My first facility job after college at a hybrid production/post company included more than just editing. Our largest production effort was to produce, post, and dub weekly price-and-item retail TV commercials for a large, regional grocery chain. This included two to three days a week of studio production for product photography (product displays, as well as prepared food shots).
Early on, part of my shift included being the video shader for the studio camera being used. The video shader in a TV station operation is the engineering operator who makes sure the cameras are set up and adjusts video levels during the actual production. However, in our operation (as would be the case in any teleproduction facility of that time) this was a more creative role – more akin to a modern DIT (digital imaging technician) than a video engineer. It didn’t involve simply adjusting levels, but also ‘painting’ the image to get the best-looking product shots on screen. Under the direction of the agency producer and our lighting DP/camera operator, I would use both the RGB color balance controls of the camera, along with a built-in 6-way secondary color correction circuit, to make each shot look as stylistic – and the food as appetizing – as possible. Then I rolled tape and recorded the shot.
This was the mid-1970s when RCA dominated the broadcast camera market. Production and gear options where either NTSC, PAL, or film. We owned an RCA TK-45 studio camera and a TKP-45 ‘portable’ camera that was tethered to a motor home/mobile unit. This early RCA color correction system of RGB balance/level controls for lift/gamma/gain ranges, coupled with a 6-way secondary color correction circuit (sat/hue trim pots for RGBCMY) was used in RCA cameras and telecines. It became the basis for nearly all post-production color correction technology to follow. I still apply those early fundamentals that I learned back then in my work today as a colorist.
Options = Complexity
In the intervening decades, the sheer number of camera vendors has blossomed and surpassed RCA, Philips, and the other few companies of the 1970s. Naturally, we are well past the simple concerns of NTSC or PAL; and film-based production is an oddity, not the norm. This has introduced a number of challenges:
1. More and cheaper options mean that productions using multiple cameras is a given.
2. Camera raw and log recording, along with modern color correction methods, give you seemingly infinite possibilities – often making it even harder to dial in the right look.
3. There is no agreement of file format/container standards, so file-based recording adds workflow complexity that never existed in the past.
In the next three blog posts, I will explore each of these items in greater depth.
©2019 Oliver Peters
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