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Interesting article - thanks for the post. Nice to see that some location video (i.e. racking - colour balancing etc. live) work is still possible - rather than leaving everything to the grade in post. Nearly every article I read on HD production seems to include the line "we underexpose and used a fixed setting on a memory card, I hated the idea of all the adjustments that could be made whilst shooting" from an ex-film DoP...
It is interesting to see how "what goes around comes around" in this industry. In the 80s and 90s, almost all BBC Children's - and some Adult in the 80s - drama was shot on location in standard def video, with specific "looks" designed on location, not in post. Single camera - but not camcorder - techniques were introduced, though 2 or 3 camera set-ups were also popular as they were very time-efficient (which is a real issue when working within British "Child Actor" laws designed to ensure the wellbeing of young actors, which have very strict limits on the amount of time a chile can shoot each day)
They used standard def still stores (just as was routine in telecine suites) to ensure consistency between and within scenes, whether they were shooting single or multi-camera video. The Outside Broadcast vision supervisors who were responsible for colour balance etc. on the shoot often went into post-production to assist on the "grade" - or TARIF as it was known in the BBC (a legacy term for the BBC Technical Apparatus for Rectification of Inferior Film device)
The only difference seems to be that the guy performing this role on The 4400 has a post-production colourist background, whereas the vision guys on BBC location video drama were from a live production background (and were as at home making the grass consistently the same green at Wimbledon, as providing fantasy sequences for Children's stuff) I think colourists usually earn more than vision engineers as well...
It is nice to see that some skills and techniques are re-invented.