staying color safe for broadcast TV

[Scott Roberts]

You need to view your work on a calibrated external monitor. What you see in AE is not what you’ll see on an NTSC monitor. View your work on a vectorscope and waveform monitor to make sure your colors fall into the safe broadcast range. And, make sure you put titles within the safe zones.

More info here: https://people.csail.mit.edu/tbuehler/video/titles.html

Hope that helps!

Scott

Color Grading presets for After Effects, Premiere, etc., plus free presets and more.

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[Darby Edelen]

Generally, the limits for Luma are around 120 IRE and Chroma around 110 IRE… as far as I understand it =) But different people may tell you different things. You can limit your composition to these values by putting an Adjustment Layer at the top of the stack and applying Color Correction > Broadcast Safe. There are separate options for Luminance and Saturation.

I’m not a Broadcast Engineer, so I don’t have all the details or technical info, but that should serve as a starting point. You should look in to broadcast standards somewhere, you can start at http://www.wikipedia.org

If you want you can also apply a Blur > Reduce Interlace Flicker with a setting of around 0.5 or lower. This just blurs your footage vertically a bit to… well… reduce interlace flicker, you could accomplish the same thing with a number of other effects (Directional Blur, Box Blur Vertical, etc.)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Kevin Camp]

i believe the broadcast safe color effect will only treat illegal colors, not out of range luminance (blacks/whites). so, you may also need to apply levels to your adjustment layer and set the white output to 235 and the black output to 16, then apply broadcast colors after that if you need to make sure your colors are safe.

you can also usually make rgb-yuv color space adjustments when you import your footage into most editing software. at import there is often a setting to tell the software the source is rgb, and it will scale the colors and luminace to the proper color space.

i think aharon robinowitz has a broadcast safe color tutorial here… just click his face at the top of the ae forum and scroll down the page (or search broadcast safe articles).

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW