I spent most of the nineties worrying about whether a roll of Kodak would last the afternoon, so watching people today treat a digital sensor like a magic wand is exhausting. There is this pervasive, expensive myth that if you just buy the right $500 LUT or the newest color-grading plugin, you’ve solved your problems….
I spent three weeks on a documentary in the Highlands last year, watching a kid with a brand-new cinema rig try to fix a mismatched scene by downloading yet another LUT. He thought he could buy his way out of a continuity error, but you can’t fix a fundamental misunderstanding of light with a software…
I spent three weeks on a documentary in the Highlands last autumn, fighting mist and failing light, only to watch a junior editor try to “fix” a crushed shadow profile by slapping a heavy creative LUT onto the timeline. It was painful. There is this pervasive, expensive myth circulating in every gear forum that a…
I remember a shoot in a cramped, windowless basement in Bristol—no budget, one single tungsten bulb, and a talent who looked like they were being interrogated by the secret police. The operator was sweating, frantically scrolling through menus, trying to find some magic “skin tone profile” in the camera settings to save the shot. It…
I remember sitting in a dim rental house in Soho, staring at a high-end OLED monitor that looked absolutely gorgeous, while the waveform was screaming that I’d clipped the highlights into oblivion. I was convinced the image looked “cinematic” because of the mood, but the math didn’t lie. This is the trap most people fall…
I spent three hours last Tuesday watching a kid in a studio apartment try to fix a jarring jump in visual tone by cycling through five different $50 color LUTs. It was painful. He was looking for a digital band-aid to fix a fundamental failure in his setup, convinced that a better sensor or a…
I spent three hours last week on a Zoom call with a kid who was convinced he could buy his way out of a bad exposure by upgrading to a new sensor, as if a higher bit depth acts as a magic wand for poor lighting. It’s the same old song: people treat post-production like…
I spent three hours last week watching a beautifully lit documentary—the kind where the shadows actually mean something—only to have the entire experience ruined by text crawling across the bottom of the frame like a distracted insect. People seem to think that learning how to write good subtitles is about finding the flashiest font or…
I remember sitting in a cramped edit suite ten years ago, staring at a monitor while a client insisted we needed a “premium transcription service” to fix a messy dialogue track. They were convinced that throwing more money at a software subscription would solve a fundamental lack of clarity in the scene. It’s the same…
I spent most of the nineties sitting in dark suites waiting for film to develop, learning that if a shot didn’t work in the light, no amount of magic in the lab was going to save it. Now, I watch kids spend six hours a day hunting for the perfect transition plugin or a way…
Read More “Editing for Sixty Seconds Is a Different Craft” »