The above video shows what happens when you point a video camera from the inside of a room toward a window and then back into the room. The camera has to adjust for the differences in in light that the lens sees. When it is facing toward brighter outside light, it adjusts to see outside the window creating the inside to be darker. If you pause the video between 7 and 8 seconds, you will clearly see the inside dark before the video re-adjusts for the inside light and gets bright once again. This is when sometimes the inside of a home will always appear darker than the photos. Photos, photography is vastly different to video and videography.
To better understand this, comntinue to read on and we'll give you an insight on how all cameras work versus what our eyes see. Eyes have a 'high dynamic range, HDR for short. This means that they have ability to see both bright areas and dark areas at the same time. A camera does not. It can either see one or the other at any one time. Their 'dynamic range' is way way lower than the human eye. So how is it that you can get photos to show balanced light inside and outside of a home at the same time? Well they dont. Its done by multiple photos taken at different exposures to capture the dark and light areas of a scene and which are blended together in software using a process which everyone is now familiar with, 'HDR Photo Preocessing'. Hence, the name HDR photos. Currently, there is no technology that exists to be able to do this for video.
You have two choices to set the exposure when takin video. Manual or Automatic. With manual exposure, you set it to light to see inside a room ir dark if you want to see what is outside the window. These permanant settings. What do we mean by permanant. Well, if the exposure is set to dark, although you'd be able to see outside the window, the room would be very dark. When set to light, you'd be able to see clearly inside the room but with windows would appear so bright that you won't see the outside. This is known as window 'white out' or 'window blowout.'
When the camera is on auto exposure this setting doesnt allow either one of these scenarios to be permanant. The video wont go extremly dark, but it also wont go very bright as the camera adjusts the exposure constantly to what is sees in the overall frame. This is the setting that we do use so that there are no extremes of darkness or brightness. And for view shots, we can pan from outside to inside the room to capture the view.
However, you may have see videos where none of the above thats been said applies. This is due to a set of circumstances coming together at the time of the shoot as well as the amount and size of windows on the home. Heres an example: A very overcast day , a covered patio with the sun is on the other side of the home creating an even exposure between the outside and inside light. . The results being that you can see the outside and the inside on the video at the same time. This is the reason why you cant compare one video to another. Different homes have differnet exposure variances do to room size, window size, position of the room in relation to the sun, sunny day, cloudy day or anything in-between.
