Best settings for taking video of a light show

February 1, 2021 6:05 AM

Noob question about white balance and what-not

I'm less a noob than I am just not a photographer/videographer; my experience is mostly composing a few decent shots when traveling. What I am is a musician who likes to make videos for his songs. And I'm having trouble googling this subject.

I'm making a video featuring this, and I basically know just enough to know how much I don't know. I played around with aperture/ISO/shutter speed and got a decent result, though I definitely will take any advice on those fronts too. But I don't know anything about white balance or really anything else that would yield more accurate (or even 'better than accurate'?) color/brightness/intensity/really everything. If anyone has guidance on any of it, I'd be grateful. This thing is so pleasing to the eye; I know my camera lens isn't the same as my eye's, but I'd love to do it something close to justice.

I'm shooting on an Alpha 6000 using a Sony 4/18-105 G OSS lens; it's the only one I have.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

posted by troywestfield to Technology (12 answers total)

Hey!

I'm an newb with cameras as well and I know very little. Hopefully someone smarter than both of us chimes in.

In case they don't, here's my suggestion

With flashing lights like this, it kind of hurts your eye to have an otherwise dark background. I recommend turning on a light nearby.

Second, your camera movements are a little distracting. One of the coolest things about this product is what it does to the walls around it. I would step back a bit, mount your camera on a tripod. Then, I would invest in a cheap turntable. Something like this would suffice: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1557452-REG/offex_ofx_493963_tr_electric_motorized_360_degree.html

That allows the viewer to see the same perspective without the shakey camera, and can allow you to perfectly adjust the settings on your camera without them changing regarding the distance to your camera!

hope that helps!
posted by bbqturtle at 7:54 AM on February 1, 2021

Response by poster: Thanks very much, turtle. I realize I should say a couple things here: That video isn't mine -- I think it's from the cube's website -- and I plan for the camera and the cube to be stationary for the entirety of the video. And while I might well find that you're right about the effect on the eye of a dark background, I definitely want to go for that first, at least; when watching this thing, I find the wall behind it/table underneath it distracting. The video I did take so far, I got the settings right to only feature the cube; it's just that the LEDs themselves aren't done justice, they look sort of weaksauce. If I have to, I can play with saturation in Motion (hell, just changing the lens's focus a bit seems to help saturate the colors), but at this stage I'm hoping for settings that'll get the lights/colors sort of richer, like they appear to the eye. (Apologies for sucking at the terminology.)
posted by troywestfield at 9:07 AM on February 1, 2021

Turn off the automatic white balance on your camera and set it manually to Daylight. Otherwise the colors are probably going to confuse the heck out of your camera's auto white balance and you'll get unwanted color shifts.

(if there's a light source other than the cube thing, you want to set the white balance to match that source. Daylight is usually what you want otherwise.)

You may find it useful to manually set the exposure, too, since the lights might similarly confuse your auto-exposure.
posted by neckro23 at 9:28 AM on February 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yeah, manually fixing the exposure is going to be key here -- otherwise your camera's auto setting will turn the aperture and/or shutter speed way down when the lights get bright, which will make the lights look dim and underwhelming.

You should manually set the white balance to a fixed setting as well for the same reason.

I don't have specific settings to suggest for these, but you can experiment! Fixed is the important part. If you post a video of what you've got so far here, maybe we can suggest ways to improve.
posted by mekily at 11:17 AM on February 1, 2021

Response by poster: Thanks very much. Will try the daylight setting. Aperture/shutter speed/ISO already all manual.

Here are a couple of videos I took for starters, with some variation between them in shutter speed and ISO, though they further confuse me more than they clarify anything; they both looked in focus but sort of wan in the viewfinder and monitor, but I now see that they're pretty well saturated but not as in focus as I thought. So I guess any advice is actually helpful. I can see where taking time to experiment with shutter speed and ISO will teach me a lot, but if there are also any best practices for shooting something like this ... Really appreciate the time and expertise.
posted by troywestfield at 11:41 AM on February 1, 2021

IMHO, put it on a tripod so you're stable, and just leave it alone. You can edit it in post-production. :D
posted by kschang at 1:01 PM on February 1, 2021

Both example videos look underexposed to me. That means you need a larger aperture (again, should be wide open), higher ISO, or a slower shutter speed.

Start with that! Then I recommend you tweak your background and see if that makes a difference.

Part of the cool part of the cube is the motion changing the internal repeated reflections. That's why I do recommend rotating the cube or something. An alternative would be a slow zoom in.
posted by bbqturtle at 1:49 PM on February 1, 2021

I think it looks great honestly -- if you can't find a different white balance setting that you're happier with, you can always bump up the saturation in post-processing.

One thing that strikes me is it looks quite underexposed -- way less exposed than the example video you posted first. The lights would look much more brilliant with a higher exposure.
posted by mekily at 1:50 PM on February 1, 2021

Response by poster: Thanks, all, I'll definitely explore that. I'm sure Apple Motion will let me sort of crop out everything that's not the cube so that the whole background is black; I was trying to see whether I might not have to, just do it in camera. But this is why I wanted to ask people who know what the hell they're talking about.
posted by troywestfield at 2:26 PM on February 1, 2021

You’re off to a good start!

Focus will be tricky with the aperture opened up all the way, as I imagine it is. This causes a rather thin slice of your scene to be in perfect focus. You may want to make a tradeoff by choosing a higher ISO so you can use a higher f-stop and thus get a deeper depth of field. The tradeoff here is that there will be more noise (graininess) at a higher ISO.

If you’re not super familiar with the factors that affect depth of field, I recommend using this tool on the PhotoPills website to experiment with different settings (I highly recommend their mobile app if you do much photography). Choose your camera model and focal length (how zoomed in/out the lens is) in the menus. In the last menu, choose DoF Near/Far Plane. Then look at the chart below to see how much will be in focus for a given f-stop and the distance your camera is from the cube.

So as an example, in that second video I’m guessing you are using a focal length of about 18mm and your camera is about three feet away from the cube with an f-stop of f/4. That means you can get everything between 33.39 and 39.05 inches away to be in focus. Play with the numbers to see how zooming in or moving the camera closer will reduce depth of field and choosing a higher f-stop will expand depth of field.

As long as you’re not moving the camera around as you shoot, I’d also recommend using a low frame rate (24p) to allow the most light in as well as to give the video a more dreamy film-like quality, though the latter point is purely an artistic choice that you may feel differently about. A film-like look is best achieved with a shutter speed that’s double the inverse of the frame rate, so if you’re at 24p use a shutter speed of 1/48 sec (or as close as you can get to that on your camera, which is probably 1/50 sec).

If you will be moving the camera as you shoot, a higher frame rate may be desirable to reduce motion-blur. If the camera is locked on a tripod turn off in-camera stabilization as well as for the lens.
posted by theory at 6:40 PM on February 1, 2021

Sorry, I input the wrong camera model in the example above! For your camera and lens at 18mm, f/4.0 and 3 feet away from the subject, the depth of field would be from 29.5 to 46.17 inches away from the camera sensor.
posted by theory at 6:51 PM on February 1, 2021

Response by poster: Thanks very much for all that. I'm familiar with the concepts you're talking about, but not experienced with them. I'm starting to realize I was a dummy to think someone could give me magic numbers, that there are enough variables where it's only part science, and the rest sort of art, or maybe craft. It's just my workflow seems too clunky to do so much experimenting. But it takes what it takes.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm so inexpert, I wasn't even taking depth of field into account. :( But I really appreciate the depth of your explanation.
posted by troywestfield at 7:47 PM on February 1, 2021