Re: The Brits - Do ITV understand anything about television?

In article <43fb5c0b.116596968@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Zero Tolerance wrote:
As for the filmic look, I fail to see why an event as chaotic as an awards
ceremony needs that sort of sheen.

Altogether now:

"Because video looks cheap and film looks expensive."

Only by association, not intrinsically. Film literally *is* expensive, so the
equipment is most frequently used only on productions which can be expected to
recoup their costs, and it is much more likely that the people recruited to
work on these productions will be people with a track record who can work on
previous experience. Video equipment is more widely available, it is
relatively cheap to experiment and results can be seen immediately, so it is
commonly subjected to much more "casual" or experimental techniques. The
results show in the production techniques and in the types of productions that
choose a particular shooting medium in the first place.

There's also the fact that a great many programme makers have a film
background, are familiar with film, don't know much about electronics and
don't want any help (which they sometimes see as "interference"), from people
who do. Flm schools are still turning out people like this, so film equipment
is more often used by people who have been properly trained in its use, and a
lot of electronic equipment is in the hands of people who haven't a clue.

There's nothing in the appearance of the pictures themselves that makes film
look more expensive. In fact, if the result is to be shown as video, shooting
it on video using modern equipment and people who know how to set it up
properly will miss out quite a lot of potential sources of errors and
distortions, so the pictures can look enormously better. You'd think that
better pictures would be seen as an improvement, but for some reason,
programme makers don't always want this, the commonest criticism I've heard
being that the pictures look "too real", whatever that means, and so they are
often degraded in an attempt to imitate what they would look like on film. I
would have thought that good photography should aim to replicate what is in
front of the camera, not the deficiencies of an alternative type of
technology, but apparently this won't do. We thus end up with dark pictures,
oversaturated pictures, black crushed pictures, white crushed pictures, green
pictures (Why is it nearly always green?), jerky pictures, or even pictures to
which artificial "grain" has been deliberately added, or any combination of
the above, and they think it's an improvement, and declare video quality to be
rubbish.

Rod.

.

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