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Colors and NTSC
I’m sure we’ve all had those moments where something looks great on the computer screen, then you look at it on a TV monitor and it looks awful–especially the colors.
I’ve watched Aharon’s tutorial on NTSC-legal colors, but that has more to do on the colors that you CAN show on a TV screen. My question is more about getting colors that look good.
Specifically, I’m working with an incredibly cool vector image I found on istockphoto
(comp image here: https://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/3612636/2/istockphoto_3612636_retro_frame.jpg)I know it’s got alot of detail, and I can avoid some flicker by removing some of the detail and adding a subtle blur. That’s not the issue. It’s the colors are frustrating me. There are some nice, earthy, muted greens, oranges, and browns here. On a TV monitor, they all look really garish and blown out.
Does anyone have any best practices to share on taming these colors for NTSC output? I’ve certainly seen colors like this on TV before! I just don’t know how to get from here to there.
Thanks,
Rob -
3 Replies
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[Rob Wolf] “There are some nice, earthy, muted greens, oranges, and browns here. On a TV monitor, they all look really garish and blown out.”
Well, it sounds like you’re lucky enough to have a monitor to check your output. In that case you should make sure your monitor is properly color calibrated (keeping in mind that most consumer monitors out there are not).
After that it’s just a matter of making it look good on the monitor by any means necessary. As I understand it CS3 will have much improved color management for output to TV (AE7 has some options for this, check the built in help). However, this may not get you entirely to where you want to be, in that case an Adjustment Layer with Levels and possibly Hue/Saturation on it will be your best friend =) Tweak to your heart’s content.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I make sure to adjust output levels from anything from PhotoShop to 16, 235, run the NTSC filter, and in AE, I use Scopo Gigio (https://www.metadma.com/ScopoGigio.html) to check the waveform levels to make sure they are not too high (I try to keep stuff at around 100 – 110). Final Cut has great built-in tools for measuring color and luma output. Anyone know if AE CS3 has built in vectorscopes and waveform monitors?
Color Grading presets for After Effects, Premiere, etc., plus free presets and more.
LITTLE BLACK BIRD – PROFESSIONAL VISUAL EFFECTS
https://www.littleblackbird.com
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as mentioned adjusting the level outputs to black 16 and white 235 may help scale those levels… also, if you are taking the image into photoshop first, this action called deflickerator does a great job of softening the detail that causes interlace jitter while not effecting the rest of the image… dowload it and ty it out (it free).
calibrating your monitor is good start. on macs, the built in visual calibrator allows yo to calibrate as accurately as you eye is, it not the greatest but better than nothing. i’m not sure about windows. however colorvision has a calibrator called spyder pro that is pretty good and only about $250 (they have a cheaper one for under $100), the pro has a profile for ntsc, but you can also pull in the smpte-c profile from photoshop.
you may also want to check the calibration of your broadcast monitor. call up smpte-c bars and adjust brightness and contrast so you can only see the lightest (of three) gray bars at the bottom right of the screen. then switch to blue check, and adjust the phase and chroma until the four large bars all match the small blocks bellow them.
after all that, you may still need to desaturate and adjust the image to get the color you are looking for.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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