YOU’RE OUT OF DAYLIGHT AND YOUR VIDEO VIEWFINDER LOOKS DARK?

This happens to all shooters. In shooting film when this happens you can switch to a faster or (more sensitive to light film stock) or you can put on some high speed lenses. (lenses with a faster aperture opening).

That extra hour of shooting can mean big savings to the producer of a feature film with 150 people on the crew but what about you with your camcorder?

The most obvious approach would be to hit the DB boost setting that a lot of cameras have. In other words instead of shooting at “0 DB” you push the button to “9 DB “ or “18 DB” or whatever your camera has for this.

The big problem here is that as you do this what you are actually doing is getting the camera to boost its sensitivity to light at the expense of a weaker video signal. (a less contrasty, less sharp and more “noisy” ,this is like grain in film image).

An extreme example here would be those shots from the gulf war showing rockets being fired at night. Remember how grainy these images were?? In this case the content far outweighs the technology.

The other things that you can do is to wait till you have more light or change the position of the camera to obtain more light or add some artificial light to the subject. Those are your choices.