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HDTV color temperature setting
Back in 2007 I was working on a project in Vegas 6d that was designed for TV. I had a standard tv attached for my preview. Long story short, I stopped working on it but some months ago I resumed. I’m still using Vegas 6d but I realized I had better upgrade to HD.
Truth is, for all these years I never bothered to upgrade my personal TVs to HD and I knew zero about HD televisions. I spent the last week researching dozens of websites and youtubes about it and
I now I understand perfectly the whole 720p/1080p, HDMI thing.I have yet to purchase a blu ray burner, player and new HDTV. However, I do have a 22” HDTV my landlord left. I never plugged it in before a few days ago. I now have it hooked up to my PC via HDMI into my graphics card.
I have my Project Properties set to the HDV 720-30p (1280×720, 29.970 fps.) template and the TV is in a 720p. The picture on the TV-screen looks great, so far, so good. However there is a certain issue:
Within this video project I’m working on, I used some “media generators” (vegas offers) as a backdrop for several minutes of my production. I used one that has a solid color and then fades-out to semi-transparent. I have this media colored to “red.” When I preview this section of my project I saw that the faded, semi-transparent part of this media did not register to the HDTV.
In other words, you would see the solid-colored part of the media but not the semi-transparent part. It always looked perfect on a standard tv, just as it looked on the computer monitor.After playing around with the HDTV’s control settings I finally realized that it was the “color temperature” setting I had to adjust. It offers, COOL, NORMAL, WARM & CUSTOM.
It was the CUSTOM setting (which already had everything set to a measurement of 128) that gave me the same image I had on my monitor and otherwise would get on a standard TV. As an experiment, I “reset” the TV back its default settings to see where the “color temperature” lands. The default is COOL, which is a setting that does not look good. My concern is this;
If I complete my project with the HDTV color temp. set to custom, does that mean the typical TV, my viewers watch it on, will be set to a default setting that does not look good? Otherwise, should I keep my TV set to its default color temp. and “re-adjust” my graphics to that temperature?
Thanks,
Ron
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34 Replies
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Buy a real monitor. You can never depend on consumer grade TV’s for proper color evaluation. Even if you do force the TV to look OK to you, since the TV can not be calibrated, no one else would see the same colors.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Thank you for your reply.
My thinking is that my video is intended to air on television and therefor all the monitors/TVs will be CONSUMER. Therefor, if I use a high-end monitor, it may look good to me but it will remain an unknown as to how it looks to the average viewer.
Am I wrong to think this way?
Thanks,
Ron
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Exactly backwards. As I said, you cannot calibrate a consumer TV which is the main reason they make lousy monitors. You want to provide the most accurate video possible, which means color graded to a reference monitor. Consider what happens if your TV is already skewed toward blue side of the gamut, and your buddy’s TV is slightly skewed toward the red. You adjust your colors to look great on your TV by adding red and yellow, and your buddy’s TV will show a very orange image. It’s not your problem if the end user has a crappy monitor.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Steve,
Please direct me to website(s) offering the monitors you’re suggesting.
Thanks,
Ron
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There’s a lot of them, but I prefer B&H Photo & Video:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Video-Monitors/ci/2199/N/4028759509Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Thank you Steve.
It seems thousands of dollars are required for professional calibration. Just to summarize, to make sure I understand;
The idea is to use a professional, high-end monitor, rather than a typical HDTV, to balance out a happy-color-calibration-medium for all the possible color-settings consumer TVs, airing the video, may have?
Thanks,
Ron
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One other thing,
If both your computer monitor and previewing monitor/HDTV are displaying colors matching to each other, isn’t that a validation you’re color-accurate?
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You can calibrate your PC monitor using Datacolor Spyder.
I use Datacolor Spyder3. Datacolor Spyder4 is already out there.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/838844-REG/Datacolor_S4P100_Spyder4Pro_Software.html
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Just because your computer monitor and HDTV are close is no assurance that you are properly set up, but it’s a bit closer.
Most pro studios are moving to the $5,000 Sony monitors, but that is good for the starter shops because the CRT monitors they formerly used are flooding into eBay. Search for “Sony PVM” and there are several currently under $100.
Bottom line – unless you are submitting video for broadcast television, a good quality LCD monitor and a spectrophotometer will get you close enough for most consumers.
I use three U2412M monitors on my editing workstation, and “calibrate” them using a ColorMunki spectrophotometer. I say “calibrate” because no consumer LCD monitor can be properly calibrated, but for my clients, it’s close enough.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Thank you for the information Frank.
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