The Armstrong Experiment - For Use With: Overblown Extreme Overexposure
This is an example of an extremely overblown capture of an extremely over-
exposed film that had to be sent away for a customer to get developed. The
Developers in this case send us the film back as a negative and black/white. You
will note that the film is very dense, dark, opaque (much emmulsion on the film;
which stands to reason being that it is a negative of overexposed film).
As such we capture with vegas as a positive and invert it once on the vegas
timeline. With this test we have captured the film (Armstrong) with gamma set to
zero, and in 4 captures set the exposure to 10 o'clock, 12 o'clock, 2 o'clock,
and the extreme 4 o'clock. In each case each showed as very black on the
timeline. Then when inverted, they all showed as very white.
Then next step was to capture again at 4 o'clock and also push the gamma to +30.
A faint ghostly image is now captured. It dose not seem to matter whether the
gamma is added during capture of after on the timeline. Only the customer could
fully appreciate the ghostly image knowing the context of the shooting.
In the extreme a capture was done with the exposure set to 4 o'clock and the
gamma set to 40 whereby on the timeline a very pixelated image can be determined
on some parts of the film. The image is better seen by not inverting the clip
and watching the contrast in the darker rather than lighter form as the textures
are more distinguishable.
Black and White issue:
When attemping to use the Sony Black and white plugin in the mix it only appears to remove definition,
flattening the image, and providing less contrast. Which makes one wonder why the developers bother developing the film in B/W.
Other settings in Vegas:
On the levels, the Input Start adds darker contrast, and for this example was set to 0.463
The Input End was set to 0.816; the more (less than initial setting) that is added the more broad became the arch of the histogram,
also more disperse was the Waveform, and more disperse became the Vectorscope.
The Output Start was left at zero as it did the opposite of the above, and washed the image to a grey and flat image.
The Output End was set to the mid-point, where the 0 turned the screen black, and the extreme right dispersed the
vector scope and waveform beyond a useful image.
Gamma if not set during capture with the Retro was best set to about 1.967; whereby when the Retro Gamma was set to 30,
the gamma on vegas was only set to just below the 1.0 initial setting to about 0.975. This also tends to flatten the histogram and
disperse the vectorscope and waveform when the slider is moved to the right.
In the end these settings can be set to your liking, ie. to adjust for contrast and texture to better determine the ghostly image.
In another attempt to capture, we used stab on, gamma 24, exp 4 (max), and sensor at 12. This proved better results.