POSTSCRIPT
I got an email about managing white and black levels for broadcast-safe recording. First of all, yes, the still I posted here is taken straight from the raw footage in Final Cut Pro: recorded on the tape in HDV format, captured over Firewire, and exported as a still image. I didn't do any post on it at all.
And yes, the dynamic range of this image is way outside the broadcast-safe limit. Broadcast-safe television images should never drop below an RGB black of 16, 16, 16, or blow up past an RGB white of 235, 235, 235. Or somewhere around there, depending on about a jillion factors.
But here's the thing: Fuck broadcast-safe. Okay? If you absolutely have to clamp your footage to within broadcast-safe limits - say, for broadcast, for instance - then you can worry about broadcast-safe. Nest your sequence and throw on a broadcast-safe color-correction filter as your last step before output.
But before that, right up to that point, fuck broadcast-safe. Make your blacks black. Make your whites white. Make your footage look as good as it possibly can on your master timeline before worrying about mandated changes that depend on your output format.
Why? Because you never know. Maybe you're shooting for broadcast, yes, but later you'll want to do a film transfer for a cinema screening. Or maybe you'll want to cut an Internet trailer; on the Internet, black is 0, 0, 0, not 16, 16, 16, and distributing broadcast-safe footage on the Web is a great way to make your show look muddy and flat.
Maybe this is crazy; maybe it's even flat-out wrong. But in my head, there's a high wall between the cinematographer and the engineer. The cinematographer is driven and passionate and wants to make the best show he possibly can. The engineer is the asshole who says "no" all the time. I don't let these guys talk until the last possible minute, when they have to in order to finish the job.
But maybe that's just me.