Your scene lighting presents a strong case for shooting 10 bit 422.

Any chance of sharing the original clip?

Nick - I found that once I turned the split screen off, a modified curve (I use curves a lot) worked as well. here is a 4K still from the original clip - you can see how dark it really was:

Something like this should work well, assuming the levels in your still match the levels in the video. The lower left anchor is at RGB 16. The upper right is at RGB 240 which is allowing the red to go to 240 (which I *think* is still "legal") while the overall luminance is within 235.

Red chroma at 240 should be OK for broadcast, although some PBS outlets have been picky in the past.

The Still was take in V14 from the original footage. My curve was very similar to yours. I normally work with a Gx8 (2) and have found the down rezed 4K to be fine (been using ProRes as an intermediate codec). Thanks for sharing, appreciate it.

Remember that you should only reveal detail that is of interest in the shadows. Detail not of interest is better left unrevealed. You should not lighten shadows too much or the scene will lose impact. Just lighten enough so that the detail of interest is only just visible or tantalisingly hinted at. Always leave some dark shadows, particularly the darkest, or the scene will look washed out.

I don't believe that you can get adequate results for the really difficult cases merely by remapping levels. The better filters, such as I believe Adobe uses, attempt to separate the scene into shadow and non-shadow regions, apply a mask (matte) to the shadow regions as a whole, feather the edges, and then increase the brightness of the regions. That way you retain the contrast within the shadows, because the brightness is applied to the regions, not individual pixels. Care has to be taken with the feathering, however, or you will get halos around the region borders. Sharp shadow edges should have narrow feathering and vice versa.

With a blue sky, dark shadows, once lightened, may look unnaturally blue, and so may need a little colour correction, but not too much. They should always be slightly blue if the sky is blue.

I use LightMachine for photos, but I do not know of a video filter that is as comprehensive in its controls. Adobe Shadow/Highlights is the best video filter that I know of.

Remember that you should only reveal detail that is of interest in the shadows. Detail not of interest is better left unrevealed. You should not lighten shadows too much or the scene will lose impact. Just lighten enough so that the detail of interest is only just visible or tantalisingly hinted at...

Thanks Peter. That is thought-provoking. I will bear it in mind when trying to "rescue" detail that doesn't really need rescuing.

Don't get me wrong; the old school analog look will be with us forever, in the same sense that audiophiles fervently cling to their vinyl collections.

Our tendency to expect some polarization of values in the shadows and highlights is a conditioned response imo, to nearly 200 years of inability to get the visible spectrum on the medium. Adams used this shortfall to his advantage and developed means to quantify exposure "zones", often sacrificial, in much the way Peter describes.

But now we have HDR and the ability to acquire and display a far greater range of values to the human eye. I believe that over time, the cultural preference of starkness over detail will gradually shift to a slightly flatter but more inclusive "look" to our creations. I actually prefer D7K and Nick's interpretations to the classic Adams landscape technique, which has been to deliberately block some shadows in order to divert attention to the highlight details, understandably in less forgiving media than we have today.

One thing is for certain - - we have far more creative choices available to us than even a dozen years ago. With far less interest in reflective media in this millenia, a modified trend may begin to emerge sooner than we think...

Another Vegas Pro tool which is nice for shadow boosts is "Fill Light". This is how it affects a curve:

"I use LightMachine for photos, but I do not know of a video filter that is as comprehensive in its controls."

Tiffen DFX is a great OFX video color correction plug-in with most of its tools allow for precise matte controls. "Ozone" is one of the DFX tools which lets you control 10 different zones based on one of 11 parameters (just like luma or a color channel) and then adjust hue, saturation, brightness, gamma, contrast, temperature, cyan magenta, red, green, blue solely for this certain zone.

I used to use Vegas Fill light, sometimes even using it multiple times in the same clip. Then I came upon NewBlue Colorfast 2. Wow! Who knew all the details that were buried in those shadows?

One thing is for certain - - we have far more creative choices available to us than even a dozen years ago.

how true, and how overused and abused are many of these choices.