[Glenn Chan]

1.) When I create a new PAL project in Premiere Pro, and then create a new Bars and Tone clip, how do I know if it’s 75% or 100% or what? What are these percentages refering to?
In 75% color bars, the chroma amplitude is 75% of the maximum chroma amplitude allowed. The bars however are always a pure color (i.e. the red bar never has blue or green in it).

It’s all a little confusing, since saturation is an ambiguous term. It refers to chroma or to chromaticity, which are NOT the same thing. We tend to think of saturation in terms of chromaticity, which is related to the purity of a color. Chroma on the other hand is “proportional” to luma… higher luma values need higher chroma values if you are to maintain constant hue and saturation/chromaticity.

Premiere makes 75% bars… 100% bars are rare. You can verify the correctness of color bars on an external waveform monitor and vectorscope. Software color bars and scopes may be incorrect. In a NLE, do not import color bars as they may be wrong (sometimes this occurs from conversions that occur). The internally generated bars tend to be mostly correct; some of the NLEs differ in the color of the -I and Q bars, although those bars are not useful anymore since no one broadcasts Y’IQ anymore.

2.) The spec below seems to be saying that the tone is at 0dB. Is this what they are refering to as the “line-up signals (or level)”? Then they say that the maximum sound levels should not be more than 8dB’s above the line up level. I can’t imagine that they want the audio levels at +8dB. Maybe they meant that the audio signal of the show should be no more than 8dB BELOW the line-up signal? I’m confused, and then there are terms I don’t know like PPM4, PPM6, and -4VU.
You have to pay attention to the units. VU in this case would refer to the VU meters on a betaSP deck. They are a measure for analog audio levels.

Don’t confuse that with dBFS, used for digital audio (i.e. Premiere). They aren’t the same as VU.

Line up level is a reference level, so that a particular dBFS level will correspond to a particular VU level.

You can actually go over the line up level, since audio systems are capable of handling that / they have a little headroom for sudden peaks and transients. Unfortunately, the standards are a little fuzzy here as there are different ways of measuring peaks.

Peak, PPM, and VU meters have different responses to peaks/transients in your audio. With digital audio, digital meters tend to show you the highest numerical value that a peak hits. This produces higher numbers than the other methods.
VU meters are balistically weighted, so they take a short amount of time to respond to a peak and they don’t go as high. Some meters aren’t weighted like this (to save cost) so that’s something to watch out for.
A Peak Program Meter is another method… I forget its details. I think it’s the kind of meter with LEDs lights that you see on analog audio mixers.

[Glenn Chan]

I’m also seeing this, no XSAN. When FCP sees a phantom TC break, it will skip over several seconds but now the timecode will be slightly offset in comparison to the tape (about 2-3 frames).

DSR-1500, capturing over SDI into a Blackmagic card DV codec to an external firewire hard drive.

[Glenn Chan]

There are lossless codecs such as Quicktime Animation and Huffyuv.
There’s also commercial codecs like Microcosm, although the smaller file size may not be that big a deal.

DVDs can hold either data or MPEG2 video. The problem with DVDs is that they can degrade very quickly, even getting data corruption in 2 years.

[Glenn Chan]

Perhaps it’s due to 7.5 IRE setup?

https://www.glennchan.info/articles/technical/setup/75IREsetup.html

A lot of professional equipment will put analog black level at 7.5 IRE (which is correct for non-Japanese NTSC). On the other hand, some DVD players sold will put analog black level at 0 IRE, which is incorrect and will make your image appear a little darker if you have your monitor calibrated to 7.5 IRE.

It could of course be something else.

[Glenn Chan]

I believe betaSP (and Digital Betacam and DVCAM) converts the signal into a luma component and two color difference signals/components (chroma).

On tape, more bandwidth is given towards luma than for chroma. This is to optimize the signal for our visual system. We see less color resolution than brightness resolution. Video doesn’t fully seperate out the color from the brightness information- a little portion of brightness information is found in the chroma, and a little portion of the color information found in the luma. This is most visible in the dark band between the green and magenta bars in color bars. In practice it’s not a big deal.
*The problem stems from the way luma and chroma are formed… the order of operations between gamma correction and forming the weighted sum is reversed. This lowers cost / improves performance (and may improve S/N ratio; not sure).
If ‘ stands for gamma correction, then the video formula is:
Rec. 601: Luma (Y

[Glenn Chan]

FCP doesn’t apply any chroma smoothing when it decompresses DV. If you had taken the SDI output off a deck instead, most decks will smooth the chroma (into 4:2:2 color space, not 4:4:4) and then that will go into FCP.

WIth firewire ingest, you could apply the ?color? smoothing 4:1:1 filter to smooth out the chroma. With material ingested via SDI, you could apply the color smoothing 4:2:2 filter.

2- If you want to mix SDI ingested material and DV, sometimes it’s better to ingest the DV via SDI so you don’t have to muck around with the differences between the 720×486 and 720×480 frame sizes.

[Glenn Chan]

Here’s how independently produced shows in Canada usually work… (second-hand info here)

Financing sources:
Broadcast license – The broadcaster promises to give you money once certain criteria have been met (this is all spelled out in a broadcast letter / contrast). You usually need this to trigger other funding.
Provincial and national tax credits.
Other funding sources that give grants, loans (for interim financing), equity investment. Nearly all are listed in the producer’s handbook from the CFTPA.
Private investment, sponsorship
Deferrals – you can defer your actors’/actresses’ labour, the producer’s labour
Advances – distribution, merchandising advances; you can sometimes get advances on future sales of merchandise, and of other broadcasters picking up your show.
Other – i.e. Broadcaster-donated goods/services – i.e. studio, editing facilities ; be creative

The Canadian television industry is heavily subsidized… without government involvement, very few Canadian TV shows will be produced. On shows with CTF funding, the broadcaster usually contributes 30% of the financing. Compare this to the US, where the broadcaster contributes 100%. In the US, you wouldn’t have as much funding agencies+sources to draw on.

In both scenarios, you likely want to pitch the show to a broadcaster and try to get a broadcast license. A lot of people pitch their shows to broadcasters… so that affects your chances. Producers may or may not have some demonstration video (i.e. like a pilot) to show. Usually they just pitch an idea and try to go into development.

Considering you don’t have producing experience, it might hurt you. Not having experience, you will need to pair up with another party with producing experience (and that cuts into your pay). You probably aren’t going to make much money… although you’d get your first producer credit.

2- To recap:
A sample show might have the broadcaster financing most of the show, with other financing sources rounding that out. The producer’s fee is a certain % of the budget… in Canada, it’s supposed to be 10%. But the broadcaster may make you defer some of that fee.
Of the producer’s fee… if you are producing the show with an experience producer then: you the producer would have to do most of the work, and get about half of the producer’s fees.

If you can convince a producer to pitch+produce your show, then they would worry about the financing and all that. In that case, the producer then has to use a production company to crew the show… often a production company would be the producer.

[Glenn Chan]

If the BVM is new, there’d be no question which monitor is better. However, you have to ask yourself: why are they really selling the BVM??

Old monitors can pick up subtle problems that affect the image. As well, the phosphors in the CRT will change in composition based on how many electrons have hit them (this depends on time and intensity)… for critical color, CRTs should be replaced once they’ve been used too long.

FYI neither monitor is worth a damn without a method to properly calibrate either with a external color calibration probe which allows adjusting the gain and bias controls on the monitor. Gain is white balance, bias is black balance. There are numerous inexpensive color calibration probe available thru third party vendors which can be used.
In my opinion, this is overly picky. Gain is best set by eye. You want to get all light sources in your room close to D65, but more importantly all the white points should be the same. This is so your white balance does not drift around. Display a black+white image on all your monitors, and flick your eyes between them to check for a mismatch in white point.

Bias can be set by eye… although you have to find a decent test pattern for that.

*Some calibration probes don’t work that well since they are not matched to the monitor.

[Glenn Chan]

Generally, you capture, then edit way, then do color correction / make the footage broadcast-legal during the color correction / online editing phase. The Avid Symphony is designed to do online color correction + finishing.

[Glenn Chan]

Grade 1 is SMPTE C phosphors and Grade 2 is EBU
That’s not true.

For the SD NTSC world, SMPTE C primaries are the standard. By primaries, I mean the specific colors of red, green, and blue (typically defined with chromaticity co-ordinates).
For the SD PAL world, EBU primaries are the standard.
For HD everywhere, Rec. 709 primaries are the standard.
P22 is a vague standard AFAIK.

Sony:
They did not abandon CRTs.
BVM series are their grade 1 monitors. They are CRTs.
PVM series are their “grade 2” monitors. They are being discontinued because of lead-free requirements… Sony did not want to spent R&D $$$ re-designing the boards in those monitors.
The Luma series LCDs are their “grade 2/3” monitors.

regarding what to grade to (engineering standards, vs real-world practice) see
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=8&postid=897800