E03 - Lighting and Exposure Tips - UE 5 Virtual Production for Indie Filmmakers & Content Creators

In this episode of Indie Mastering VP Virtual Production Supervisor Ian Fursa takes you through the basics of Camera Exposure and Lighting while filming with a Projector or Led Wall as a background to do In-Camera VFX Virtual Production.
Link to UE Plugin: www.vp-toolkit.com/plugin
If you need help with an ICVFX Virtual Production please contact us at: www.vp-toolkit.com
Thank you and hope this was helpful!

[@sinanarts]

Lighting! Highly under estimated till the point when one steps up to be a pro like content creator. This 7 minutes is a great resource and a golden startup key to achieve realism effect on any given shot. Thank you Ian! If I were to give any advice to an enthusiast about recreating reality and convincing with VP I'd say learn lighting and material physics as a general concept. Where to start.? Start understanding the Nature of light and start from the Sun and its interaction with our planet and daily lives of ours. Thank you Ian! you are a priceless source of information in this field.

[@dcstudio309]

Why would you recommend bumping up the LED brightness and lowering it down with an ND? In this case wouldn’t you need more light for your talent to match the general exposure of the LED environment?

[@yang5616]

I have the same doubts.

[@vptoolkit]

@@dcstudio309 Of course this is always a balance but I’ll explain! When your camera is exposing for lower light levels it is actually introducing more ambient light into the sensor, which helps DP’s without having to use as much fill and creates need for negative fill to control contrast on talent (which wasn’t really a thing before high ISO camera’s and low stops) The issue is that the more you open up the camera’s exposure the more light just bouncing around the room now lifts the shadows on the led wall and removes dynamic range from it’s output. So basically the low exposure brings in uncontrollable spill onto the wall and lifts those shadows. By bringing that exposure range up a bit you lift your exposure above basic ambient light levels and the light falls off faster and gives better contrast ratios. Yes you will have to increase the brightness (and sometimes the fill) of your talent/prop lights but the spill from those lights will have less of an effect on the contrast ratios of the led wall. It’s a balance! I’ve found in most cases when working with a DP our team likes to start with the LED wall 90% or so (depending on the brightness of your panel) and then the DP will start to light there and likely ask for the wall to be brought down slightly, where if you start with the wall dark your DP will light to those low levels and you will be trapped dealing with your shadows of your environment being filled in with uncontrollable ambient spill! (Plus political nightmare) Hope that helps. ND .3 or .6 might be all you need. This also allows for lowering the t/f stop without over exposing. In this video I switch to showing my background as solid black and you can see that even when “black” its still not dark enough to show to camera as true shadows/black levels, this is because of the high ISO and low T Stop, If I was able to make the background brighter, lights brighter (with the same lighting control) and then exposure for that it would drop that level lower just because the lights fall off faster at that brightness.