Inside Production: Walter Schoenknecht
A Little Light on The Subject
It was an endless, wordless battle, so they tell me:
My grandfather strolls through the kitchen, hoists the window open
and saunters on. He’s followed closely by my great-grandmother
– his mother-in-law – who slams the window shut and mutters
foul German oaths under her breath as she leaves. Like a Bavarian
clockwork tableau, my grandfather re-enters, opens the window once
more, inhales deeply and vents a few choice epithets.
After he’s out of the room, the old lady is back
and – well, you guessed it – slam. Too much sauerkraut?
A genetic legacy of stubbornness? In our family, we’ve always
preferred words like "strong-willed" and "self-assured."
I can’t help but recall this charming ancestral
legend – however, it’s in the oddest of locations: the
edit suite. It seems that I’ve become party to acts of similar
idiocy, and it isn’t fresh air at the root of things. It’s
light.
Several times a day – so I’ve noticed –
my partner Dave and I alternately douse, blast, tweak and sneak
until the light levels in a given room are pretty much the opposite
of when we entered. And like my forebears’ folly, nary a word
is spoken; no doubt, each of us is thinking, "I wonder how
he can possibly work under those conditions?"
LIGHTNESS OF BEING
So who was it, I want to know, who decreed that an
edit suite must be lit like an anthracite seam at midnight? Sure,
I know that it’s bad news to wash out the CRT with ambient
light; that’s just common sense. I’d be the first one
banging on the door of the booth if the projectionist left the movie
theater lights up during the show.
But in my mind, an edit room is a different sort of
place. It’s a workin’ sort of place, a room where you
need light to read a script or a log, to find the third input on
the mixer, or – sweet victory – to see that subtle wince
cross the client’s face as you cut it the way she insists it
should be cut.
There is no right answer to the lighting question,
nor is one required. In building these rooms, we pay lip service
to these differences in illuminative preferences by installing dimmers,
track lights, torchières and halogen task lighting –
any of which can be turned on, off, up or down. It seems like a
subjective decision, but is it really?
When in doubt, I try to do what a real engineer would
do: look for a published standard in an engineering journal. Well,
the granddaddy of ‘em all is the Journal of the Society of
Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and while there’s
no authoritative standard for edit suite lighting per se, they’ve
got the next best thing: a Recommended Practice, or RP.
SETTING THE MOOD
Okay, so it’s not really for edit rooms, but
it details the ideal environment for screening rooms and that’s
a pretty close match. According to RP166 (1995), the ambient light
should be no greater than about ten percent of the brightest part
of the picture. That’s not an awful lot of light.
And to further refine the viewing experience, one
might want to splash a 6500K light source on the wall, lower reading
lights to about 10-foot candles and limit other task lighting to
3- or 4-foot-candles. Mmm … nice. How about adding a big ol’
La-Z-Boy recliner and a little something to wet your whistle? Sounds
mighty soothing.
But hold on a minute – that’s not what we
build the rooms for. They’re not theaters. They’re not
even screening rooms, except at the end of the edit when the client
sits back to watch the whole show end-to-end. They’re part
workshop, part art gallery, part computer lab and part office. They
need lights. These are little TV factories and while it sure is
fun to watch TV with the lights off, it’s not necessarily a
productive environment.
I’m intrigued by some of the bright, daylight-washed
sitting rooms and parlors that serve as nonlinear suites these days.
Are they practical? Can you still do any critical viewing if you
need to? I don’t know, but the promotional stills sure look
great. On some emotional level, though, I guess I acknowledge the
quest for a tomb-like abyss – devoid of light – where
our alchemy is performed, where magnets and electrons and glowing
phosphors forge ideas and words and images into stories.
It’s not important that the stories are about
furniture stores and cholesterol treatments. What matters is that
each time we sit down to edit, we’re intently focused on delivering
our finest work.
I still want the lights up a little higher. I think
I just set my coffee down on top of my Palm Pilot, I’m counting
the function keys by touch to find "F8," and if you pass
me your lighter, I may be able to read the reel number off this
next tape.
Walter Schoenknecht (walter@m2gi.com)
is a partner at Midnight Media Group Inc., a New York-area digital
production facility.
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