Premiere pro calibrate with camera

[Mark Hollis]

Are you using a Mac or a PC?

Have you checked bars out of the camera?

Are you assuming that whatever shows up in the camcorder’s monitor is what you ought to see on your computer? That’s not so, you know.

I am not familiar with your camera, but if it can make a standard test pattern (SMPTE or color bars), record some bars and look at them on Premiere’s scope.

You can make a scope out of any monitor. Click the little button in your monitor with the triangle in the upper right and choose YC waveform. The white bar should be either at 80 units or 100 units IRE (depending on whether or not the bars are SMPTE bars or color bars.) SMPTE bars have a special white bar that is at 100 units with the white bar to the left being at 80.

Look at the recording of the camera’s bars output in your scope. If you look at them on your vectorscope, they should look like this. Tektronix has photos of how the bars should look on a waveform monitor.

If the bars from your camera check out, look at the video. If the brightest part of the signal hits 100 units, your computer’s monitor is adjusted so that it is not giving you a good looking picture. If it is too low, you have underexposed your image in the camera.

The brightest part of a person’s face should be 80 units, with caucasians averaging at 60 units.

Do not assume you have a good video picture until or unless you have seen it on a television monitor or in your computer.

There are adjustments in Permiere’s preferences to properly set up what you see on your computer.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Bob Dix]

Check your computer monitor, re calibrate ?

[Mark Hollis]

You can recalibrate “within the application,” using Adobe’s calibration. That way what you see as you are capturing will show a little closer to reality in the video world — but this is a coarse adjustment.

In Premiere Pro, pull down Preferences>General and adjust User Interface Brightness as appropriate. As I’m using 1.5, I’m sure that’s pretty coarse but later versions of Adobe’s applications may have improvements to monitor calibration that were added to Photoshop, which does allow you to set up your monitor within Photoshop to match output (press, video, computer) so that what you see is closer to what you will get.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?