Not quite thinking I'd fully ever recover from last week's experience in sound, this week I was on CCUs. After confirming all the cameras were cabled up, asking Bruce whether he was happy with the lighting, getting someone from staging to bring the whiteboard out, and lining the cameras up, I went into tapes to switch all cameras on and proceeded to white balance.
My intention was to have a consistent as possible image across all three cameras - so I rapidly switched between them, and observed the tally lights to know which camera not to adjust.
An issue that I wasn't expecting was that our newsreader Ethan was wearing black, standing infront of a black curtain and, well, he's black skinned, so that camera required its blacks to be raised slightly. Not a problem, only that the levels would need to be returned to normal when the camera had changed shots. Normally you can see where the blacks lie on the waveform monitor; I encountered some kind of feedback in the signal, and so I couldn't actually see where 0% was. So I 'capped' the camera by closing the iris and manipulated the black balance to return the levels to normal - what I didn't consider is that I had also effectively blinded the camera operator. Oops.
Otherwise, the vibe in the control room was great - some roles had been previously been filled, so experience was showing - and from what I saw of the floor through my tiny porthole, things were running smoothly. Aesthetically, my shots looked great. Bruce was very happy, and so was I. :)
I've learnt from this experience that a slight modification in my workflow when dealing with otherwise unusual situations is needed - though in my defence without comms, I was unable to notify anyone, and didn't want to run my request through the DA, when she had other more important things to be concerning herself with. Had the comms been working, I would have notified the cameras that I was closing their irises down first, before going ahead and doing it, or figured out a way to look past the noise in the waveform monitor and adjust the levels that way.
All comes with experience, I guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment