C100 Setting Exposure

This document will take you through some of the recommended exposure settings for the Canon C100 MK2

The C100 has different Picture Profile options for how you record your shots.

The main choices are EOS standard, Wide DR and C-log

Eos standard (setting 7)

This gives you a punchy image straight away with solid blacks and lots of contrast and colour. This may be a good look for you for your final delivery but its severely limits your grading options and gives you little information in the shadows and highlights which will roll quickly into black and white respectively.

I would not normally film on this setting myself but if I had to, I would set my Zebra patterns to 70% IRE (will explain this later) and set exposure on the brighter parts of the face to that. (Top left of image)

C-log (setting 9)

Gives a much lower contrast image and will give you more tonal information. This image is less pleasing to the eye (though some folks really like the aesthetic of the washed out image) and needs careful colour correction to look ‘normal’. Look how there is more information in the subjects dark hair, which there is not in the Eos standard. The image is also desaturated, as colours can peak as well as highlights.

Wave form for C-log

Wave form for EOS standard

You can grade C-log manually or as a starting point use a LUT (Look up table) on it. I find this one from the Canon site a good start as it is not too harsh, though this is a matter of taste.

WDR (wide dynamic range - setting 8)

The other setting available is WDR

This is often overlooked, but is a really good compromise between C-log and standard and only needs a tweak in colour correction. If you are in a controllable lighting situation this setting is ideal. If you are in a high contrast situation like a sunny day exterior I would use C-log.

It is still important to expose correctly whatever the profile

Setting exposure with the different Profiles

If you record in EOS Standard, what you see is pretty much what you get, and if you over expose any area that you didn't mean to do, it is difficult to pull back, particularly skin tones that lose all detail and subtlety. This clip is was overexposed but making it darker in Premiere does not help it much. There is no detail left in the white shirt.

A simple way of making sure your skin tones are correct in EOS standard is to use the Zebra pattern function. This shows a diagonal lines on the subject set to a specific numerical value, in this 70 for bright skin tones.

The best way to get your skin tones correct, apart from using an actual light meter (which I still do occasionally) is to expose for the skin using the WAVEFORM monitor that can be displayed on the LED screen)

The waveform monitor

This can be selected on the rear of the camera with the WFM and is displayed in the LED screen on the bottom right. Cycle through the button until you get this display...

It shows the exposure level in a range from 0 to 100 . The divisions are in IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers folks…)

Below are two displays of the same image. The first one is probably overexposed as at the top of the scale, the top areas (whites) are clipped at 100 IRE, whereas for the second one, the exposure has been brought down to keep everything in the safe area.

Anything below 0 is completely black and over 100, is white with no further detail in it.

If we are filming with CLog we should set our skin tones to about 55-60 IRE and with WDR to 60 IRE. This is like setting our Zebras to70 for EOS standard, but unfortunately the Zebras only go down to 70 !

If can select a small part of the waveform we can use it to study someone's flesh tones

To do this we go to the Menu, select the spanner icon (OTHER FUNCTIONS)

Then choose WFM (OLED)

Waveform monitor

Type----Line+Spot

Menu off

Now we have a red box that we frame over our subjects face and I set my exposure so the average at on 60 IRE mark.

Wave form tip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJo0vu9horQ

WDR sell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg36P0an3wA

Written by FR

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