Phil Rhodes

I think this is being lost in translation. Lunch on an American set: Lunch on a British set:

I notice that in some of those, particularly the three guys with the big window behind them, allow the daylight to look slightly blue while the tungsten looks slightly warm. Whether it's a grading decision or a colour balance decision, I notice that happening a lot - I see a lot of monitors with Alexas set to 4200K, so people can easily go pleasantly warm or pleasantly cool without it being over the top.

That's an Aladdin Fabric Light, but there are a few brands. P

Well, if power's cheap, which frankly it often is, tungsten works great for more or less everything. There are two situations where LEDs win. First is when you're running around on battery power (though HMIs can also be battery powered, up to a certain sane size limitation; the thing with LEDs is that they're ofte small lights.) Second is if you're lighting a huge studio interior with space lights or something like that. In that situation, studio power is often extremely expensive, and you can end up using vast amounts of it. Even worse, all that inefficient lighting creates massive amounts of heat, which can require massive amounts of air conditioning, which requires massive amounts more power. The place LEDs and the like really score is in news studios where the lighting runs all day and all night, and it has to be air conditioned to keep everyone looking pretty. If you're shooting a small project in someone's house, unless for some reason you need massive amounts of light, tungsten is fine.

Comparatively little light for a lot of power. HMI, fluorescent and LED are all at least four times better.

Tungsten-halogen light is wonderful. It has excellent colour quality, excellent matching between units even between manufacturers and even between units which have had wildly different amounts of use. It hot-restrikes and is available in a vast range of power levels from flashlight to Wendy light. It is fairly lightweight and usually completely silent in operation. It is extremely inexpensive and naturally creates reasonably small, point sources that can be used to create light of almost any character via inexpensive modifiers. It fades smoothly all the way to black (and that gives you some colour control too!) It's just horrifically inefficient. In every other way it's wonderful.

I think you have to give some serious thought to how much you're going to pay for Premiere and how long it'd take you to have paid for some more RAM, or even a whole new computer. Resolve will probably do a quick mask-and-shift fix as you described, Fusion will do much more.

You might also look at Resolve, which is a lot more affordable than Premiere and comes with an inbuilt version of Fusion. If you were already a hardcore Premiere person it might be annoying to switch, but frankly, it's very hard to recommend anyone keeps paying the endless Adobe tax these days, especially if you'd be new to the full version of Premiere anyway.

This can get sticky because, as you've discovered, of colour management. I'd do something like that in Premiere by inserting an After Effects composition, which will generally make a reasonable job of handling the colour situation. Definitely export directly from Premiere. Avoid JPEG with its compression and (generally) low bit depth. Use DPX, TIFF etc. P

Not to recommend something outrageously spendy, but some of the big flexible LED fabric lights are pretty good for this sort of thing, and you can trim the colour to your heart's content.

Get some Photon Beard LEDheads. Sorry, it's really called a PhotonBeam 80, but it's an LED redhead. Remote phosphor panels for top-banana colour quality, and you can interchange them for different colours. P

Isn't this a judgment call, in the end? If we're shooting a spooky woodland scene for a haunted house movie, we might expose for the spots of sunlight, so the forest recedes into darkness. If we're shooting under the palm trees in the oasis in the desert, we might expose for the shadows, so as to emphasise the power of the hot sun. In either case we'd meter both separately and evaluate how much contrast there is. If it's just a few stops, most modern film stocks (and digital cameras) will deal with that, with enough to spare to, you know, actually see what's going on in both areas. You could make that decision in the grade, though probably you shouldn't. If it's ten stops, that's perhaps different. P

Careful, Tyler, that's advancing the dangerous view that all this obsessing over monitoring numbers is more than offset by the unreliability of the human visual system, and we can't have that! P

I have an Asus PA32UCX here right now. 1200 nits, 1152 zones of LED backlighting, £2500 or so in the UK. P

BVM-HX310. Remortgage your house.