Re: Zebra Levels (white very BRIGHT)

Your problem has nothing to do with white balance, and everything to do with exposure. If you set your zebras to 100, anything at 100 or above will "clip" -- there will be no detail. Your white shirt must have been at or above 100 IRE (which is what the zebras are indicating.) You apparently set your zebras to 90, which was of little use to you.

White shirts, dresses, etc. are always a problem, especially for small HDV cameras, especially in hard light. If you expose for the white, then faces tend to be underexposed a bit. As you probably know, in post you can boost the middle level of exposure and leave the shadows and highlights relatively alone. So your best bet is to expose for the whites, then in post bring up the faces a bit.

Going the other way -- exposing for the faces and letting the whites blow out -- is impossible to correct in post, for the reasons stated in the first paragraph.

Zebra levels: if you set your zebras to 70, which I recommend for most shooting, and adjust exposure/iris so that there is just a tiny bit of zebra on the hottest part of the face, and the face you are adjusting for is Caucasian, you will get a "correct" face exposure for everyone in the scene, no matter how dark or light. Some good cameras, such as the DVX100/a/b will not let you do that -- the lowest zebra is 80, which is a bummer. If your subjects have dark skin, you can "borrow" a white hand or face to set exposure, or else learn how much to stop down the iris on a particular shade of dark skin after you find a twinge of zebra.

On the other hand, if you are shooting outdoors with lots of sky, you might want to set the zebras to 100 so that you adjust exposure to get some detail in the hot sky. This adjustment is often a hard dance to pull off, as you are likely to make the ground-level stuff a bit dark. One solution is to frame so that there is not much sky, and to let the sky "blow". This is the curse of video -- can't handle the range from hot sky to dark shadow. Film has much more latitude, though the newest big HD cameras, such as the Sony F23, are approaching that beautiful ability.

Rick Wise
director of photography
Oakland, CA
www.RickWiseDP.com
email: Rick@RickWiseDP.com