Need to avoid DV

[John Rofrano]

Vegas has one of the highest quality DV codecs you will find. I’ve never had any problems with DV in Vegas. If you have problems with certain colors then don’t use those colors. DV is only 4:1:1 no matter who’s codec you use so it doesn’t have great color sampling to begin with.

What are you using to see these colors when editing? Hopefully not you computer LCD. That may be your problem right there. You need to be watching your DV work on a broadcast monitor via firewire and then what you see will be what you get on tape with no surprises.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Frank Stevn]

Thank you for your response John.

Sometimes you just can’t avoid using certain colors, for example when you work with company logos.

I don’t see any color problems while I am editing: I use 2 LCD PC monitors with Spider 3 Elite monitor calibrator. I didn’t see any color problems either when I did a test using the camera LCD (connected through firewall) as the external Vegas preview monitor.

I only see the problems in the avi files rendered with Vegas NTSC DV code and the problem is still present in the printed miniDV tape.

Any ideas on how to not use NTSC DV for delivering in tape. Maybe I should invest in a card and a deck? Are there any not super-expensive alternatives?

[Mike Kujbida]

[Frank Stevn] “Sometimes you just can’t avoid using certain colors, for example when you work with company logos.”

If you don’t stop using certain colours, you run the risk of having the spot rejected by the station because the levels were outside of legal limits.
The other thing that can happen is that the station will “legalize” it for you and everything will go muddy as the “legalizer” is just an electronic box and doesn’t care that it’s affecting the entire video.

The client needs to understand that certain colours can’t be duplicated on TV as they exceed the broadcast limit for luminance and/or saturation values.
For example, pure red (255-0-0) is WAY outside of legal video limits.
By way of comparison, the red in the colour bar test pattern is 180-16-16

I’ve received company logo guidelines where they state specific Pantone values.
I go into Photoshop, enter those levels, find the equivalent RGB values and, if necessary, correct them for video.
No one has ever complained.

Great Titles with the DV codec is an excellent article that gets into dealing with recommended levels.

[Kelly Griffin]

Hey Frank–

Just in the past few months I’ve jumped from delivering spots on tape (BetaSP) to electronic delivery. There’s about eight to ten stations to which I normally have to deliver, each with their own specs for digital filetypes. I asked them to humor me in an experiment to find one filetype that works for everybody, and the winner was MOV with H264. You might want to try the same; it’s worked like a charm so far, and I’ve been making it successfully with either QuicktimePRO ($30) and Sorenson Squeeze (way overpri$ed).

[Frank Stevn]

I read Philip Hodgetts article on DV Codec. I applied. I followed the directions, changed reds to 180-16-16 (in Photoshop for the logo), changed blacks 16.16.16 and white to 235.235.235, besides applied 3% Glausian blur to the text and the logo and Applied Broadcast color conservative FX to the entire project. The problems improved a little bit, but there are still present. See the pictures:

It seems that the main advice of Philip Hodgetts article is clear”…NOT compress to the DV codec. The DV codec is not optimized for text.”

Can you suggest the best settings for econding in Quicktime H.264. I will see if the TV stations want to accept it.

Does DVCpro has the same color problems than miniDV?

Can you suggest a tape format (deck), that would deliver 4:2:2 titles quality and is affordable? Maybe buying a used one?

[Rob Mack]

I’ve spent the last 10 years peering pretty closely at frames of DV. It’s awful stuff. Your reds look about like what I’d expect in a DV codec.

The problem isn’t Vegas, it’s DV. Yes DVCPro would be an improvement since it’s a double-DV codec and has 4:2:2 sampling…but it’s a proprietary Panasonic codec and Vegas can’t control the deck, nor can it write the files without buying a Raylight Encoder codec.

You probably need to start delivering files on hard disk. Sinking money into a tape deck is probably not a great proposition at this stage of the game.

And you also need to bone up on color for video.

Rob Mack

[Scott Roberts]

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/griffin_nick/flanders_sci_lcd.php

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