Oct 03 2007
Improving web video - 2.Contrast
In the days before digital tuners, tuning a violin or guitar was an imprecise science. Tuning the strings to one another is a skill anyone can learn - but tuning the E string precisely to E is not - at least in my experience. So if you have 3 guitars all properly tuned to themselves, but at a different pitch to one another which guitar do you tune to?
The highest one!
If you are going to be slightly off-pitch it is better to be high than low. If the pitch is slightly low the music will sound flat, lifeless. Slightly high and it will sound brighter - it will have more energy, it will be more exciting.
In the last two hundred years pitch inflation has turned a C-note into a B-note as orchestras compete with each other for the brightest sound. In 1939, international agreement fixed A=440 hz. Many of the world’s premier orchestras have crept up to A=445. The singers don’t like it, but the audiences do.
So the lesson from music - go sharp not flat: A brighter note is a better note.
The same is true for a visual image. Brighter images are better images. Photographers learn very quickly to push the histogram to the right.
But the web is chock-full of murky underexposed video - largely because the lcd screens have zebra stripes warning of blown highlights, but no histograms to show what is happening in the middle of the tonal range - which is where the picture is made. Result: too much attention paid to avoiding blown highlights - the image is dull - more noise and less tonal values - the footage lacks energy, and at the margin - does not get watched.
The still above is taken from the stormmedia.com katrina piece I linked to yesterday. All the photos perfectly exposed and much of the video with blown-out highlights. The photographer could have avoided the blown highlights by moving the camera or the truck but context, content and composition take precedence. A good decision to my eye.
Blown highlights are moving in along with handheld camerawork. They are part of the grammar of video 2.0.
