This is a post for the video-technoids among ye. We're post-producing our Farm Television pilot--Courage, New Hampshire--and we're trying to settle on a "look" for the interior shots. This sequence had very little light on the original shoot (our first mistake), and our efforts to bring up the light and the contrast digitally resulted in a deep reddish cast, brought on by the burnt-cherry stain of the public house walls. Premiere CS3 gives you dozens of color correcting tools, each with dozens of controls like "input black level," "hue correction," "saturation," "pedestal," "gain", "gamma" and more. (Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.) If you add too many of them, or dial the controls too far, the results can be very grainy, and sometimes you don't even see that blow-out until you play it out on a big screen TV. Anyway, here's a little measure of modern color-correction option shock:
Jeff came up with a version of the last one that looks really nice even on big screen TVs. (This process is something like a family sitting around a TV and arguing over the controls. "Too yellow!" "Too red! Too blue!") I think we have it now--at least for that scene.
Kill Market Garden Update
My rant last night on H.R. 875--a bill that would require all market-bound small farmers and back yard gardeners to register with the federal government, and endure inspections--got me stewing about the very venal realities involved: it's absolutely essential to remember that most of our policy making has nothing whatsoever to do with safety or the public good. Sure, it's always sold that way. They call this stuff things like "The Produce Safety Act" or "The Healthy Families Act" or the "Safe Streets Act," and there may be a few policy wonks and legislators (the ones who have never run a business) who actually think they are doing good in the world, but what they are really doing is: 1) creating a procedural burden that ends up criminalizing small time family business 2) protecting inefficient, leviathan semi-monopolies who can afford lobbyists and compliance staff and 3) making us all poorer for spending more time filling out forms and less time producing a product.
The best politician, in other words, is the guy who says: "I'm not going to do anything good for you. I'm not going to sponsor any legislation--unless it's a bill to roll back the last fifty years of do-good idiocy. Got that?"
A guy can dream anyway..
No comments:
Post a Comment