Broken Hill © Main Course Films
Some people would say a shot like this in Broken Hill is a shot that needs the full gamut of dynamic range. All but one of the images in this post are somewhere between 3 and around 8 stops of dynamic range.
What they don’t tell you about Dynamic Range…
There are very few instances where a director will need more than 12 stops of dynamic range in a camera. There’s a lot of competition between professional cameras having 14 stops or 18 stops of dynamic range, but how many situations are there in reality where you need more than 6-8 stops of dynamic range?
Dynamic Range is just the difference of the minimum to maximum range of light between the shadows and the highlights. So, unless you’re shooting scenes with massive differences between interiors and exteriors, you won’t need massive dynamic range.
It’s helpful to have up to 12 stops of dynamic range when you’re shooting interiors and want to simultaneously see details of exteriors. Whether it’s a complex drama scene or a simple interview situation, having more dynamic range means you’ll be able to see more of that exterior detail.
But most shoots are either interior or exterior, and won’t require more than 6-8 stops of dynamic range to capture full detail. It doesn’t matter what the lighting style is – hard, soft, key only, fill only, daylight or tungsten – the maximum dynamic range most productions will require is just 6-8 stops.
Remember Kodachrome transparencies? No cinematographer today would think about buying a digital camera with ‘just’ 12 stops of dynamic range as this would be considered terrible dynamic range, yet when you get the exposure right, even today, these images are still amazing. Dynamic range often gets confused with exposure, and yet if you’ve got a well balanced image that is properly exposed, dynamic range is rarely an issue.
So for directors, it’s not the dynamic range of a camera a director needs to pay attention to, but the shooting log or RAW and the nature of the gamma curve. If you pay attention to the gamma curve, shoot with as much as detail in front of the camera and detail in post, then that’s the maximum image to begin the colour grade in post as it’s this image that will give you complete control.
