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I would like to do a product demonstration similar to the White Room's demonstrations done by Apple, such as iPad 2 Product Demonstration
What type of lighting is used to keep the whites extremely white, while producing a professional looking video? Is this done by saturating the room with light, then going in after the video and darkening the video?
What type of room setup is needed?
Suggestions on Video Camera?
We do this all the time. All you need is a white wall and plenty of light.
The goal is to light the wall far brighter than the subject in front. You want it so that when the subject is properly exposed, the wall behind them is vastly overexposed/blown out, thus losing any details/texture on the wall.
It helps to keep the subject at a distance from the backdrop.
Here's the last shoot I was on using this technique:
The best results I've achieved were using a light grey cyc or background instead of actual white. They bring the exposure up to where it looks white but you don't have to use nearly as much light on the subject to make them expose properly. We just used kino's with diffusion on the cyc and kino's with less diffusion on the subject with a solid backlight. The 5D MkIII produced a fantastic and professional looking result.
I'd hazard a guess that they were either using a chroma key (green or blue screen) or a white wall studio to shoot in, and using a lot of lighting on the walls especially.
If it was blue or green screen, they would have used a few lights behind the subject on either side, but if they were in a white wall studio, they could have possibly used the reflected light off the walls to get the highlights from behind.
A dimmer, softer light source such as a soft box or umbrella from near and above where the camera is located is used to light their face.
The best how-to build for a white seamless background that I've seen yet is:
http://www.zarias.com/white-seamless-tutorial-part-1-gear-space/
And part 2 of that how-to covers setting the correct exposure very thoroughly:
http://www.zarias.com/white-seamless-next-post-this-afternoon/
Depending on how you want to treat the footage, like Nick Bedford said, your camera and capture choices may be very similar to the choices you'd have if you were shooting green screen, which you can read more about over at Create a DIY Green Screen / Chroma Key.
