The week of the first lockdown in March 2020 a live streaming studio became a necessity to keep serving my customers, so I instantly started to build the first version of my studio. It was my first decent attempt to achieve a cinematic webcam that I actually could use live.

Before v1 there was also a lot of incremental versions, v0 being just natural light or cheap light and no successful color grading (terrible and worse, cheap lights destroying the possibility of ever getting a clean grade).

v0.5 was the first attempt to shape the light cinematically using new professional cinema lights (great color accuracy, went for cheap-ish and thus underpowered for my needs) and also color grading my own LUT using an actual x-rite ColorCheck color correction chart. To me, this was the “we’re finally getting anywhere” moment. IMO it was also a pleasing look, but way too flat and way too edgy.

Both the v0 and v0.5 where made with the tiny Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera super 16mm MFT camera on a cheap-ish Samyang MFT 12mm lens and I used a Blackmagic Design UltraStudio Mini Recorder Thunderbolt (only works in a few apps like e.g. Zoom) and a Corsair Elgato Game Capture HD60 S+ for the rest (emulates webcam, lower quality signal) until the release of the ATEM Mini Pro.

The base lighting setup remains the same to date: A key light close left (my side) of my face, a top/hair light just above my head, and a kicker further behind me to my right side (like a mirror version of the key light). This is a classic three-point film setup. (I’ve later also added various filler lights to help shape and warm up the light on my face.)

v1

This was the first serious “look” upgrading to more powerful professional cinema lights, adding softboxes with diffusers and grids to help shape the light, upgrading to the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k super 35mm camera and adding a professional Sigma Art lens.

The grading was updated to fit the new camera and lighting, but it was pretty much the same like v0.5 with no real “cinematic” look. Good contrast, shape and skin colors, but lacking that little certain something that the brain recognizes as “cinematic” (I had no idea what I was doing with color grading at the time). It was also a bit too dark (looked great for me, but sometimes participants reported it was a bit dark depending on their monitor an operating system).

Also, there was no “motivation” to where the light was coming from – just a black void.

v2

I later tried to refine the shaping using two filler lights, one for the shadow side of the face and one at the front of the face, both set to 3200K to add some warmth (all the other lights are 5600K).

I practiced a bit with grading in Davinci Resolve and found some trustworthy (e.g. Gerald Undone, Rob Ellis, Alex Jordan, Darren Mostyn, Cullen Kelly) educational content (btw, most videos on youtube on how to grade in Davinci Resolve are CRAP made by click-seeking idiots with no fundamental knowledge of color science and how grading actually works – let alone any sense of aesthetics) and made a more cinematic grading LUT. I also had to adjust the grade to having added a Teleprompter to the setup (yes, that added glass has a very noticeable effect). I still didn’t know what I was doing, though – an incredible amount of painstaking trial and error followed.

I also added the three lights in the background for “motivation”, aka fooling your brain to think that these are sources that light is coming from (no light from those three reaches my face from these lights, though – photons, inverse square law and all that), and it added some “interestingness” instead of just the dark void. It was still a tad bit too dark to account for variations in participants’ setup, though. In hindsight, I also find it too saturated – especially in the highlights and shadows.

v3

The major hardware change was replacing the individual fill lights with a light tube system that could be remotely controlled in concert (major headache to finess each light manually), also replaced the top/hair light with two tubes in the same system and built a custom softbox around them. The main reason for this, however, was that the new lights had more power than the previous and would enable me to lighten the look further.

I also changed the DOF (depth of field, went from f2.2 to f2.8) to better help staying in focus when naturally moving my head (yes, there is absolutely no autofocus in my cinematic setup), I then relit the whole thing by first cranking the ISO up from 200 to 800 to properly expose to the right (more dynamic range), and to enable using less power from the lights to achieve the same result (because of less eye-strain, lack of flexibility in lighting the scene if the lights are already maxed out at a 100%, and of course to consume less energy and generate less heat).

The major grading change was, aside from adjusting to the new lights and the ISO change, updating to Blackmagic Gen 5 color science (pain in the ass, had to regrade everything – but not too hard now that I know a little bit more about how to actually grade and I could replicate steps instead of trial and error) and a brighter, less “edgy” or stylized, look that still tries to retain that “cinematic” quality to it. It is now bright enough to accommodate for the differences in participants’ setups. Some report it is also a more pleasing look than the previous one.

My current Davinci Resolve node tree for color grading. (Screenshot showing a more edgy grade than my live LUT, disregard the “Grain” node.)

You should check out the Leeming LUT Pro (IMO the best color transform luts for the Blackmagic Cinema cameras out there by far!) before starting going crazy in Resolve yourself – worth every single buck.

The first node in my grading above is the “Leeming LUT Athena III – Blackmagic Design Pocket 4K – Gen5 Film”, the “Video to Full” node uses the “Leeming LUT Fixie – Video to Full Range” as I find it adds to the cinematic quality, and you can then add your creative cinematic grade to the “Creative LUT” node either manually or applying a cinematic LUT. Keep in mind that the creative LUT you apply should be expecting the same color science you are using. In my case using the “Leeming LUT Athena III – Blackmagic Design Pocket 4K – Gen5 Film” LUT converts the color space to something as close to rec709 as possible, so any LUT expecting a rec709 input will work – but any LUT expecting a different color space input will look like utter garbage. If you find a LUT that you like but it’s for a different color space than you have already set up (say Arri Log-C instead of rec709) – or conversely you’ve found a LUT but it looks like crap when applied and you don’t know what input it is based on – you can always add a node with a “Color Space Transform” effect in front of the Creative LUT node and experiment your way with converting your current color space to different ones to see if you can find something usable for the LUT to use as an input. Oh, and those “Limit Sat” nodes are for me to make sure that no colors snuck into the highlights or shadows during my grading process (I’m not going to claim I fully know what I’m doing here, there must be ways to do this more professionally) to mimic how photochemical film behaves.

See for yourself what v3 actually looks like in live action and check out the comprehensive list of the gear I’m currently using to achieve the look on my Kit.co page.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Lessons Learned:

• The quality of the output equals the quality of the input: camera, light, and lens matters equally
• Use a camera with enough dynamic range to be able to deliver a cinematic image at all
• Only use lights that are color-accurate
• Diffusion is a prerequisite for that cinematic “wrapped-around-the-skin” light
• All you need to know about diffusion is that you can either use a white shower curtain, a sheet of bleached muslin – or add a more productified version called a “soft box” to your main lights for your light to become wonderfully diffused
• All you need to know about Aputure Lightstorm lights is that Godox VL is cheaper and provides the same quality of light (or even better) for this studio use (Aputure Amaran 100d/200d might be a better budget option, though)
• Where you put your lights matters a lot – study what they’ve been doing in Hollywood for years
• Motivated lighting is a thing
• Use a lens that will support the creative vision of your output (shocker: all lenses are different), but it should probably not be a slow “kit lens”, more likely an f2.8 or faster prime lens (or a fixed t/f stop zoom lens, like I’m using in my v3 setup)
• Crop factors, full-frame vs MFT vs APS-C, etc are all things you are going to learn to hate – it’s already a fucking mess, and adding a speedbooster to the mix will just kill your will to live and make you give up on calculating actual focal lengths and t/f stops altogether (well, it’s not too hard to actually re-calculate it but it is a killjoy – if it works for you, fuck it, shoot with it)
• All you need to know about crop factors is to take the lens in question and mount it on your camera – if it fits (sometimes an adapter is needed) and if it looks good (no serious vignetting, you get the field of view, depth of field, smoothness or sharpness, the character you’re looking for) then it’s a keeper (screw the calculations) – oh, and never get into a discussion on this topic online ever
• All you need to know about speed boosters (or actually “Telecompressors“) is that, if you add them, whatever the mm and t/f stop printed on your lens says is now wrong (don’t worry, it’s all good – if the image now coming out of the lens is still usable) and you now need to adjust the lighting accordingly to taste (although feel free to cheat by using Zebras and False Color)
• All you need to know about Metabones vs Viltrox “Speed Boosters” is that the Viltrox is almost an order of magnitude cheaper and will most likely be fine for your “cine” webcam studio or office setup
• Contrary to common “cine” aesthetics, apply high sharpening in-camera if you intend to stream (compression garbles details so you want to have more details going in upstream)
• Color grading is an art, not a science – but a “cinematic” grading takes basic principles from  photochemical film science into account when grading
• If  you are on Apple Mac, you need to know this before stepping into grading with Davinci Resolve (I wish I had known sooner! It would have taken away 90% of the painstaking trial and error).
• Save yourself even more pain and time by investing in an X-rite ColorChecker Video (found on my kit.co page)