How do you film LEDs????

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potatotron

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No matter what I do I get bad results when I film LEDs. I've got them behind a diffuser, I've played with room lighting levels and exposure levels on my camera (Nikon D5100). I've even tried limiting brightness -- in the video below no LED goes above 0x3f3f3f

This is the best I've been able to do, and it's still not very good. Any ideas?

 
Because the intensity is so high, they can saturate the camera's sensor. Reducing the exposure will make the surroundings nearly totally black. What works best for me is to NOT have the ambient lighting low - that will keep the exposure low also, and the LEDs will show up with the surroundings.
 
The way I take pictures of Christmas lights or candle light is to put my camera into second curtain sync mode (where the flash fires at the end of the cycle, instead of the beginning), and then take a long exposure shot in manual mode in a dark room. At the end of the cycle, the flash fires and lights up the rest of the room. I typically play with the shutter speed and aperture to get the color balance between the leds and the flash. For special effects, you can get a star filter that makes point light sources like leds emit a 4, 6, 8, or 12 point start.

I don't do this, but you can take two pictures, one without the leds on, and the other in darkness, with the leds providing the only light (manually focusing helps here). Then in post processing, you combine the two images.
 
I had to buy a ND filter for my camcorder to shoot the video for OctoWS2811. Without the filter, it was impossible to get decent video.
 
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