to light a set for an inexperienced director who had just purchased a new HD camera. His approach was to light the talent for a lawyer TV spot with point blank, undiffused light which created hard shadows on the talent and on the background that created all kinds of problems that took hours to overcome. When I questioned him on what he was trying to achieve, he said he wanted a “Film Noir ” look! From Wikipedia: “Film noir ” is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize moral ambiguity and sexual motivation.

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