How to Get the Perfect Exposure with the Pocket 6k Pro - False Colour & More

I've owned the pocket 6K Pro for about two years now I've used the camera almost daily and so I've learned a fair amount about how best to utilize the camera's exposure tools today I'm going to talk about what I've learned since owning the camera and hopefully help anybody who is new to the pocket 6K Pro learn a few things about the camera [Applause] epocket 6K Pro is an incredibly capable camera that has incredible image quality great dynamic range and awesome colors straight out the camera without too much need for post-production work however in the realm of videography and photography the tools that the individual uses are only ever as good as the creative who is behind the camera making all of the decisions on exposure white balance and all the different things like that of course one of the big benefits of the 6K Pro is its ability to shoot black magic raw which can often provide somewhat of a security blanket for the shooter so you're able to change your ISO your white balance your contrast your saturation levels all within the raw tab of DaVinci Resolve in post-production and so the need to really nail that final looking camera becomes a little bit less important but sometimes you're shooting a project that requires a super quick turnaround or perhaps you know that you won't have too much time or maybe you don't have the skill to work in post-production fixing a poorly exposed image that's where you really need to have the skill set and the knowledge to know how to utilize the Blackmagic pocket 6K Pros incredible exposure tools to get a properly exposed image so to give you a quick rundown of what this video is going to look like just in case you want to skip ahead to specific chapters here's what I'm going to talk about in this video firstly I'm going to briefly address the exposure triangle which is just the very basics of exposure with a large focus on aperture and shutter speed or shutter angle from there we're going to talk just a little bit about ISO and particularly something with the pocket 6K Pro how the dynamic range shifts and is attributed differently at different ISO values and of course touch on how much noise is present in each ISO value we'll then briefly touch on ND filters and how they allow us to make more creative choices that a little bit more freely finally from there I'm going to talk about the great exposure tools that come built in with the pocket 6K Pro including false color waveforms and zebras and how I use them to generally get just a properly exposed image so let's start off with the very Basics and the exposure triangle this portion is more so aimed at beginner filmmakers so if you already know about this and are pretty well versed feel free to skip ahead to the next chapter the exposure triangle is as you would expect made up of three different points aperture shutter speed and ISO and they are your three parameters essentially that determine the exposure of your image on your pocket 6K Pro for right now we're just going to focus on aperture and shutter speed and we'll get to ISO in a little bit shutter speed is perhaps the most simple of these points when it comes to video in 99 of the time you are going to want your shutter speed to be two times the amount of your frames per second in which you are shooting the video frames per second in its most basic form is essentially the amount of still frames that the camera takes every second which get played consecutively resulting in the effects of a video that's its sort of most basic form hopefully everybody knows a little bit about that already though shutter speed basically needs to be double this to get a correct amount of motion blur that looks realistic so if you're shooting in 24 frames per second which is the standard for Cinema your shutter speed should be 1 48 or 1 50th if that's all your camera can do as that's the closest if you're shooting 16 frames per second it should be one 120th of a second and so on thankfully in the pocket CSK Pro Blackmagic makes this super easy for you and it's the same with a lot of Cinema cameras because if you navigate your way over to the setup tab you're actually able to change the shutter speed number to instead be represented as a shutter Angle now this is way easier because by leaving the shutter angle at 180 degrees the camera will always have a shutter speed of double your frame rate so even if you change from 24 frames to 60 the camera would account for that and choose the correct shutter speed for the frame rate I pretty much always leave the shutter angle at 180 degrees unless I'm making a particular stylistic choice or I am incredibly low on light just to note the pocket 6K Pro also has a handy little feature where if you press the left or right arrows next to the 180 degree number it goes to a slightly odd decimal value and this often gets rid of flickering lights or weird artifacts in the image that may be caused by overhead lights that are slightly different to your camera Etc it's great feature to have and I use it all the time when I just get a little bit of screenflick all the lights flickering gets rid of it pretty much completely so with your shutter speed now set to 180 degrees and left there you are good to go you don't need to change that for the majority of things so let's talk about aperture [Music] aperture is actually a value that corresponds to the lens that you attach to your camera and you can actually have different options depending on what lens you have attached high quality and often thus high cost lenses will be able to go to numbers like f 2.8 and even sometimes 1.8 1.4 or 1.2 particularly if they're prime lenses and the majority of lenses will be able to go to a high aperture of F16 or even F22 so that's something that I would rarely recommend aperture is essentially how big the opening in the lens is which allows light through the lens and into the camera sensor the lower the number such as F 1.8 creates a larger opening and thus more light is allowed onto the sensor resulting in A Brighter Image the higher the number IE F16 the smaller the opening and thus the less light on the sensor the darker the image from a creative standpoint aperture actually controls something really quite important and that's depth of field essentially how sharp the background is going to be in relation to to the subject in the foreground if that's what you're focused and of course vice versa if you're focused on the background how shallow the depth feel to be for something in the foreground a low number F 1.8 produces a very shallow depth of field meaning that less is in Focus if your subject is in the foreground the background will appear very blurred and pleasant bokeh will be present a high number means the background will appear sharper in the same situation so you may get more things in acceptable Focus I.E if you have two people were nested a meter apart from one another a higher number ief 16 will be more likely to have them both in Focus than a lower number like f 1.8 this background blur and bokeh is often deemed a very desirable quality and is part of the reason lenses that have apertures this low cost more money of course as well as the ability to use them in lower light a trade-off of this however is in regards to sharpness lenses tend to be most sharp a stop or two down from their lowest aperture and most films tend to shoot around F4 or higher unless they're shooting incredibly stylistic scenes because they prefer that sharpness and slightly larger range of focus either way depth of field and sharpness doesn't relate to exposure so I'll move on but it's just something to note that as you change your aperture it will have that creative effect as well in summary for this portion leave your shutter speed at an angle of 180 degrees and adjust your aperture from there to get your desired exposure and creative look utilizing depth of field there is of course some other tools that we need to look at that work in tandem with aperture and shut speed as well [Music] foreign and the main one of these tools is ISO to look at it in a simplistic manner ISO is essentially your camera's sensitivity to like to be described aperture as an opening in the lens that lets through a certain amount of light through the lens well ISO is essentially a setting that changes how light all of that information is that the sensor receives in the pocket 6K Pro you can select ISO values ranging from 100 all the way to 25 600. ISO 100 lets in the least amount of light and 25 600 lets in the most however as you increase the iso you're also going to get a noisy image just like the aperture ISO has a creative Point as well from a personal recommendation with the 6K Pro I wouldn't shoot over ISO 6400 and ideally I wouldn't go above ISO 3200 unless you really have to you're just not going to get that nice of an image but one of the cool things about the pocket 6K Pro is that it actually has dual ISO meaning that you have two different ISO bands from which you can choose from the first is a native ISO of 400 and runs from iso's 100 to 1000 the second has a native ISO of 3200 and runs from 1250 to 25 600. the difference between these bands are the dynamic range which if you don't know is the amount of detail that the camera can retain between pure black shadows and its very brightest white highlights at ISO 100 to 1000 the pocket 6K pro has 13.4 stops of dynamic range this is very good and you're going to want to shoot in this band as much as you can because you're going to get the best looking image in the second ISO band the pocket 6K pro has 12.1 stops of dynamic range up until ISO 8000 where it drops down to 10.8 stops and it gets sequentially lower until its lowest dynamic range value of 10.3 stops which is an ISO 25600 the max of the camera thankfully Blackmagic in the manual have included a dynamic range chart because the stops of dynamic range are actually attributed differently at different ISO values you may think that if it's super bright you want to shoot at ISO 200 to let less light in because it is so bright but actually that would only give you 4.9 stops of so-called highlight dynamic range or stops above middle gray whereas ISO 800 would give you 6.9 stops of highlight dynamic range essentially the brighter parts of the image have got more information attributed to them when you're outside in bright sunlight a lot of your footage will be exposed in those higher portions and so it's actually wiser to use a dynamic range of say 800 as opposed to a lower one of 200 because you will get more latitude in your highlights because of this I like to shoot at 800 when I'm shooting outside particularly if it's sunny and sometimes I'll even shoot at isos like 100 or 200 if I'm shooting something very dark and Moody because it has the least noise in the shadows and the most stops of dynamic range attributed below middle gray it kind of seems a little bit backwards going higher for a brighter situation and lower for a darker situation but once you take a look at the iso chart it should all start to make sense if I'm shooting in a controlled environment with a lot of lights and set to where you can really control how much Shadow and how much highlight there is I'll shoot at 400 to just ensure the absolute cleanest image free of noise but with a balance of dynamic range contribution between the highlights and the Shadows the only other thing to note with this dual ISO range is how the pocket 6K Pro produces noise everything below the native ranges of 430 200 pulls down from that native ISO and so generally produces cleaner images with less noise everything which is above 430 200 pulls up from that native ISO and so begins to stretch it that little bit further and introduce noise to the image with that in mind if we're shooting in a low light situation and find yourself essentially having to choose between ISO 1000 and ISO 1250 I would always choose ISO 1250 because you sacrifice a lot of that highlight latitude because you move up into the second native ISO band but you will end up with a much cleaner image which when shooting in low light is most likely more important is like using ISO 800 outside which I just recommended but in Reverse in that situation at outside you have a lot of highlight information so you want your dynamic range to be weighted towards those highlights and you don't have to worry about noisy Shadows at ISO 1250 and low light you weight the dynamic range towards the Shadows essentially in order to keep them clean I hope that that makes sense in summary for ISO my recommendations for exposing well with the pocket 6K Pro are to use ISO 400 when you're in controlled and indoor environments where you've got Lighting on the scene or you've got a real mix of Shadows and highlights you want to have a pretty equal mix between above and below middle gray outside particularly on bright sunny days I will almost always use ISO 800 if you're exposing for an intentionally dark shot and you can use isos below 400 do that for the cleanest image and if you get into really low light situations where you have to go up a band via so start ISO 1250 as your base and increase up there if you need to as it's an incredibly dark scene ideally going to a maximum of 3200 but pushing to 6400 at a complete push all right ND filters are the final thing on the pocket 6K Pro that we can use to change the exposure of our image simply they allow us to reduce the overall exposure of our whole image by two stops four stops or six stops this is essentially equivalent to changing our ISO from 1600 to 400 to 100 that is a pretty big range of reduction these can largely be used as creative tools I've already said I like shooting at ISO 800 when outside due to the excellent highlight detail if I add two stops of ND to my image I get the same exposure or look to the image as I would if I were shooting outside at ISO 200 but with the added bonus of having that dynamic range in the highlights and that better highlight retention this is particularly great if you want to shoot with a lens wide open at say F 2.8 as you can achieve that Pleasant shallow depth of field with bokeh in the image in the background while still shooting in very bright sunlight this is the best use friendies and I use two stops of NDS regularly still in the sort of talking head portions of my video so that I can still get some depth of field but have enough light to get a clean image even in my fairly small office I don't it Overexposed parts of my face which are directly lit by a light which is right there NDS are an incredibly valuable tool and the pocket 6K Pro makes them super easy by including them as simple buttons on the body of the camera so now we know exactly how to expose our image let's talk about how the pocket suits K Pro helps us to do so [Music] a couple of tools that I do use but aren't really my main exposure tools are the histogram and zebras the histogram is an RGB histogram so it actually shows color values also which can be helpful to see if your white balance looks correct if the red is super high you've clearly probably got a pretty red looking and warm image the histogram shows you where your exposure is placed with your black Shadows on the far left and your white highlights on the far right this is generally just pretty useful to seeing is your image exposed roughly in the Middle where it should be or is it weighted towards one side higher or lower of course if you're shooting a dark scene it will be towards the left to the lower and if you're shooting a very bright scene a lot of the information will be up towards the right hand side zebras are customizable as to what exposure level they appear they're essentially black lines that will appear on your screen at a certain exposure level I tend to set them at 95 so that I can see what portions of my image are about to clip and lose highlight detail but aren't clipped all the way just yet this way I can have a warning when changing my exposure to not go any higher if something I want detailing is about to clip they can also actually be really helpful to set at a preset of middle grade Plus One Stop which is roughly where you want to expose lighter skin tones or at middle gray which is where you would more likely want to expose darker skin tones if you're shooting an interview this is one of the quickest ways to check that your talent is properly exposed turn on your zebras see if their skin tone comes up with the zebras and you'll see okay that's pretty much exactly where it should be exposed but the exposure feature that I use by far the most and really encompasses all of these other tools and makes exposing so incredibly easy is false color by pressing the false color button which I've assigned to a custom button on the top of the pocket 6K Pro you'll see that your image is overlaid with some crazy colors and each of those colors represents a different level of exposure in the manual for the pocket cameras Blackmagic includes a handy little guide to help with using false color red means that the highlights are clipping and there's no detail that is your pure white purple means the Shadows are clipping to Black and there's no detail there so that's your pure blacks green is Middle gray so they're like a gray wall or a gray card and pink is one stop over middle grain again that's your target skin color false color values pink for the lighter skins and green for darker skin tones and if a person is the main subject of my shot I'll use false color mainly to ensure that they're correctly exposed and then change any lights Etc that I have around them light gray is the Highlight area between middle gray and clipping and dark gray is the shadow area between middle gray and clipping while still retaining some information and some texture yellow is essentially an overexposure warning to warn you that you're close to clipping but not quite there yet and blue is an underexposure warning of the same thing in both regards there is still detail and still some texture there but it's very close to clipping to pure white or black this is simply the best way to expose your images with the pocket 6K Pro you're often going to want to protect your highlights and try to avoid anything showing as red unless of course it's a very bright light bulb or the sun is in your scene at that point that is naturally going to blow out and be too bright a little tip for getting cinematic imagery the film industry in general doesn't tend to blow out highlights it's just not that pleasing of a look it gives almost sort of a cheaper camera digital type look to in the images here's some example of some of my favorite movies and TV shows that I've been watching recently with some false color overlays that I've put on from DaVinci Resolve just to show you where they're placing their highlights and everything else that's in the frame as well [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] I believe false color is just simply the best way to expose your images because it gives you a map essentially of the exposure levels of each thing and once you learn what exposure levels things should be or learn to see what it will look like the final thing using false color for me there is no better tool and the final thing that you absolutely can use and I encourage you to do as perhaps the first and the last thing that you do before you hit record is simply look at your monitor whether that's the monitor on the back of the camera which is a great one or an external monitor if it looks bad on the monitor it probably is bad and poorly exposed if it looks good it's probably in the right Ballpark and you might just have to consult the other tools like false color and your zebras to really dial in the settings for the look that you want I know that there's been a lot of information in this one and it's probably been an incredibly long one but I hope that you've maybe learned a little bit about exposing for video in general and particularly when using a Blackmagic pocket 6K Pro that is all of the exposure settings and tools that I use to ensure that everything I'm filming on a day-to-day basis is well exposed and I certainly still don't get it right 100 of the time I won't claim to do that but hey that's where Blackmagic raw Saves the Day a little bit when you really need it to but it is always better to get the basics down understand how you're exposing and why you're exposing certain things and again the camera that you pick in my case a great one the pocket 6K Pro is still only ever going to be as good as the creative I.E me that is using it so always keep learning and always keep trying to work on how to best expose your images I hope you've enjoyed this one feel free to leave a like if you did let me know your thoughts down in the comments below and maybe consider subscribing if you do want to see some more of my content stay safe everyone stay happy and I'll see in the next one [Music]

Channel: Daniel James Bird

Views: 20,100

Keywords: blackmagic pocket cinema camera 6k pro, pocket 6k pro, false colour, how to use false colour, fasle color, how to use false color, how to use the pocket 6k pro, how to use blackmagic cinema camera, exposing with the pocket 6k pro, false colour skin tones, shutter angle explained, pocket 6k pro footage, blackmagic cinema camera footage, blackmagic pocket 6k pro settings, blackmagic pocket 6k pro tutorial, blackmagic pocket 6k pro review, blackmagic pocket 6k pro footage

Id: PJ4LRhAFFFg

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2023