Exposing Interiors for Real Estate Video
Whether you are shooting real estate photography or video, properly exposing your image is crucial. Some of the luxuries we have in photography are unavailable or unrealistic when you are capturing a home for real estate video. Knowing the tools at your disposal and adjusting your expectations will allow you to produce your best video productions.
A Starting Point: Your Histogram
We first need to have a working knowledge of the histogram. You may be familiar with shooting off of a histogram, but if not, let’s take a look. Your camera’s histogram is a simple graph that represents the grayscale version of the brightness of your image – the graph ranges from pure black to pure white. The concentration of pixels at that brightness is shown vertically for any of the values from pure black to pure white. An underexposed image will have large concentrations of pixels on the left of the histogram, whereas over exposed imaged will have large concentrations of pixels represented on the right side of the histogram. A properly exposed image for most interior video will have pixels within the middle of the histogram without pushing to either extreme.
It should be noted that there are many other tools to check exposure in video. The histogram is just one of the fastest and most readily available. Other tools your camera or monitor may have for setting and checking proper exposure would be zebras, false color, and waveform. Histograms provide a quick and easy way to check and judge overall exposure.
Exposing Interior Video: Think Single Exposure
If you’re transitioning from photography into video, it’s best to think about exposing most interiors in the same terms as if you were shooting photos and had to take a single ambient exposure. As a real estate videographer, you will most likely be shooting at a constant aperture, constant shutter speed (dictated by your frame rate), and a single ISO setting. You may change these room to room, to properly expose the new room, but the latitude we enjoy from photography in compositing multiple images is unrealistic in video. When setting exposure for a room you want to properly expose the room while trying to avoid overexposing the highlights or underexposing the shadows (crushing the blacks or crushing the highlights).
Take a look at the following histograms. Our first example shows a room that has been underexposed. While we have great information in our windows but most of the room is underexposed to the point of being unusable. Being real estate videographers we will have to showcase the room. To recover the darker areas of the image we might try to raise the exposure in post or adjust the curves, this will introduce noise and we will still lose the windows. Overall, our image quality will suffer.
Contrast that with our second image where we have overexposed the scene and have extremely overexposed windows. This is a problem for real estate video as we have lost a lot of data for the blacks in our image and even if we are shooting log or raw, we will not be able to recover all of the information from those overexposed highlights.
Finally, a properly exposed histogram can have data across the entire histogram without clipping the extremes. When you clip your blacks or your whites, you are almost always losing data that can’t be recovered. Watch the extremes of your histogram.
Window Exposures in Video
In almost all of the real estate video we shoot, our windows are overexposed to a point. This is due to the simple fact that we are shooting with ambient light only. There isn’t a practical way to control the sun. Bringing in a powerful enough lighting set up to compete with the sun would be cost and time prohibitive. Bringing a giant roll of ND to knock down the windows would also be out the picture. So we do our best to maximize our dynamic range by shooting in a log profile and we focus on the exposure of the room.
If a room has a spectacular view, we will capture dedicated shots exposed for outside. In these cases, we will pick up dedicated shots where we have either dropped the ISO or tightened up the aperture. These dedicated shots can be a great addition to your edit.
When working with an agent that is new to video, go out of your way to show them examples of your work and make sure to discuss how the final video will look. My company goes as far as discussing window exposures beforehand as we found many agents expect the same views as our photography. Setting proper expectations and using many types of shots goes a long way to keeping an informed and happy client.
Is there any other way you like use to check your exposure? What tool is your favorite?
Don’t crush your highlights and keep showing off the properties you get to capture!
I do walkthrough video tours. They are effective and show how the rooms the buyer will likely already have seen in the pictures flow together.
To get decent volume the video has to be sold at a value price. $250 for most 2,500 sqft homes by themselves or $400 when packages with photos. Note…I did not say $400 for video alone. I cannot consistently sell good volume at those higher price points in my market.
Price dictates everything. Workflow. Time on site, time in post…everything. For me this means FAST. As in I want the entire interior filmed in 12 minutes and I want to use just one 17 minute battery with the drone outside.
That 12 minute interior video time target dictates many things. The biggest factor is that I do not have any time to adjust exposure. Zero. There is no pointing the camera at the scene, checking histgram, adjusting, shooting…next setup, check histogram, adjust, shoot…
No no no. There is “camera goes on gimbal, press record, walk through whole house, stop record”. That is it. That is all there is time for.
So I need the camera to pretty much get everything right all the time regardless of lighting conditions and CHANGES in light conditions.
You come out of a darker “intimate” first-floor master bedroom into a great room space with blazing 2-story windows? I want that camera to adjust for the under lit bedroom and the over lit great room all on the fly. I want shadows lifted in the bedroom and I want the highlights protected as soon as I walk from the darker room to the brighter. With no input from me. No checking. No nothin’. I have enough to worry about watching for me showing up in reflective surfaces.
So how do we accomplish this video alchemy?
S-Priotity and Auto ISO.
I shoot slog3 at the recommended +2ev exposure compensation. Auto ISO is set to max out at 25,600 and will bottom out at the 1,600 that slog3 requires. Shutter speed is 2x frame rate. I shoot manual focus and pump focus to 3m and then gently guide it back until it just barely rolls over to 2m focus point.
Now I’m ready to go.
The camera will now do everything I said I wanted it to do. As I pass into darker rooms it will automatically open the aperture to the max and then start boosting ISO as needed. As I turn in any direction and the lens starts pointing at an overly bright window the camera will fist bottom out ISO and then start stopping down the aperture on the fly to protect highlights. I have seen the screen indicate f22 a few times but rarely it has to go more than f16.
The result is that I am able to produce basic videos that I can sell at a price point that attracts consistent orders and boosts my average sales price significantly. Anyone who does not live in a luxury market with $2M+ homes all over the place which agents can justify spending $500 and up for…that is, if you live in a “normal” market but struggle to be able to find customers that will pay for video at the price point you need to sell them to be profitable…this workflow may be your key to cracking the video market in your area wide open. The speed with which you can create these videos allows you to sell at an aggressive price and a huge benefit is that by attracting customers who want video…you will be getting the phtograohy business by default. They can launch a listing with photos and not video but they can’t launch a listing with video and no photos…and who wants to hire and schedule two separate service providers when one guy or gal can get it done in one go?
Hi Brian. I’ve just found your comments and found your approach to RE video really interesting. I’m just starting to do RE videos here in the UK and I’d love to know more about the final package you present to the client. Do you edit the 12 minutes of footage, other than exposure and colour corrections? And what about the drone footage? Do you mix that into the ground-level stuff? If you’ve got the time it would be great to see an example of the finished product. Thanks.
Hey Brian! We are at very similar price points. We shoot homes for video with drone in about an hour and about an hour to edit in house. Often in the flow of the house, we will check the exposure of where our shot will land. There is wiggle room to pull somewhat in post, we shoot slog2, but we have found we really want the control and consistent focus of a manual lens on a set aperture. We try to walk the line between very practical home tours that are still stylistic (but not overly cinematic – almost no changes in focal length – all wide). We might have to try some auto ISO, does it change smoothly or does it click up? Same for aperture, is a smooth pull? Talk soon!
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