This topic was suggested by a conversation with a prominent member of  a national cinematography society whose rushes workflow had created results which were, well, very much not as they should have been, provoking awkward politics with principal cast and the production company. The cinematographer and the production must remain nameless, but the problem is something we absolutely can discuss – and probably should discuss more often.

Most of the ways we get pictures from set to camera and through post are good examples of a process that wouldn’t work the way it does, if we designed it from scratch right now. It’s not too much to call the current blizzard of snowflake workflows a storm of kludges. They’ve piled on top of one another during the  last twenty years of haphazard improvisation and case-by-case problem solving, ultimately leading to a teetering edifice of technologies and techniques that’s often inconvenient, sometimes downright dangerous, and almost always limits our access to nice things.

Colour and brightness encoding issues, which likely caused the rushes issue which provoked this article, are almost tired examples. The digital transition was not met with universal approbation to begin with, and the idea that digital cinematography would involve several incompatible colour and brightness standards per camera might have put even more people off. The idea that those standards would not be automatically encoded in camera original files, and left up to the technical interpretation of someone else, months down the line, is as absurd as it is common. Creatively, anyone using a show LUT is, in effect, re-engineering the colorimetry of the camera, and it’s shocking that such a fundamental decision might later be revised by other people depending how they feel about it.

Even in the best case, all this requires that the show LUT is designed competently and tested adequately, and in many cases neither of those things is a firm guarantee.

Workflow anxiety

That’s bad. What’s worse is the sheer number of other, even more exciting ideas that we could make real, but can’t, because our haphazard workflows just won’t permit it. Some stills cameras correct digitally for chromatic aberration and barrel distortion in lenses, for instance. There’s nothing formally preventing cinema cameras from doing the same. With lens manufacturers sweating buckets trying to create lenses with ever more spectacular combinations of focal length, aperture and sharpness, the option to achieve even higher performance, particularly in a smaller, lighter, more cost-effective package, must have occurred to someone.

But we can’t have that, because it would take a very, very brave cinematographer to work in the confident expectation that either the camera or the post process would follow instructions. It’s a pretty shocking reality. A big manufacturer would not dare design a series of lenses which would be reliant on digital correction, no matter how advantageous the resulting price-performance ratio might be. That manufacturer could very reasonably expect that someone would simply use those lenses without the required correction, then complain about their behaviour (notwithstanding the fact that almost no matter what a lens manufacturer makes, regardless its characteristics, someone, somewhere, will decide it’s a look.)

Similarly, no cinematographer dare shoot something requiring a gentle, painterly look with fast, sharp, high-performance modern lenses in the expectation of later simulating a more historic image, unless that cinematographer was expecting to post the show in the back bedroom and thus had total control. At risk of seeming to celebrate the obsolescence of someone’s beloved grandmother, it’s perfectly feasible for modern post production gear to simulate a huge range of subtle, complex, attractive optical aberrations which even fairly practised eyes might struggle to discern from even the most overpriced classic glass of 1970s stills photography. In 2024, doing that simulation is not a big deal. It’s barely even VFX. Given the amount of VFX-adjacent things currently done (on the quiet) in grading, lens effects are something we could reasonably fold into final colour process.

And this matters, because cinematographers are sometimes utterly desperate to stamp some sort of look on the current crop of digital cinema cameras, and that sometimes leads to serious concerns. Trying to shoot under lighting of the current zeitgeist (which is to say, not much lighting at all) with lenses designed in the 1970s has caused real world problems. That lens which looked wonderfully characterful at f/5.6 on the test stand might just look smudgy on an available light night exterior. People did not generally shoot available light night exteriors in the far-off decade when that lens was first released, and it wasn’t built to do that.

But, again, nobody would dare shoot one way on the assumption that post will make things look another way. The tools aren’t there (though they easily could be) and there aren’t even particularly well-defined ways to pass that information along, much as it’s been possible to embed ancillary data in computer video files for a lot longer than digital cinematography has been a mainstream force.

Universal solution?

The universal solution to all of this requires a lot of standardisation, and sadly, given the Jenga tower software and hardware we’ve created, it’s hard to imagine the process that might lead to an agreement sufficiently universal to satisfy the nervous cinematographer that instructions are likely to be followed. Perhaps things will converge over decades, but it’s hard to imagine even a subset of these issues being solved in the short term. We live in an age of better communications than have ever existed, and we have access to equipment with far more than the required capability, but due to a vague combination of human factors whole rafts of potential (and actual) capability go unregarded.

It’s this, indirectly, which has pushed the cost of the 24mm f/1.4 Canon FD SSC lens into five figures, it’s this which leads to people’s rushes too often not looking as they should, and it’s this which prevents the film and TV production world from enjoying some of the potential benefits of modern digital imaging that amateur stills people increasingly take for granted. It’s traditional to end a piece like this with a reference to proposed fixes and hope for the future, but that’s difficult on this occasion. All of this is something that’s sort of become normalised, but it’s not great, is it?