Re: Highend tools - lower end budget

Fascinating debate fellow bovines...

I agree that a reference is important, but also see that 'cutting one's cloth' accordingly is also a viable option. I recently cut a low budget feature for a friend - total budget around 30k sterling - and he onlined and CCd (including magic bullet) in a suite with no scopes but with a decent monitor. Overall they did a pretty good job, with one or two exceptions - but the important point was that it was a thousand times better than had they not done it.

There's a saying this side of the pond - 'You can't polish a t*rd' - which is true... but modern low-end equipment can, given the right creative input from the back end, produce wonderful quality. As a professional I welcome that, but also recognise the potential for eroding standards that this revolution inevitably brings. If a job won't let me use the full complement of tools because of budgetary issues, I'll bring my full professional knowledge to bear on the job and see what can be achieved - as long as you're honest about the pro's and con's to the client then I think there is no harm in that.

As an aside - I have an on-screen SD waveform/vectorscope - which I'm planning to use alongside my setup (going to be either Kona3 or IoHD) for monitoring downconverted HD. Any gotchas? Will the downconverted HD signal fed to the 'scopes be useful for correction purposes? Better/worse than the internal 'scopes?

Cheers,

Jason