I will be filming a movie that takes place entirely in the dark outside. I do not have a nightvision feature on my camera and was hoping there might be a way to make things visible without destroying the mood. If anyone has suggestions please submit them. Thank you.

welcome Stuart! don't worry about the nightvision - in my experience it's horrid anyway. what you need to do is light the scenes really realistically. there have been a lot of topics about outside lighting at night - do a search of the forums for those keywords and see what you can find.

Welcome to the club!
Yeah, do a search in the forums and if you still can't find what you are looking for, come back and let us know!
Again, welcome!

i actually really like nightvision personally, shot 75% in it. it was great cause it provided a really dark, creepy mood and there was more realism in the fact that my actors acted in the dark. if u ever use nightvision though dont blow it cause mine doesnt work anymore. whatever u do though i would recammend doing some tests and seeing what it looks like in whatever u edit on, would hate the thought of re-filming cause something didnt work right.

well - it looked awesome in yours HDK some are bad though

I'll probably end up using a lot of low-light features. For my last productions I went out and purchased a few black lights. They actually showed up quite nice on the camera I used.

I'm anti-night vision myself. The trick is to justify some sources, whether they be car headlights, flashlights, a fire the moon or even dim starlight. Then, accent that motivated source with artificial light.

quote:

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Originally posted by BIGMOVIE:
At least you not using film!!!

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Where did that come from?

There are film stocks that rate faster than just about any pro-sumer video camera. Not only that, but they'll see much further into the shadows (You can even force-process them up a bit). Film would help solve this problem, not make it worse.

Nota "At least you're not trying to draw it!" Mono

I just came up with an ingenous way to light for night. I already tried it out and I wish I had some picks to flaunt, but this is what I did:

1)A 44oz. blue colored see through cup.

2) A flashlight.

Stuck the flashlight right inside the cup and viola!

how can that be bright enough? isn't it really grainy?

uh, I can't get my pics to post . . .

Sorry about the wasted space, here's the link to the website.

Feel free to browse the rest of the site, but don't expect much, I started it 2 months ago and haven't had time to finish it.

http://mymatrix.8k.com/custom4.html

The one on top is not lit by my "machine."

HTML documents aren't pics. Post the actual picture URL and it'll work (The urls ending in .jpg in your case).

Like so




In ragards to fast films, to the best of my knowledge you can get 500 asa stocks in any size.

Nota ".giffer" Mono

it is a TAD grainy... but not bad. pretty cool

Thanks Nota, I had never done that before so I had no idea.

Anyway, yeah, they are a tad grainy, but if you perhpas get a more powerful flashlight it would come across better. (Also if I wasn't using a Sony Digital 8). You can definately tell teh differnce between teh one without and the ones with though.