ISO is RUINING Your FILMS | The TRUTH about ISO

have you ever watched some of your favorite films and wondered how they got such clean beautiful images you look at these really dark Moody scenes and you realize that they're beautifully shot and they have zero noise then you go ahead and you try to shoot one of these dark Moody scenes and you end up with grainy noisy footage that is impossible to color and just ends up looking like straight up garbage the first few years of my career it felt like it was impossible to shoot a dark emoi scene until I understood ISO and today I'm going to break down and demystify all the common misconceptions that most filmmakers have about ISO there are three aspects of exposing your camera apperture shutter speed and ISO while aperture and shutter will affect how much light is actually coming into your camera and hitting your sensor your ISO is just boosting that light captured by the sensor which essentially adds gain and therefore degrades your overall image quality and I know that might sound confusing so let's quickly break this down you have natural light in a room then you have your aper which controls obviously your iris and how much light you're letting in and then you have your shutter which also affects how much light you're letting into your sensor and then you have ISO that comes in after that boosts or amplifies that signal now I really hope that made sense to you guys and if it doesn't drop some comments down below and I will try my best to help make sense of this properly exposing your image is a balancing act and there's definitely a give and take especially when it comes to setting your ISO in fact one of the most common misconceptions is that every camera deals with ISO the same but that's actually not true it all every camera comes with a native ISO and some come with a dual native ISO this is typically where your camera performs best when it comes to dynamic range and color performance so let's take my fx3 for example I have a dual native ISO of 82,800 and one of the reasons why this camera is so powerful is because the iso performance makes it extremely versatile but that also doesn't mean that I should always just set my camera to 12,800 and you know throw an ND filter and run around and expose for that because there are times when it's better to shoot 800 and there are times when it's better to shoot 12,800 but all that to say I highly suggest that you guys figure out what your native ISO in your camera is and test out the different isos to see how well your camera performs in low light at different isos and in bright lighting conditions with different isos another common misconception and something that I wasn't really aware of especially early on in my career and that was lowering the iso in brighter lighting conditions and then hiring the iso in lower light conditions and this was actually ruining my films what I typically do now is I'll set my camera to its native ISO and I'm usually shooting on my Ursa mini pro which is the native ISO is 800 and I'll expose my camera for using 800 ISO and because you know your shutter speed should typically be double your frame rate and because I shoot in 24 frames or I might shoot in 60 frames it's either going to be 50 or 120 that leaves only one of two options either I can lower the aperture to let more light into my camera or I have to bump up the exposure or the the the lighting levels of my scene to properly expose my scene and if I'm outside in really bright conditions I'll use an ND filter but if I'm in a really low light situation I'll raise the natural light in the room so that more light is hitting my sensor and I'm retaining all the information I need to be able to properly expose my image and have as much detail in my shadows as possible now an attempt to better explain this have you guys ever ever looked at a behind the scenes of one of your favorite films and you notice a scene that they're shooting that you realize in the film is a lot darker but in the behind the scenes there's like a ton of lights and what they're actually showing you is something super bright but in camera it looks a lot darker that's because they don't just light a scene and then they go oh okay the scene's a little dark let's just bump the iso up no instead they leave the iso most likely the native ISO of the camera and then they add natural light to properly expose for the image but then the question Still Remains right like how do you properly expose for your image that's where the term exposing to the right comes in now I'm sure a lot of you guys have seen different tutorials online with you know other filmmakers talking about how all you have to do is hire your ISO and then expose to the right like I said coming back to the beginning ISO is something that amplifies the light coming into your your camera sensor it's not actually adding light into your camera sensor the best and most natural way of doing that is to either a lower your aperture to let more light in or B add more lights to your scene so you could properly expose for that image so if you guys think just because you have a Sony fx3 and you could bump up your camera to 12,800 that doesn't always mean that that's the right thing to do it really depends on what your image calls for there's no one siiz fits-all so really quickly let me break this down certain cameras will perform better with their highlights if you bump up the iso higher you'll retain more information into your highlights because you're going to make sure that those highlights don't clip however you will have a little bit more grain in your mids and your shadows so you have to kind of determine what's the most important part of your image do you want to retain most of the shadows and the low lights in your image then you're going to want to use a lower ISO now if you want to retain a lot of that highlight information and most of your image lives in those midtones and the highlights and there's not so much shadow in your image then your best bet might be to shoot with a higher ISO in order to retain that information so nothing Clips taking a look at this scene that I shot for one of my documentaries I knew that most of the information that I wanted to retain was all in the shadows so I set my camera to its native ISO of 800 and I Overexposed by One Stop knowing that I would bring down all the shadows in the blacks to give me this really dark Rich looking image but just like with anything there's a give and take you could obviously see the the light tubes on the cage just clipped and I missed a little bit of that information now now to me it was more important to make sure that I had the information in the shadows and in all the dark spots of the scene so I could properly color grade this because the overall image was going to live in the shadows and in the blacks so ultimately like I said before there's always a give and take and you have to look at the information in your image and figure out not only how to properly expose your image but what ISO would retain the information that would give you the best results I know a lot of this ISO stuff could be very confusing so this is my best attempt to try to help you guys understand this of course if you have any questions drop some comments down below and I will try to help you guys as much as I possibly can I want to thank you guys so much for stopping in and hanging out and uh yeah man I'll see you guys next week deuces [Music]

Channel: Alex Zarfati

Views: 80,852

Keywords: alex zarfati, Iso, How to set ISO, exposure triangle, exposure triangle for beginners, exposure compensation, camera exposure tutorial, camera exposure explained, camera exposure triangle, camera exposure settings, fx3 iso, fx3 iso 12800, fx3 iso setting, sony fx3 iso, ISO is RUINING Your FILMS, how to properly expose slog3, how to properly expose video, how to properly expose film, how to properly expose log footage, what is iso, how to use iso, high iso, iso explained

Id: npFhShRrW7c

Length: 6min 50sec (410 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2024