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The ‘American TV Look’
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Possibly a big deal has to do with economics. American TV shows are typically very well funded. The American market is quite large and American programming exports better than programming from other countries. I’m not saying that American culture is better, but rather there is a bigger demand for American culture/television than that of other countries.
It’s the only system where going over budget is expected. Everywhere else, producers have to keep their productions on budget.
Bigger budgets means the show can afford color correction at the telecine stage or tape-to-tape, which can really alter the look of a show (i.e. CSI) and make it look better/stylized.
2- PAL versus NTSC:
In the following interview, Yves Faroudja makes some interesting comments on how NTSC can be better than PAL when properly implemented. *Better in the sense that it’s more efficient. Since it has less bandwidth it doesn’t carry as much information as PAL.
https://www.avguide.com/film_music/film/film_main_04.jsp
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Hi everyone, thanks for all your thoughts so far,
It’s more about the colours than the resolution of the image I’m concerned about. To give you an idea, it’s for a programme where half takes place in UK and half takes place in US. As an added indictation of this, the director wants to colour the US stuff to make it look as though it’s got that Friends/Seinfeld colourscape, rather than (as you say) the flat colder colours that we seem more comfy with when making British stuff (which will be the UK stuff).
Look at The Office for example. Can’t remember for the life of me what that’s shot on, but it’s typical of the colourscapes that get used in British productions, and if you compare that with pretty much any US drama/sitcom – it’s starkly different.
It’s this look that we’d like to inject to the US stuff that’s important. We’re shooting HD so it’s not a quality issue – it’s a colour issue.
Thing is though, if you look at something like Curb Your Enthusiasm, it DOESN’T have that Friends look to it (in my opinion anyway). The colours are a lot flatter, and it’s not as vibrant, yet it STILL looks complelety different to The Office (and again, I don’t think that’s to do with format).
And if you look at a UK sitcom like Coupling (the UK version) where it’s tried to make its colours brighter, richer and stronger, it still looks nothing like a US programme.
It’ll look into the colour settings you mentioned for the camera and see if the camera tech can look into doing some tests first, as the description of the gaudy colours actually sounds like what we’re looking for.
If all else fails, I’ll just put a laughter track over the US stuff… and call all the characters Chip and Chet…
Please… that was a joke… no hate mail 🙂
John
http://www.fairlineproductions.com/johnedit.htmlJohn
Success is merely a failiure to imagine more…G5 2.7Ghz, 4.5Gb ram, Blackmagic Decklink/multibridge, 5.6Tb Infortrend storage, FCP Studio 5.02, Makie MCU control, Yahama 5.1 surround, JVC DTV multi-format monitor, 2x23inch Apple monitors – and a partirdge on a pear tree.
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[John Steventon] “Look at The Office for example. Can’t remember for the life of me what that’s shot on, but it’s typical of the colourscapes that get used in British productions, and if you compare that with pretty much any US drama/sitcom – it’s starkly different. “
My gut feeling is that it comes down to lighting and art direction. If you look at the Seinfeld or Friends set, there’s a lot of stuff in the apartments. The Office is lit very much like a typical corporate video, more natural lighting, rather than lighting intended to highlight elements in the scene. As far as color, PAL has no set-up (7.5 ire) and a different matrix for reds, which explains why images are more saturated and have richer blacks. This is true even if the colors are muted. The Office (in the US) looks like it is shot 24p – probably Sony cameras, which tend to have a more neutral/flatter look unless tweaked. Curb Your Enthusiasm looks like interlaced 29.97.
There may also be some other subtle differences. US sitcoms shot on film are often shot 3-perf 35mm. This gives you a wider aspect for HD, but then the 4×3 NTSC version is zoomed in during xfer to crop the edges. This tends to alter the grain structure from dramatic 35mm productions. Sort of halfway between 16mm and 35mm.
Remember that if you are comparing US shows in the UK, then you are often seeing images with 2-3 pulldwon, which have then gone through a standards converter to get to PAL. The same show in the US may not look the same under close scrutiny.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
From looking at some deleted scenes on The Office DVD I would say it’s shot interlaced video and then deinterlaced in post to give it a 16mm documentary look.
“The Office” is a “mockumentary” – deliberately lit and shot as a fly-on-the-wall doco – hence the flat, natural look. So it’s probably not a good example to compare to the likes of Seinfeld etc.
Tom Ackroyd
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I agree about the standards conversion, growing up in Pal country US shows always looked completely oversaturated, watching them now in the US they look much more natural, I agree there is a difference between the two but how it is broadcast does make a big difference.
Glenn Stewart
1K studios
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