Mark Grgurev wrote:
That's not how dynamic range works. There's no shadow or highlight dynamic range. You just have dynamic range, your curves, and your middle grey point. Bring the middle grey point up gives the impression of pulling more detail from the highlights and bringing it down appears to bring up more detail in the shadows.
That's what how the ISO works on all the BMD cameras except the Pocket 4K/6K which have two analog ISO ranges where it works like that and then the higher ones are analog gain.
Yes, I know that.
I'll "technically correct" my post. I meant above middle grey. Sure, you can have 20 stops below middle gray but when you boost those up, you're typically losing color saturation, sometimes there are shifts in color, sometimes colors get distorted, some of it's noisy, etc.
Sure, if you scale down to 8K or 6K, you might get more dynamic range in the shadow areas since the noise might be less, but that's not as noticeable, if at all, as having stops above middle grey. But it might be. If you can shoot clean footage at 2000 ISO on an 800 camera, and you set your middle grey accordingly, you've shifted the dynamic range distribution and you might have more in the highlights, but then how much overall contrast, saturation, and overall midtone contrast do you lose?
It's not linear across the whole exposure range. That's why I personally prefer a bunch of stops above middle grey than what many cameras offer. I think that's more important. That's just my opinion though.