4.3 High Dynamic Range
Interrogation Scene
The ability to distinguish between the brightest brights and the darkest darks is an important attribute for motion picture cameras. This dynamic range can define a cameras ability to preserve a lot of detail in the shadows and highlights. Film is traditionally better at having a higher dynamic range because of the way that film tends to act logarithmically rather than linearly.
In each of these photos, there is information that is either being clipped, or crushed because of the limitations of cameras on phones. Camera-phones can only capture so many stops of light.
In setting normal exposure to the shadows to preserve the detail (left)
and setting normal exposure to the highlights on the shield (right)
The photo on the right is more aesthetically pleasing because it does not clip Max’s face. There are some details in the shadows, but they are not as important.
Ideally, if a phone could capture all of the information, so that the image can be manipulated in post to look like the photo on the right; that would be best. The goal of this scene is to test each cameras ability to capture a high dynamic range scene.
Which one will preserve the best data?
Is one better than the other?
Or do they each have their special abilities like film capturing the better highlights, and digital capturing better shadows?
Note: this scene was lit to have 22 stops of dynamic range from the darkest dark, to the brightest bright.
To achieve 22 stops, the shield was used strategically to get very bright reflective spots; similarly the darkest spot was achieved by cutting the light and really focusing the light on the table area.
Film is the clear winner in this category. In this shot the highlights, 6 to 7 stops overexposed, were able to be recovered! There were no noticeable coloration issues at all. The underexposed part of the scene still had great detail in the batman costume in the darkness which was roughly 4 to 5 stops under. The D21 on the other hand suffered some issue with overexposure. The highlights began to blow out and cause a minor hue shift due to one channel being clipped. The underexposure area had less information on the black suit of batman.
Notes
Again, a lot of this material has disappeared over the years and this will be updated as clips and photos are found
Click here to learn more about HDR and how it might apply towards visual effects
