Basic and Most Effective Video Lighting Setup
For some, lighting can be a bit scary, because not everyone has knowledge of it, and at times it might be confusing. You might think that lighting a video just puts lights in front of you, around you, or whatever you’re shooting directly at. Or maybe you thought you were just going to turn every single light in your room and make your video light up. Well, you might as well try and do that, but chances are you’d still end up with a dark, grainy, unbalanced video.
Video Lighting Setup Basics
Now, if you’re shooting outside in the daylight, there’s no need to set up lights, because the best light you can use is sunlight. However, you’ll need good lighting if you’re shooting inside a room, a studio or basically indoors.
In reality, lighting is a crucial part of filming and editing a film (especially if you are a vlogger). It ought to be so good that it won’t be noticed. I’m going to explain in this post one of the most effective, basic lighting configuration you could do, and the kind of lights you could use to set this up.
Three-Point Lighting is the very basic setup, and the most widely used setup to illuminate a subject on the screen. This is a standard setup for the industry and is used for photo shoots, movies, television shows, and the like.
THREE POINT LIGHTING SETUP:
Setup of Video Lighting: Three-point setup
1. Key Light is the first one on this setup, and this will be your main light source. This will help to shed light on the subject. It produces shadows and textures that make objects look realistic in reality. Some say that you should simply use this as your main light if you have a window, since it is still a diffuse light, and natural light is and will still be the best source of illumination. However, if you don’t live in a house with a big window that might be a potential source of light, you’re going to need a large source of diffuse light.
Since it’s the primary light source, it has to be bigger and brighter than the rest. You don’t want to put this directly on the subject or point directly to your face because it’s going to produce a really shiny, clean, washed-off look that’s not good. We want to expose the contours of our heads, so we position it at an angle of about 45 degrees from you or the subject you are filming.
Soft Box-A strong key light may be a soft box. It’s a light box that diffuses light from the point light (bulb) into a wider field with a film on it.
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2. To lighten the shadows created by the Main Bright, Fill Light is used. This is positioned on the opposite side of the key light which should not be as bright or brighter than your key light or worse than your key light. On the other side of your face, there should be just this slight touch of light so as to soften the shadows produced by your primary source of light. Again, do not explicitly point this to the subject, attempt to angle it and see if the light bounces off. But if you want a dramatic touch to your film, you will not need to use a filling lamp.
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3. This is used to highlight the edges of the subject, in a way to distinguish the subject from the backdrop, sort of add it more dimension to the video, because if it’s just the main light and fill light, the back section would be kind of gloomy and the subject kind of blends, which is a little meh. This will make you less flat and more dimensional in your subject.
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Lights in Practice. This are the lights that you put on your backdrop that you can see on camera, so, let’s say, if your background is dark and one of your lights casts a really bright light, it sort of makes your scene look artificial, because it just doesn’t blend with the rest of the scene, because the audiences can wonder where it comes from. For eg, if you have this orange light that softly illuminates the back of your hair, if you put a lamp that emits the same light color on your background, they’re going to say, well, it’s coming from that lamp, when it really comes from the light on the rim. To make the scene more realistic looking, functional lights are used, so you can use just about any form of light that makes sense for it.
A good light source and configuration will make your camera function at its best and give your video the professional look that could really raise your videos to the next level.
