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Reliable broadcast colors possible?
Hello everyone,
about to add some more confusion to the neverending story of broadcast safe colors.
Just to give some background info for my question: I work for an animation company, we only deliver digital material to post houses which do the conversion to tape. So I don’t need to worry about making the video signal broadcast safe, but I’d like to make sure that there are no huge color changes from what we deliver to the final broadcast.
We don’t have the hardware to check actual video levels (yet), and it seems that getting this equipment just to be sure is unnecessary.In search of a reliable software solution I tested the broadcast color correction of Shake, After Effects and Color Finesse, and they all flag different colors/ranges as inappropriate, with Shake complaining about the least, AFX correcting pure magenta which CF doesn’t do, and CF correcting pure blue which AFX doesn’t do. The settings were the same as far as possible.
I know that none of them might be perfect for correcting colors, only for identifying which colors have to be corrected. But can anybody say which of them, if any, does that reliably? Is there some other software to look into for this? Or is there no such thing and we do need to get a vectorscope after all?
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5 Replies
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Sorry, I do not have an answer for you, just a suggestion and some possibly incorrect editorial.
Software vectorscopes and waveforms are available, they’re cheap compared to the hardware versions but you’ll want a good set of scopes in the loops to your large client viewing monitors.
The problem at the moment is the term “broadcast.” The color space for digital HD over-the-air broadcast reception appears to me (on my 1080p TV set at home) to be dramatically different than the color gamut available to cable, satellite, or Blu-ray disks.
I no longer have any idea what color space I’m supposed to satisfy so I stick with what I know, NTSC. But those color boxes on the vectorscopes were designed to reduce chroma crawl within the frequencies in NTSC and to prevent luma and audio distortion dues to switching noise in the vertical interval caused by overdriven adjacent lines in the interlaced fields. None of these are of any concern in digital where progressive firing of discrete pixels has replaced alternate lines being scanned with electron beams.
bogiesan
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I forgot to add that I’m working in PAL country, in case that makes a difference (thought it shouldn’t though).
Well, I don’t know if broadcast colors still make sense in this bright new age of digital TV, but I do know that our material is still checked to the usual PAL standard before it airs, and who am I to argue with that? So the problem persists… -
A quick, easy solution would be a Canopus ADVC-300 (or better), analog to digital convertor running a signal via firewire out to a pro monitor or television or lcd tv . . . this will give you a pretty good indication of what you’re getting.
Color Grading presets for After Effects, Premiere, Final Cut Pro, RedCine, etc., plus free presets and more.
LITTLE BLACK BIRD – PROFESSIONAL VISUAL EFFECTS
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Does that mean this device will also take care of illegal values, so if the digital content has out of specs values the broadcast monitor will show them clipped?
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“Does that mean this device will also take care of illegal values”
– what the device would do is to give you an “analog out” of your digital output. Through this method you can somehow grasp how it would look say on a normal TV.
– It pays to utilize the software vectorscope and waveform monitor available in your color correction software – be it Apple Color, Color Finesse etc… alongside with an analog output to standard monitor.
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