My Secret for Dark & Moody Product Videos

i'm gonna pour some water on here so that we get some splash action and in three two one all right welcome back to the channel everybody today we're gonna be talking about black backdrops this is one of the most common things we see in product or commercial style videos we have a seamless black infinite behind our subject and this can actually be one of the more tricky things to light and capture and i'll explain why now filming on a black backdrop can present a few challenges particularly when you're trying to get that pure infinite black how do you avoid getting a ton of noise in the shadows how do you make sure that your subject is well lit without creating shadows on the background and how do you actually make the background darker without drastically affecting the appearance of the subject so this right here is my black paper backdrop from savage the reason i like paper backdrops is because they don't wrinkle too easily you can reuse them roll them up and when you're shooting on a black backdrop like this there's a few different ways you can light it or manipulate your subject to make it look a certain way in some instances you might light it in a certain way where you can actually tell that there is a black backdrop in behind your subject for example if you look at it right now you can see that our light is actually bouncing off of it it's not completely black you can see it now for me the way i like to shoot a lot of my product videos with a black backdrop is to make the background appear infinite black like it's just a dark abyss it's completely crushed and there's nothing going on in behind there's a whole bunch of advantages to doing things this way you could hide noise that is in the shadows you can mask out fishing wires feather masks and you wouldn't notice because it's completely black if you've seen my videos before you might know that i do this all the time in my videos like for sephora or canada dry even socialite having a completely pure infinite black background can be very advantageous and today we're going to show you how i do that so first things first obviously you need a black background but the next thing you're going to want to do is separate your subject from the background and that's going to help you get the light off of the background so i'm going to take my table here and pull it away closer to my camera and away from the background and this creates some separation i'll roll this down just a bit more now having this added separation between your subject in the background not only keeps your light off of the background itself but you also avoid getting reflections of whatever colors your subject is going onto the backdrop or creating any kinds of shadows now the next step is you want to control your light and your exposure so the first thing i'm going to do here is turn off the room light because we don't want it hitting the whole room we just want to have light on the subject and nothing else and further to that point i'm going to close up the window here to block the light from outside coming in so what we want to do now is sort of isolate our key light just on our subject and nothing else so to do that i'm going to bring this around here and i'm going to place it directly over top now what's great about a top-down lighting setup like this is that it's going directly downward on your subject and it's not going to be spilling around the environment but now we're getting a lot more light up top here compared to what we're getting underneath so to combat that i'm gonna be using a piece of dry erase foam core it's nice and reflective and this should just add a little bit of extra light underneath our subject to balance it out we're going to be using this little aperture mc light and just placing it on the table in behind our subject out of frame now for this kind of setup with a black backdrop a backlight is helpful because you're going to be creating that extra separation and outline on your subject so that it doesn't get lost in that black background so we're going to put this down in behind here on a ball head just angled up at our subject now the advantage of using such a small light as our backlight is that i can place it down here on the table not only does this give it a backlight but it can also kind of light from underneath to help out that bounce a bit more also a light any bigger than this would be quite tough to hide in the frame but having it nice and small like this keeps it below the frame where you don't see it in the shot so just to reiterate what we've done so far we've got our backdrop down we've pulled the table away to create that separation the backlight adds to that separation add a bit of kick from behind so that it's outlined and popping off of the background we've got our top down light here and now we've got a bounce underneath the next thing we're going to want to do and this is a very powerful light this is an aputure 300d mark ii we do not need that full 100 power the goal is to balance the light output coming out of the light with the exposure settings in the camera so that our subject is well lit but the surrounding environment around the subject is nice and dark so what i'm going to do here is i'm actually going to lower the output of my light to 20 and you can see how much darker this makes everything in the room so as you can tell the whole room is a lot darker now because we don't have this light just bouncing around all over the place it's a lot less power just on our subject and even our black background is a lot darker which is super important so right now i'm switching up my camera settings to s and q mode i want to get the shot in 240 frames per second so we can slow it down so we're going to go with a shutter speed here of one over 500 we've got an aperture of f4 and an iso of 1600 and this should make our pepper nicely exposed and everything else should be pretty dark now the key here when you're adjusting all these little settings for exposure is that you're just exposing for your subject you definitely want to make sure that you're not over exposing because that is harder to bring back versus if you underexpose a little bit and then you brighten it up in post obviously you never want your shot to be overexposed or underexposed but in this particular case with the look we're going for you definitely don't want to overexpose i'm going to move our light stand out of the way that was holding up my pepper this right here this is a resealable plastic zipper bag or zipper seal some people call it a ziploc some people call it a sandwich bag or a freezer bag i'm gonna take a bunch of these chopped bell peppers and place them on the bag here and this is a great tip for people who are trying to launch stuff for product videos now a few days ago i was actually working on a video for a makeup brand where i had to get a shot of a bunch of makeup brushes and make up dust flying into the air and to do that i was trying to use a piece of foam core like this and throw it all in the air like that the problem was every time i went like this the foam core was getting in the frame of the shot the advantage of using a ziploc bag is that pretty much everyone has these in their house instead of using your arms and momentum to lift it up in the air you can just hold it in one place pull the sides apart and it acts like a trampoline i suppose so you go like this and that one went high enough to hit the ceiling so i mean it's pretty convenient because you don't have to lift it it doesn't get in the shot just maintain your height go like that if you're ever trying to catapult something in the air like coffee beans fruits and veggies or just any light object this is super useful all right so we've got everything on here now that's quite a bit might actually be too much but we'll see i'm gonna pour some water on here so that we get some splash action should be pretty good i'm gonna hit record here and in three two one i'm soaking wet but let's uh let's see how the shot looks three two one okay so that was our flying pepper shot right there we've broken down the lighting scenario and how to film on a black backdrop let's now go in a final cut and i'll show you how to actually edit this to make the background that infinite pure black alright so here is our raw shot in final cut the only thing i've done so far is crop in just a little bit to make sure that it is slightly more centered we can tell that this shot needs work because if we pull back to the beginning of our clip here before the peppers enter the frame our black background isn't completely black and you can easily see this just by looking at it it's kind of blotchy and some parts are darker than others but we can also confirm this by opening up our scopes here in final cut i click command 7 and in the waveform scope in the rgb overlay channel we can actually see how much of the exposure varies in our background if this frame were completely black we would have a straight line across zero down here and you can see that if we move our playhead over to this black solid that is the case now back to our shot here i want to make sure that we are looking at a part of it where we can see our subject in the frame so that we know how our adjustments are affecting it so to make our background completely black while maintaining proper exposure in the subject i'll start by lowering our shadows or lift until we see that the line here that represents our backdrop starts dipping down below zero and i actually like to go as far as seeing that line begin to flatten out so that i know for sure that this is going to remain black regardless of what device or screen the video is being watched on now in doing this we've effectively brought down the exposure in the whole shot so we need to balance this back out a bit in our highlights or gain i'll begin raising that until our brightest parts of the shot are just barely tipping over a hundred and next i will also adjust our midtones or gamma raising them until i'm happy with how it looks and that my friends is it we've got a purely black infinite background in our shot and this is what it looks like all right so there you have it that is how i film and edit one of these product style videos on a black backdrop for that infinite black look i hope you found this helpful if you did then don't forget to give it a like and subscribe follow me on instagram daniel.chiffor and as always i will see you guys in the next video

Channel: Daniel Schiffer

Views: 800,598

Rating: 4.9777536 out of 5

Keywords: infinite background, infinite black background video, how to film product videos, product commercials, daniel schiffer, epic b roll, daniel schiffer product commercial, daniel schiffer peppers

Id: QwtPETjfbnU

Length: 9min 5sec (545 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021