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TV Airing poorly
I edit for an outdoor television series. I dub out to beta and it looks good on my monitors when it leaves. I notice when it airs the colors are poor. The footage looks grainy at times and the reds turn to pink often. Any ideas???
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13 Replies
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are you using calibrated broadcast monitors to view the material, or just computer screens?
Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UKhttp://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk
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Yes, it is all monitored with broadcast Sony equipment.
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if you are happy that your kit is all properly calibrated and the output onto tape is all “legal” ie. correct video levels, chroma levels etc, then my next step would be to approach the transmission engineer at the station to see if they have noticed any problems.
Its possible that your chroma settings on your screen are over saturated, so that if you don’t use a vectorscope and rely just on your eyes, then you could be adjusting the image to look right when in actuality you are sucking out the colour un-necessarily.
Don’t take offence if i’m teaching granny to suck eggs – its just one possible out of many. Without seeing the problem first hand a solution is not always obvious immediately.
adam
Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UKhttp://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk
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Hi Branch,
No idea Branch, but don’t think too much about what you see ON AIR.
Monitor the tape before airing, is that is OK, then, why look bad on air, is not your job (unless you are the guy who pay for the airing)
If your out signal is good,and the tape no, or the desk is recording the signal too low, or playing it so.
In those cases Color Bars is what you need. And a waveform monitor, of course.
Print to video some Color Bars. Adjust the level of the recording signal (it was RF?. Y don’t see a Betacam since 1.999).
Them play the bars. If you need to turn a lot the luma or chroma knobs, you may need new video heads.
rafael -
The guy paying for the airing is the guy complaining. Even when he saw the master and thought it looked great. My next question would be could it be the way they run it because he is using SD equipment? I would think not that it should still look like the master after it airs, but?
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You’re working in SD and airing on HD? Yes that is always going to look like crud compared to the edit suite. You probably want to go out SDI to DigiBeta or HD and eliminate the analog conversion back and forth. If you’re the only one sending in Betacam and their decks are simply calibrated wrong, then your stuff could easily be played back incorrectly on air. If the bars you’re putting on there are wrong then they are possibly recalibrating for your bars. After all, by putting bars on something you’re saying, calibrate to this. Ditto with tone. I’m guessing this isn’t a big network you’re sending this to. Maybe local broadcast or cable insertion?
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Branch,
As the video editor, if your Betacam tape is OK in the studio, nobody can complain of your work.
There is a million of reasons why the signal can look bad in the TV of your client (because it could be his TV needing some adjustment.
I’ve past long time hitting the PLAY of a Betacam desks for airing.
We adjusted with the bars (the only way to adust the desk).
The guys in the main control monitored the signal all the way in the studio, but they had also a norma TV with antenna.
In the dais of PAL, even if the signal as OK, some time they told you to rise the chroma because the TV had poor color due to the bad weather.
BTW, you commentedof an shift in the colors; I’m from PAL land, but if I’m not wrong this is the historical issue of NTSC when the broadcasting is not very good.
You in NTSC land sure know more than me about this.
rafael -
Just got work from Comcast Chicago that they think it is a Direct TV feed. They said the dub ran great on Cable.
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[Rafael Amador] “BTW, you commentedof an shift in the colors; I’m from PAL land, but if I’m not wrong this is the historical issue of NTSC when the broadcasting is not very good.
You in NTSC land sure know more than me about this. “Don’t you know that NTSC is an abbreviation for “Never Twice the Same Color”?
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I work at a TV station and we make HD masters then deliver them as PAL. The broadcasters then put it to air in an MPEG-2 format with a low data rate. I realize that you are having tape playout but there will be some quality lost when broadcasting, maybe ask the transmission guys about the data rates they use?
Anyways, none of this is you fault or problem. Tell your client to take it up with the broadcasters.
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