Courtney Cox is tabloid editor Lucy Spiller on Dirt, an FX series about a tell-all newspaper that delves into the dark side of glitz and celebrity. Though Dirt, created by Matthew Carnahan, is designed to be edgily comedic, it is essentially a dramatic series—which not long ago would have screamed out to be shot on film, especially because of the requirements of the show's highly glamorous portions. But production requirements necessitated that Dirt be shot in HD, and Cinematographer Geary McLeod's vote was to go with the Panasonic VariCam.

McLeod had worked with Panasonic's VariCam and Sony's F900 and has high praise for both systems, but in demos of the two, he felt that the VariCam won out because of its off-speed capabilities that the filmmakers knew they'd want to use frequently on Dirt for visual effects and transitional shots. He also preferred the VariCam's rendering of actresses' skin despite—or, McLeod speculates, because of—its lower resolution (720 versus the F900's 1080 vertical lines).

So the production has been shot with either a single VariCam or a pair of them cabled through Digital Imaging Technician Ethan Phillips' workstation. There, Phillips—who spent 20 years as a gaffer before going the DIT route—can use his Panasonic AJ-EC3 Paintbox Controller in conjunction with McLeod's lighting to lay down a clean and partially color-corrected image to tape.

"Even on the most expensive episodics," says Phillips, "the DP doesn't get much time to color, but even if you're spending time matching [during postproduction], you're not spending time in final color using a million-dollar da Vinci for more specific, detailed things that can't be done on set."

McLeod, who carries a variety of Fujinon zooms and likes to shoot through Tiffen Classic Soft filters, runs two VariCams for much of the show to help make the tight seven-day per one-hour episode schedule. "Then, for the glamour close-ups, I'll use a single camera so I can be more precise with the lighting."

The cinematographer spent a great deal of his career using a light meter, but the meter generally stays in its case on the set of Dirt. "I tried to use a meter, but it just doesn't work on an HD show," he says. "I have to light by eye to the monitor. The monitor ends up being a 300-pound light meter. It's big, awkward and heavy and can't go everywhere I want it to go, but it's the light meter now and there's not much I can do about it."

McLeod, like virtually every cinematographer and operator who has worked in the film world, misses the ground glass viewfinder when working in HD. "The eyepiece is dreadful," he says, adding that this is no less true of the F900. "When I start working, I want to look through the camera and start lighting. The eyepiece is useless for lighting, so I have to wait until there's a picture in the monitor. I know it seems like a small thing, but when, 20 times a day, you end up standing there with your arms folded across your chest waiting for the camera to get plugged in, it can add up."

That said, McLeod is quick to add, "Ethan is an extraordinary DIT. As long as I know the monitor's properly set up, I rely on what I see."

Phillips' cart contains the Paintbox Controllers, two 24-inch studio monitors, a waveform vectorscope and a V1-UHD HD hard disk recorder from Doremi Labs that holds 90 minutes of uncompressed HD material to allow full-res playback on set if a director or actor needs it. McLeod, he says, "likes to see extremes of light and dark. It's good to have something at around 0 IRE and something at 100 IRE. You have a lot in between, too, but it's good to have something at both ends. It makes the picture look interesting. We've got only around four stops [of latitude], not 11, like film. So it's good to really work those four stops."

Philips strives to ensure that the images that go to the tape are as free of noise as possible. He generally has the gain on the camera set at -3dB, and he tries to avoid stretching the blacks further than they should go. "Sure you can pop the shutter," he says, referring to the practice of turning off the electronic shutter, "and boost the gain with these cameras and shoot in very low light, but then you get this horrible motion blur that screams 'video,' and you get all kinds of noise in the shot. If that's a look you want, then fine, but that's not what Geary and the producers want for this show."

McLeod notes, "You do end up using smaller units, though not fewer of them. In HD, I'm able to go one light smaller than I'd work with in film. So a 20K's a 10K; a 10K's a 5K and so forth. You really use more units because tape doesn't have the latitude film has."

For exteriors, McLeod makes sure to do everything possible to control the brightest areas of the frame because of the camera's tendency to clip highlights. "The grips are constantly fighting to get rid of hot backgrounds and reflections. It's always something of a battle against too much light. It helps to be able to coordinate the schedule with the assistant directors. Trying to shoot against a white building at noon is going to be a disaster in HD and there's no amount of gripping that's going to beat that, so I try to work with the ADs and the key grip to always figure out where the sun's going to be."

Joe DeOliveira, the show's associate producer for postproduction, oversees what happens after an episode is shot. Once tapes are brought to Modern VideoFilm, circled takes are upconverted to D5 tape and simultaneously digitized for Avid editing using the 14:1 compression scheme. Hard drives are returned to the Paramount lot and the editors—Robin Katz and Chris Sivelli—go to work using Adrenaline systems connected via a Unity server.

Aiming to get the shows as close to perfect as possible in the Avid, the editors will often fill out 14 tracks of audio and will make use of Avid's Sapphire effects plug-ins to rough out some of the unusual effects, such as when the schizophrenic paparazzo character suffers one of his hallucinations.

Temp effects are sent via FTP site to Engine Room Visual Effects, where the high-end versions are created under the supervision of 3D Artist Michael Caplan. Upon completion, the D5 tapes are batch-digitized at Modern into a Nitris DS and output onto D5 tape. Then Final Colorist Kim Schneider uses the time in his da Vinci 2K+ room to fine-tune the look of each episode.

Does it save money to shoot HD video instead of film? "We talk about this all the time," McLeod says. "Those are the imponderables. It's tough to calculate how much you're spending in additional time because you're shooting HD as opposed to film. It's easy for a producer to sit down with a pad of paper and a pencil and say, 'This is how much a roll of film costs, and this is how much it costs to process it and telecine' and all that. It's really hard to calculate how much it's going to cost in extra time [with video], but it definitely is a cost."

"We're trying to come up with a trademark look," McLeod sums up. "The biggest challenge on TV series work is that you end up looking for the fastest, most efficient way to do it, and that's usually the way you've done it 50 times before. That's the reason so much of television ends up looking the same. I try to approach every episode as a new show and not fall into that pattern of rote lighting, and everyone is supportive of that. There are scenes I've done with deep, deep shadows. On most other shows, I'd get notes that say, 'We're paying the actors—we want to see their faces.' I never get that kind of pressure from these producers."