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.

Ok, I had to come back to this. I'm far from being a practising professional in this field (one can hope) - I have more of an audio/music background - but I'm really curious about where this stereotype (justified or otherwise) comes from? At least from the perspective of the music production industry, it would seem the film industry weathered the economic downturn, not to mention the digital revolution, a lot better, and while it probably has little in common with film production sound (something I'm being made increasingly aware of), I'm still baffled by this generalisation. I realise it's something of a running joke, but is it based in any truth at all?

I was about to write "please enlighten us", but curiosity took over and I did a reverse google image search.... https://www.hearinglossjournal.com/radar-great-big-hearing-aids/ ..and the one above isn't even the most preposterous-looking device! There was an article on BBC recently about this massive parabola-shaped wall somewhere in Southern England that was supposed to achieve the same thing .. found it. Fascinating stuff, especially for someone acoustically inclined/curious as I am.. https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-46348917

Yes absolutely... I guess I was mostly referring to the fact that even most DLSRs don't have the dynamic range of higher end cinema cameras. There seems to be a trade-off, where stills cameras focus on resolution, whereas for video cameras it's more about dynamic range / low noise. I did a time-lapse video of the lunar eclipse we had here a few months ago, with the moon setting behind a monument, with a mirrorless camera; unfortunately the speed of the moon's orbit was such that I had to use a slow-ish shutter speed, and the night photography with a long, slow-ish lens didn't help! So I ended up still being quite limited in how much I could lift the exposure in post... Edit: I just remembered what the biggest problem was: the eclipse was past totality and it was tough capturing both the darkened part of the moon still in the penumbra, and the bright crescent now illuminated by the sun.

I've wanted to do something similar in the past on a BMCC 2.5k but with the idea of getting long exposures (not light streaks specifically but same principle), however the camera only has a shutter angle option, not shutter speed, which limits the maximum effective shutter speed to 1x the frame rate. At least on the BMCC, the slowest framerate is 24/23.98 but then you have a timelapse option which basically allows for skipping certain frames. So eg. your framerate would still be 24fps but it would only expose a frame once a second (or however often you choose). So a 360 degree shutter would still only work out to 1/24s. And from what I've heard/read, it seems to be the same on other digital cinema cameras. Apparently this sort of thing would not produce a clean image on a cinema camera whose sensor is not optimised for long exposures - whereas a DSLR / mirrorless is perfect for this. Also, since you're essentially taking single frames, you can capture higher res frames on a DSLR (though probably with lower dynamic range - probably not ideal for light streaks on a dark background - although being such a stylized effect, I guess any clipped highlights in the streaks wouldn't be too distracting, and if anything, probably expected/desirable).

Probably veering off-topic somewhat but I guess the ease with which people assume the DP title is the fact that anyone these days can own a DSLR or mirrorless stills camera that happens to record video (and pretty decent video at that, compared to the camcorders of olde), probably has a manual mode, not to mention live mode / EVF which gives a decent enough idea of exposure and general look, all of which requires zero knowledge and understanding of exposure tools - all of this in contrast with owning/renting a film camera and all the know-how inherent in its operation, getting a decent image, lighting (a necessity for relatively slow film stock), film development, etc. Just like everyone and their dog is a music producer / engineer these days because they have an audio interface, a DAW, and a few virtual instruments.

Would I be wrong in assuming a global shutter might help a lot here? I recognise the "confused" description and I usually associate that look with a rolling shutter, particularly shooting handheld on a small, light camera. And possibly also shooting at a larger shutter angle could help, although pausing on some fast action in that video doesn't seem to reveal any particularly excessive motion blur.