Lighting for Podcasts and Webcasts
 |
Using Grids for video productions is like using barn doors on a standard film and video shoot. The great thing about using Grids with your OctoDome or soft box is that you get the same control of using barn doors, or some black wrap tin foil, but with the soft light of your soft box. It can be hard and time-consuming to set up a second or third C-stand (a Century film light stand) with diffusion flags, or clipping on diffusion with your C-47s (Cloths-Pins) and burning yourself every time.
(Click on any image below for an enlarged view.) |
Topics Covered:
- Lighting for a film or video interviews
- Using Grids on your soft boxes to give you more control
- Lighting two people for a video interview
- The benefits of using a soft box with Grids compared to using Tungsten lights with barn doors
 Figure 1 |
Lighting The Interviewee
We first started our video shoot by positioning a 3-foot OctoDome nxt up high and to the left of our pro golfer(Figure 1). At first, his face was being lost by the shadow of his hat. So we lowered the light so that we could see his face completely with full light coverage. |
|
Lighting The Interviewee
We first started our video shoot by positioning a 3-foot OctoDome nxt up high and to the left of our pro golfer (Figure 2). At first, his face was being lost by the shadow of his hat. So we lowered the light so that we could see his face completely with full light coverage (Figure 3). |
|
|
In order to keep the lesson focused on just lighting for an interview we do not go into great detail about how to properly light the green screen backdrop. We will sooon fallow up this lesson with how to light your green screen for a film or video shoot. |
|
After we lowered the light, we saw that we were getting some light spill-over onto our interviewer (Figure 3). To prevent this spill-over, we attached a set of Grids to the face of the soft box (Figure 4). Grids train the light from the soft box forward so that the light spread is much narrower than it would be otherwise (Figure 6). This is useful if you want to keep light off the background, or in this case, the foreground. |
 |
 Figure 6 |
Looking through the lens of the video camera, we realized we needed to add some light to the right side of our interviewee and decided to use a Starlite Medium Digital Kit as a fill light (Figure 8). |
|
The medium SilverDome soft box provided a great soft light on the right side of our golfer, but again, the light was also spilling over onto our interviewer (Figure 9). So we installed Louvers onto the SilverDome soft box to prevent the spill-over from occurring (Figure 10). |
|
|
As you can see, the fill light is no longer illuminating our interviewer and falls only on our subject and the green screen behind him (Figure 11). Later on, we would merge the golfer with a scenic background for a more pleasing effect. |
|
|
Section Two:
We now want to light our interviewer for our second camera angle. This will be shot from just behind our pro golfer. The hard part will be to keep the spill from hitting our golfer and staying away from creating a lens flare on our first or second camera. |
|
Lighting The Interviewer
After the golfer section of the interview was complete, we then switched gears to light the interviewer. We started by bringing the OctoDome over (without Grids attached) to serve as the main light (Figure 12). |
 |
|
Our interviewer was now well lit but we had some spill hitting our golfer that was making him two stops higher than our interviewer (Figure 15). We wanted to give our golfer a more dramatic style lighting with one side slighlty darker and not so flat, so we inserted our Grids to our 3' OctoDome to cut off the spill. |
|
|
From seeing how well our grids worked with our golfer we decided to use the grids again for our interviewer to keep the spill light off of our pro golfer. In Figure 13 you can see that our golfer is getting washed out on the right side of the screen. We added the grids and brought the light off of our golfer shown in Figure 14. |
|
From seeing how well our grids worked with our golfer we decided to use the Louvers for our interviewer to keep the spill light off of or pro golfer (Figure 17). With the Louvers we can still keep light on our subject from head to toe with out moving out the light source and it keeps the light from spilling out to our golfer or out to our camera lens. |
 |
Here is a birds-eye view of our light setup where you can see all four lights (Figure 18). |
 |
|
As you can see, we now have two well-lit subjects and two great looking camera angles (Figure 19 & 20). With the help of our grids we were able to have an improved control over our light sources; much like using barn doors on a standard film lighting setup. This light setup creates a much softer and even light than using just a straight Tungsten light source with one or two layers of diffusion. Using flags and foam-core boards to block your light takes lots of time and studio space compared to using the grids. Have fun trying these techniques and let us know about your results.
Stay tuned for our green screen lighting lesson. When lighting your green screen (10'x 12') you would use two lights for lighting the backdrop; one from either side, or one from the top and one from the left or right side. It is helpful to keep your subjects away from your green screen in order to keep shadows off the screen. If your green screen is larger than our 10'x12' backdrop you may need more lights to get a full even green color. |
|
|
Green screen software:
If your green screen background comes out less than ideal and you need to pull out the green we recommend using these programs to help you out.
1) Serious Magic Ultra
2) Adobe After Effects
|
|
|
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)