Bars & Tones

[Shane Ross]

[Shelly Lee] “1. Do I still need to white balance before recording? “

Yes, absolutely…always. Those bars mean nothing. We don’t calibrate anything to those. The big purpose they serve is to give us enough pre-roll at the head of the tape. A good practice to keep.

[Shelly Lee] “2. How do I utilize that recorded Bars & Tones while editing on FCP? “

You don’t. Don’t capture it, don’t reference it. Just reference the recorded image.

[Shelly Lee] “3. Why does FCP have Bars&Tones?”

So that when we output to tape, the engineers at the networks or TV stations have a reference for the show. THERE is where the bars and tone really matter.

[Shelly Lee] ” Am I suppose to use that one as oppose to the recorded camera version?”

Yes.

Shane

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[Rob Grauert]

just to butt in and add to what Shane said:

In addition to providing enough preroll on the tape, bars and tone from the camera is used to calibrate a monitor if you’re connection a monitor to your camera in the field. It’s not really intended for post production – at least that’s the impression I’ve always had

Robert J. Grauert, Jr.
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[Mark Suszko]

In a perfect world, the bars on your tape are a guide to adjust your footage color, brightness, saturation and black level, so as to agree with the levels from the bars FCP gives you. The whole point of the bars is to keep levels consistent and true all the way thru the signal chain, to the monitor at the end. You set one set of bars as your master reference, and all your monitors and TV’s are adjusted to match that. Otherwise, your on camera host may look great on your mac’s LCD monitor, but a final play-out from tape may have him looking green or orange, and even more likely, the wrong black level (crushed) or peak white level(too-hot or burned highlights). This is the point of reference standards. But now go back to my first sentence: “in a perfect world”. Which used to be analog.:-)

Modern Digital video cameras can lay down bars that have little or no relationship to the footage levels and color balance. If this reference standards thing is going to really work, you need a physical chart or card with bars printed on it, lit and white balanced under the same lighting as your program material, shot thru the actual lens of the camera, onto it’s imaging sensor, and THEN that set of bars you recorded really “means” something about the picture in a digital world. Not everybody goes into the field witha portable macbeth chart, but I think they should.

The NLE end is just as bad: you can lay down bars from an internal generator or just a stored image file, that have little or no relation to the program levels. Then when someone adjusts their final playback to the bars, they wonder why the program itself is over 100 IRE units too bright, or too dark, or a funky orange or green shade on the flesh tones. In such cases, the unrelated bars are worse than no bars at all; with no bars, a technician would adjust the output based on the actual program levels, and more or less get it right, if the levels, wherever they were, were at least consistent.

Back in the day, we sometimes got analog tapes that had been recorded with the chroma or luma a little out of line, and the editor had slapped bars on the front, after the fact, with no relation to program levels. We could either spend a few hours color correcting the program to match the bars, or lay down new bars deliberately tweaked out of phase or level, to match the program. THEN when the program was adjusted for playback based on the bars, everything was back to where it “needed” to be. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked.

Today, many times, your finished program has been turned into a digital file on a server somewhere, there is no longer a tape playback engineer adjusting and tweaking based on bars, indeed, the bars, slate and countdown are often removed completely from the file, so that when it is commanded to play, the first frame seen is the fade-up from black to first fame of the program. NOW what do we do about the progam levels and calibrations??? Short answer to that is, nothing much you can do. The end user may just kick out your program as technically unacceptable, or they might let it play looking ugly and just trust that automatic controls on the transmitter or distribution system will clamp and override the worst excursions of your bad levels. That process doesn’t look pretty, though it may give you an FCC “legal” signal.

Which is why calibrating your editing system to a known-good reference signal, and then conforming all your programming material with respect to that reference standard, is the only thing that will give you a chance of keeping your show looking nice once it is out of your hands and studio, and in someone else’s hands.