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which color bars should I trust
Hello,
Back to calibrating again and full of doubt.
Which color bars should I use
1-The color bars I feed from my Canon HDV XH-A1 into a standard def Sony PVM 14M4U
2-The color bars generated by Vegas 7I do see a clear difference between the two.
By the way are the bars generated by the Canon XH-A1 HDV bars or SMTP NTSC bars?
Which one?The ones from the Canon tells me I’m correctly calibrated, but the one from Vegas tells me I’m way too bright. Which ones should I trust?
Thanks
Philippe -
11 Replies
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Since you’re looking for an accurate signal to set your (standard definition) monitor up with, I’d trust the ones from Vegas.
I’ve compared the colour bars in Vegas to those coming from a Leitch (broadcast-grade) test signal generator and they match very well.
I haven’t seen the bars from your camera so I can’t say if they’re broadcast spec or not. -
I agree….Trust the color bars from Vegas.
Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Creative Arts Director and Film Maker.
Portfolio at:
http://www.youtube.com/hentys -
OK, so we’re assuming now that Canon has wrong bars being generated by the Canon XH-A1?
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Now how should I send the color bars from vegas into the second display? My CRT on which I do color correction is a secondary display.
Should I just drop the bars generated within vegas on the time line and display the time line so it’s visible in the CRT?
Thanks -
That’s the way I’d do it.
I run 4 student edit suites at work and our setup is a bit different.
The computer is hooked via firewire to a JVC miniDV/SVHS deck.
Composite output of this deck feeds the JVC production monitor. -
I don’t think this is an issue of one set of bars being wrong, and another being right. Bars are meant as a standard reference so that when an engineer at a station/studio gets a tape/file from you he can set up his deck/output to match your bars; and therefore your project will look like you wanted it to look on his broadcast.
The first thing I’d do is put bars from your Canon into it’s viewfinder and adjust whatever controls you have on the viewfinder to make bars look correct. Therefore you can be fairly certain that what you’re seeing in the cameras VF is what you’ll get on tape.
With that in mind, I would set up your monitor to whichever bars are coming from what you are feeding to the monitor. So if you are watching direct from your camera, set it up from bars on your camera. When you are editing from Vegas, set it up from Vegas.
But I think ideally you would set up bars in your VF, fed from the camera. Set up bars on your Monitor from Vegas. Roll bars onto the beginning of every tape. Capture some of the bars at the beginning of the tape into Vegas. You could then play the bars out from Vegas, adjust the levels with filters in Vegas, and that should give you a roadmap of what you might have to change on that footage to get the correct “look” after editing.
Kinda confusing I know, but this is much easier in the analog world, when you would roll bars on the tape, put it in a deck, and use the controls on the deck to adjust your signal, and then edit. But when you get into a digital transfer, you lose those controls at the deck.
Hope that didn’t make it more confusing.
John Bollenbacher
10engines -
John, a station engineer will only use bars if they’re true SMPTE bars.
That is, the camera manufacturer has paid the rights to have these bars available to the end user.
I’ve used a lot of different cameras over the years and only a few (generally the more expensive ones) have had true SMPTE bars built into them.
The quality of some of them has ranged from “that’s not too bad” to “you call these colour bars?”.
Monitors should always be adjusted according to true colour bars as non-SMPTE bars probably won’t give you what you’re looking for in accuracy of colour. -
Mike, aren’t SMPTE bars always at 0 ire though? This is what I have experienced.
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Erik, in the NTSC world, black is still at 7.5 units.
Unfortunatley the Vegas scopes are not real scopes so you will run into issues if you treat them as such 🙁 -
“Not Real Scopes” Can you expand on this?
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