 Welcome to the Crimson Engine, my name is Rubidium. Today we are looking at cross keying and interview lighting scenario. Cross keying is a technique by which you use one person's key to be the other person's backlight or rim light. It's used for a scenario where you have two people that both need to be in the interview scene. So the interviewer and the interviewee. So you want to get footage of the person asking questions as well as the person answering them. If you're working in a studio space, you can just keep adding light until you get the look that you want. But if you're in a environmental setting, meaning the person's home or an office or some kind of other location, you're going to be limited by how much space and how much time you have. So clever people have worked out, you can get three angles or three different camera positions on two people, a master and two singles by using just three main lights or even two if you have good ambient exposure. So I had heard of this technique. I have used it once. So I thought I would try it again in this setting, experiment and see what result I can get. So first step, here are two interview chairs. They may look close. They may even look uncomfortably close. But this is a technique that's used pretty often because you're usually shooting, not in a studio but in a pretty confined space. So we're going to put the people reasonably close together. We're going to have their knees almost touching but in a sort of V shape so that we can get a good angle on both of them. And hopefully the wide won't look too strange. So here's our first super panel. I just left the face bare. I have a softbox that I'll probably need to put on in a second but at first I want to just get arrangement and direction and intensity for camera and then I can start modifying the light. So I've closed the windows now so I'm getting mainly the lights from the two keys. This light is keying me on the far side which is what I want. I don't want the key hitting the camera side of the face or it's going to be too flat. So it's the far side key and then the other key behind me is giving this great backlight. If I swap over to the other channel and we go over to this other angle. Now I'm getting this key on this side. We're going to have to adjust values and whatnot but just for direction. And again, I'm getting the rim kick back like kicker or backlight from the other person's key. I found if I tilt the super panel up first I'm able to get access to all four corners which is where the snap bag attaches. So now I have my snap bag on I'm going to have to up the levels of the light because I'm losing a little bit through the diffusion. So you see now we've kind of got a little bit more diffusion on there's less bounce so that the light is a little more contrasty which I like. Sitting in my chair like I am here I can talk to the other person and you get this. You have my key light on this side have my rim light on this side. Now the two more things that I want to add are front light so that it's not quite so contrasty. This looks a little cinematic right now the ratios between the bright side of my face and the dark side of my face are probably a couple of stops, three or four stops maybe. I want to get them down to maybe a stop so that I still have shaping, I still have definition in the face but it's going to be very forgiving for older journalists that may have a few wrinkles or your older politician that may have a few wrinkles and may want to have a little bit more of a beauty light. So rather than opening the window which when I do I'm going to lose control of how intense that is I'm going to set up a third light behind the main camera and push that through some diffusion and use that as my front light. So to kind of get that ratio back down to something more journalistic rather than cinematic I've set this C-stand with a quarter grid cloth hanging from the arm with another Lupo super panel behind and I'm going to have the main camera down below so it's sort of like an essentially like a four by three on camera light which is going to not create its own shadows but just bring up the level of the darker side of the subject's face. So now that we have our cross key interview I'm going to set up the three tripods or three tripod positions and get shots from each one so you can see what those final angles would look like. Now I only have one camera or one C200 here so I'm going to take a shot and move the camera but you could theoretically shoot this with three cameras simultaneously if you were getting, like I said, interview with a politician or that sort of thing where what the interviewer is saying is just as important as the interviewee. So that is shooting a three camera cross key interview. The main thing that I learned that I didn't really have a grasp of before was that you want to feather the key light so that it's not being too strong on the person who is its backlighting and it still has plenty of power so that it can hit the person that it's keying. Hopefully that helps someone out there. Super helpful for me rather than setting, if you were doing three point lighting for two people with separate lights you'd be at like six lights and we were able to pull this off to shoot for three cameras in the shots that we saw here with just three lights and made a cool interview in what's essentially a two car garage. Thanks very much for watching. Thank you, Asin, for helping out. Again, check out his YouTube channel. He's doing some awesome content there and I will see you next time.