Anything below black will flatten out on a broadcast monitor. The way I work is make sure to keep everything at or above zero with the shadow control. Then make sure highlights are kept at or below 100 using the Highlights control. Finally I use the Midtones control to actually set the level of contrast I want to see, and then the master slider to increase/decrease overall brightness level.
And to be clear- using the scopes on a desktop monitor isn’t nearly as accurate as real output to a REC709 broadcast monitor.
Noah
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