Hi folks,
I'm currently editing and touching up my short film (Detained) with Premiere and After Effects. I have a flat screen which isn't so good for monitoring colours and so I've hooked a tv to my computer to monitor the colours. I know that a proper monitor would be better but it's all I have at the moment.

What I did to calibrate brightness/contrast etc on my tv was put in a few movies and set them to how I thought they looked best with those. Then I use those as a comparison while I work on my short. It seems to be working but it only occured to me yesterday that, whatever about the tv, I have no idea if my computer is sending an accurate image to the television.

I have a 128MB Radeon 9800 and currently have all of the tv out settings at default. I had assumed that they would be the most untouched version of the picture available. Does anyone else work with this graphics card and are these settings okay? Is there anything I can do to be 100% certain that the image is close to what I am viewing on my tv?

Thanks in advance,
Jason.

Take a look at the article on using color bars to set up a monitor/TV at http://www.videouniversity.com/tvbars2.htm

David Hurdon

I think he is talking about the physical means of outputing a signal to the tv.


You are executing it incorrectly, rather use your camera, or deck/DA converter, run the firewire to your camera and use the analogue outs from your camera to the tv, that way at least you are getting a true dv output.

To put it blunty a computer videocard outputs tv for sh*t. Don't trust it.

Zac

Thanks for picking me up, Zak. Your advice is right on.

David Hurdon

Hmmm... thanks for the advice. Unfortunately I don't have either a camera or a deck (I rented the camera for shooting). As I am working on it in my spare time I couldn't rent a deck for that long. I may be stuck with just the tv out and I'll have to hope for the best.

So then are there any steps I can take to minimise the problem with using the computer or anything at all to help me get a realistic picture of what my footage will look like with what I have?

Edit: Actually if I found a way of calibrating the tv and then used the colour bars to calibrate the output of the computer, would that work?

Another Edit: Okay I'm trying to work this out in my head, but I reckon if my tv is displaying okay (not sure how I'll test if it is though), then if I feed the computers colour bars from Premiere to the tv and adjust the computer's gamma and colour settings (not the televisions) to a point where the colour bars are displaying okay, then I will have a realistic view of how my picture will look.

Does this logic work or am I kidding myself here? It also means I need something else to test the tv display. Does anyone know if a tv can make it's own colour bars or even a vhs or dvd player?

Thanks,
Jason.

It is as close as you will get with the setup. If you cannot change the setup, then continue on. When you get all of the editing finished, you could make a DV tape and find a friend with the appropriate setup to finalize the colors and the sound.

Thanks for the input folks,
Okay I've been asking around to see if I can get my hands on any equipment that might help solve this problem. Unfortunately I seem stuck with the output from the graphics card but I have managed to get my hands on a Sony PVM-2130QM monitor. I know nothing about this monitor at all (and don't have it yet). Do you know if this monitor can be calibrated on its own (as in me not having to find accurate external colour bars)?

It's quite a few years old but I imagine it would have an s-video input. I think this set up is about the best I'll be able to get unfortunately.

As my short film has a few sections that are designed to be very dark, I'm going to be on a fine line of getting the effect I want or just ending up with a black screen so I need to minimise any surprises as much as I can.

Thanks,
Jason.