Daniel Lo Presti

Could it be that the on set lighting was too low contrast and had to be pushed too much in post? It doesn't really look too offensive to me, but might be a case of overly saturated shadows, where there would naturally be much less saturation at that level. Then again, there are techniques (photochemical, admittedly) that specifically aim for the kind of look you're describing, i.e. bleach bypass.

That subtitle workflow is very interesting, and comes none too soon! I recently finished manually entering subtitles within Lightworks on a 30+ min doc...

Which specific camera are you using? And what is your typical post workflow? I'm asking because I haven't figured out how to get the metadata to "survive" either through transcoding, or even going straight into the NLE for an online edit.

Actually it reminds me of a Swedish post-WWII drama I just started watching on Netflix, The Restaurant. The opening (mostly backlit) scenes were way too hazy for my taste, but then they were intercut with clean, high contrast frontlit shots (same scene) which ruined the continuity for me.

Seems to be common on period shows, used almost as a sort of metaphor. You even see it on shows like The Crown (although understated) where you'd expect a more pristine feel - just enough to make shafts of "sunlight" visible I suppose. I'm starting to think the creation of a "rants" sub-forum on this board might be in order. ?

Lovely images. I bought early into the Fuji X system, for stills, back when they were seriously lagging in the mirrorless video market. It's incredible how far they've come, to the point where they've now pretty much cornered the market. Some of the flares/light leak effects (?) remind me of some experimenting I'd done with "free lensing"; not sure how common a technique it is in a professional setting, but it certainly creates similar interesting effects, while conveniently reducing the minimum focus distance...

I just read your replies now, but I'd looked into the console quite a bit when I first got on to the LW platform, and while I couldn't justify the price of the full console for my current needs, I remember there was a much cheaper stripped down version which looked quite decent. How would you say the two compare? Would it bring any advantages to someone who is already extremely comfortable with the keyboard interface?

I'm seeing this more and more especially I guess on mid-level-budget streaming shows; whether it's budget-related I don't know, and it wouldn't be a problem if it were just a shot or two, but typically a large chunk of a show would look severely underlit/underexposed. I think it's also a contrast problem, possibly to avoid blowing highlights (eg. interior day scenes), though I can't imagine that being a major issue with the performance of today's cameras, even down to the prosumer level. I remember reading on this forum the trick of always having one element in the shot which is correctly or even over-exposed, in a dark scene, to sell the idea that the look was intentional. That would go some way to at least give a semblance of balance. But that's often not the case. Even just having a raking / side key light while keeping the rest of the face in darkness would be preferable. The first thing that came to mind was the parallel problem of intelligibility of dialogue, as mentioned by Aapo above, which I think is twofold: actors increasingly mumbling their lines, and dialogue being mixed lower in the mix. Possibly also due to sound mixers increasingly relying on the mix track instead of isos, in a world of vanishing budgets and ever-stringent deadlines. And as he also alludes to, I as a native English speaker very often find myself putting subtitles on just to be able to comprehend more than 50% of the dialogue!

I got into Lightworks somewhat by chance, but learned to love its minimalist philosphy (both in its interface as well as general design and approach to editing), particularly its emphasis on keyboard use. There's always a steep learning curve with learning keyboard shortcuts, compared to mouse use which is pretty much intuitive for the last few generations of users, but once it becomes second nature, not having to depend on the wired rodent enormously increases efficiency (I find), allowing you to concentrate on the creative aspects of editing. I have more of a music/recording background and it's a similar story with my DAW of choice, Samplitude - unfortunately also relatively unknown due to an almost non-existent marketing strategy.

I can only assume this will be Good News for the future of Lightworks! I read the news on the LWKS forum which I'm also a member of, but I'd be curious to know how many Lightworks users there on this forum.

The problem with the audio analogy is that there's a very specific reason for having chosen 44.1 / 48 kHz, and that's due to the upper limit of human hearing; Nyquist sampling theorem as it pertains to audio says you can capture the entire audible sound spectrum by sampling 2x the highest audible frequency (~ 20kHz, and that goes steadily downhill from your 20s onwards!). A pure fundamental tone (sine wave) can be perfectly described with two bits of data, the peak and the valley. And digital to analog converters are able to "perfectly" reproduce a sine wave from just those two points, there's no audible aliasing or "stepping". And for the record (no pun intended), many recording studios record in 44.1kHz, though modern DAWs and plug-ins internally process at higher resolutions, to avoid accumulating rounding errors - just ilke bit-depth in colour correction apps. (There are actually valid reasons to record at 96kHz but they're more to do with latency, not the sound itself.)

Interesting, I wasn't aware. I never managed to make it there - by the time I was actually interested in checking it out, it was cancelled due to that horrible tragedy...

I have no prior experience with Betacam but I would think a lot of the blown highlights (river) would be characteristic of the low dynamic range of the early generation video cameras. You have an apparently overcast sky with trees in the shadows, and water reflecting the bright sky. Probably even quite a challenge for many of today's lower end cameras. And the "fog" could be due to low contrast (possibly uncoated/single coated?) lenses... I suppose a doc like that would've used ENG style zooms... And a lot of the colour casts, even outdoors, seem to be simply mixed lighting (warm sunset with sun in frame contrast with cool shadows). Not sure what kind of colour correction was being done back in the SD tape-based days, but budget would've been a consideration too. The rest would just be the camera's white balance settings and/or colour temp gels. Esp. in the music videos a lot of that would've been done as an artistic choice. Are you specifically trying to reproduce that look? Or just trying to figure this out to avoid those same issues?

Well it has certainly been made crystal clear in this thread which career path I should pursue without any further trepidation. I'll dust off my rusty Fluffy Sausage quick smart.

Less glamorous? "How very dare you!" Ah ok, I might've just picked it up from this forum then... fair enough.