DoP Aaron J Anderson looks at the Genustech ND fader Circular Filter System. Aaron’s informative fader ND filter tutorial goes for around 31 minutes.
When it comes to nice shallow depth of field you need to open your iris really wide, but that leaves a problem when shooting outside. Because your iris is open really wide, lets say at f4.0, all that sun lite will blow your shot out. So you need to use some sort of ND (neutral density) filter to limit the light hitting your sensor.
One way is a matte box with 4×4 or 3×3 ND square filters but this can be a pain if your doing more on the production than just the camera and you don’t have an AC helping out with the camera set up. The faster way is using a fader ND filter that you just spin on the front of your lens to dial in the exact exposure.
This is so much faster but in the past I found they usually soften the image and create bad brown or green color cast and I recently found out that they also kill skin tones because they are made of rotating polarizer. The color cast is time consuming to correct in post, and having skin that look strange is not ideal. But recently Genustech came out with a new fader ND called the Eclipse.
This new fader ND filter does not soften the image and only warms the shot with no green color cast, but the warming effect is very fast and easy to correct in post. But we are still left with bad skin tones,or are we? In this video I will show you how you can get the maximum visual quality from you Genusetch Fader ND filter.
Hit up Aaron with any more questions about ND fader filters you may have, and you may want to sling him a tip on Vimeo for his work.
If you need to grab a Genustech ND Eclipse Fader then swipe one HERE.