Re: Lighting a white background

Please report back - this is an ongoing problem that I think everyone has to deal with sooner or later.

Does anyone know how the "Get a Mac" ads were filmed? It looks as if everyone's on a white background, but it is so consistent that I wonder whether this was chromakeyed.

re your shoot: I did something similar, but not as challenging (interviews, not including the floor). I used a waveform monitor to make sure I didn't clip, but the producer kept insisting it wasn't "white enough." I wound up pulling a luma key in post, garbage matting out the center of the subjects' faces, and replacing the off-white background with barely-legal white.

This sort of depends on your producer and your camera. If you were shooting for MY "make it whiter" producer, and if you were NOT shooting with a Z1, I'd recommend chroma key.

With the framing including the floor, shadows would be an issue too.

John Sharaf is, as usual, absolutely right about the clipping issue. That could kill you and is probably your primary job to deal with.

I'd look at the lighting of the Apple-PC ads and try to imitate that. Light it with as big and soft a source as possible - a big diffusing panel pretty close to the camera? Light the background with exactly the same type of source (i.e. don't mix tungsten-ish Diva's and true tungsten) so you don't have white-balance issues. Lock your iris down too - make sure that if you will need to go in for close-ups, you shoot everything, even the wides, at the max.aperture that your zoom allows.