Zebra pattern

I have a few questions about lighting.

How is the zebra pattern used? How much do you set your camera, 70%, 100%?

Also, I'm guessing most people don't use a hand held light meter, do you use your camera's metering and guess for over or under exposed areas?
Or does that question go back to using the zebra pattern?

As you can see, it's late, I'm shooting some video in my living room and have some time to ponder.....


Jake

Hey Jake,

70% zebra lines are meant to be a guide for a reasonably correct exposure for facial tones. If you set the zebra lines on the high light areas of the face, cheekbones, forehead etc. it will get you pretty close to a correct exposure.
Useful for interview setups etc.

100% can be used for most everything else and should be adjusted for the brightest area of your scene. Bright part of a white cloud, white shirt etc. You need to be a bit careful to set your aperture so that the zebras are only on the brightest part of the white. If you overexpose the whites they are gone for good. Still very little latitude in video and digital compared to film.

Zebra lines are meant to be a quick but selective adjustment guide for exposure. For controlled conditions, studio etc. best to use a waveform and
a setup monitor.

Light meters can be useful but are a bit of a problem to sort out calibration with your camera. Effective ISO, Shutterspeed, Gain etc... It's more efficient to stay in the video realm and make judgements using zebras and waveform.

A useful rule of thumb is to expose for the areas in which you want the most detail. For example, can you let the window brightness blowout to maintain good exposure for the rest of the scene. Or can you let the shadows block up in order not to overexpose the bright part of the scene.

Controlling the contrast is a big part of what lighting is all about.

Happy shooting!
Will

Hi Will,
Very informative and helpful.
Thanks,
Jake

WOW. ok, so does zebra really help or on good high end HD camera is it really needed or helpful?

Don,

Still needed and very much useful on a high-end HD camera. I use zebra...

Francois

Zebra lines have been the in viewfinder exposure guide in high end cameras like forever. In earlier cameras you needed to get into the body and tweek a potentiometer to set the zebras for the desired video level. Most of today's high end cameras let you set it in the menu and may in fact offer a quick selector switch for a number of level sets.

I like to set the zebras at 95% just to give a little safety on the highlight detail.

Cheers,
Will

Hummm, the Canon XH-A1 has a lot more functions and abilities than I do or than I use. I'll give it a try. Thanks for the explaination and help.

Don

Same with my FX1, I'll set mine to 90% (won't do 95) and start paying attention to the zebra.

Don, you must have seen the zebra pattern on this shot you took?
https://www.pond5.com/ru/stock-footage/88318

Ok, sorry for the pun...

Will, thanks again for the help,
Jake

https://www.pond5.com/ru/stock-footage/133625Zebra's are great and also can be abused. Sometimes for example at dusk or dawn they can mislead you a bit. During those periods I crank it up a bit to almost "over exposure" or "lots more zebra than meets the eye" so to speak to get it just right, particularly if you have a polarization filter on the cam. Otherwise it always comes out too dark (underexposed) and putting on a gain in post would bring out the grain. Here is an example of a clip where if I would have used the zebra correctly it would have been way too dark and horrible looking - but I knew from prior expirience with another cam that I needed to open up a bit. Of course this was by guess and by god as the led display really didn't help much to really see what was going on. Sometimes you have to fly by the seat of your pants and hope for the best.

I hate the zebra lines... maybe because I am using them wrong. I set 100% zebra... and was doing outdoor shots, no clue what they were supposed to do, and my whole screen was filled with these buggers. Like, I couldn't see anything! I think I've gotten the hang of eyeball proper exposure on my hv30 flip out display... KILL THE ZEBRAS