"Ever wonder why there is relatively little discussion of lighting equipment, setup, and technique on these forums?"

Probably, like me, they're reluctant to engage in a dialogue that might entail revealing some footage of the utter crap we're making ;-)
k

"having been 'fired' from high school,

Ha. Reminds me of a former student with a ~180 WISC who got booted from one middle school and three high schools, and finished his diploma while in college. Fortunately, I got him involved in community theater, and he is now a happily unemployed 25y/o set builder still living with his parents . . .

Ahh. Speaking of lighting, this could go to some very dark places. I hope he isn't rotting and festering.
I prescribe a good dose of Ansel.

Times are brutal here, too. '08 was one of my best years ever, and this may be my worst.

Keith

"This makes me all the more curious to see the Glenn Chan plug-in. Can it really work? It seems to have disappeared from Vasst. I guess I'll have to go without."

Keith, this it not a plugin but a set of presets for the curves plugin. You can get it from here.

Thanks! I still had Glenn's site open in another window, but I hadn't delved in far enough yet.
I'll play with that for a while.
cheers,
Keith

1- My curves preset is the best way I have found so far. If anybody knows of a better method, I'm all ears.

---------------

That said, I must admit that getting a handle on video technicalities seems to be the hardest thing I've ever attempted by at least one order of magnitude. Just in compositing alone, the lack of consistent terminology from book to book is a source of grief, and then the variety of standards, the order in which they developed, what problems they solved, and as you mention, the varying levels of compliance seem to make it an absolute minefield. Being a 'first principles' kind of guy, it's beginning to seem that the best primer would be a really good book on the history of television. Any suggestions?

You can try Charles Poynton's book (see poynton.com), though it is meant for video engineers and not video editors. It is.... highly technical. It does not cover the history of television per se, though it has good information on the various technologies and standards.

As far as Vegas goes, a lot of the issues is specific to Vegas. Most other NLEs convert everything into one format (or act as if they do).

The reason why the PITA issues in Vegas exist is because it has to deal with the 'computer' world and the 'video' world. The future is moving towards convergence of the two worlds, but there is some historical baggage that comes along for the ride (e.g. timecode / 29.97 / DF versus NDF, interlacing, video formats allowing for illegal levels, HD being first developed in a mostly-CRT world, etc.). The baggage exists for backwards compatibility reasons (e.g. so you can downconvert to SD easily and broadcast/distribute in SD too) and because of the technology at the time (e.g. CRT).

Glenn, thanks for chiming in!

Even if I only really understand 2% of it, that looks like what I'm after --kind of an "Ilford Manual meets Machinery's Handbook" of the video world.

It's definitely on my wish list.

Thanks for that!
Keith

AndyL, re your reply of 9/28/2010 6:32:41 PM (I've been out of circulation till now):

My method is essentially to work clip-by-clip to one standard then use nested to map from that standard to the target standard(s) - which may be multiple. Hence separate nests for each standard (I call them "Wrapper" projects.

One way to apply that method is to work initially within Vegas's natural standard (right or wrong, at least it's consistent, as has been mentioned) then use nested to map that to sRGB or whatever. Requires up to two mappings in series (risking quantization artifacts) but doesn't "fight the system".