Re: Highend tools - lower end budget

[Joseph Murray] "Dave Alvin has won Grammys and is very well respected and is a gritty down to earth guy. I was able to employ friends who are well estaplished DP's in their own right as camera operators who lent their personal vision and style to the shooting."

Did they by any chance ever use light meters? If not, how did they determine their proper exposure? How could you ever match another lighting setup in a different location without the use of some way of comparing the two?

This is my point. I had a DP come in to "calibrate" his laptop monitor so he could tweak stills from the film he is shooting to give me a look I could match. The problem was We couldn't get his monitor anywhere near the broadcast monitor. His blacks were particularly bad.

You know why we tried this? On his last film he did this with the telecine house in Spain and they "matched" his look. So I received HDCAM SR masters with crushed blacks.

My point, and the one some of you seem to be missing, is that you need some standard to guage results by. That is the point of scopes and "reference" grade monitors.

Sure, you can make your project look great on your computer monitor. If your audience will only watch it on your computer monitor, you are golden.

What if by chance it goes somewhere else? Have any idea what it will look like? The old argument that grandma's set in Peoria is green and washed out anyway doesn't hold. If we stay with the SMPTE specs when we correct our shows, at least they will all be consistently green and washed out on her set.

This isn't a heated argument. I know what it means to have a standard of judgement. Just like a Pantone chart, grey scale, a ruler, etc. These things keep us on the same page. Using a dictionary doesn't mean you have to write things only one way, it means that we all have the same understanding of certain words so we can communicate. Apparently I'm not doing a very good job of that here.

It appears that you folks are confusing low cost film making with a lack of a need for a standard on which to align images.

Terence Curren
www.alphadogs.tv
www.digitalservicestation.com
Burbank,Ca