Color adjustment on SD TV monitor
 

Has anyone tried adjusting the color of an A-1 on a SD T.V?

This probably seems strange but it's something I'm curious about.

I mention this because....

Most of my video, for now, will be viewed on an SD tv monitor and I wonder about viewing the finished product on the format my customers will see it on.

On a further note and as explanation:

When I would record music, I would listen to the finished product on the 'least' effective medium...often a car stereo system or boom box to see how it sounded. If it sounded good on these 'least' effective mediums/media, I had a pretty good idea that my recorded sound would work well on a more effective sound system such as a good stereo system.

Does that translate to video and the A-1?

In other words, if my video looks good on my SD t.v., it should look and sound great on any p.c. monitor or high def t.v. provided I recorded @ high def.

So, with all that I have mentioned....does an SD t.v. work for video evaluation?

Tx

Rog Lee

Tis what I do, and I've rarely been disappointed.

The main thing you miss isn't color, but details. This is especially an issue if it's to be broadcast, as a label in the background could get you sued for trademark infringement. I prefer, also, to color correct my LCD screen and my SD playback monitor, so that my colors on the LCD screen in the little window are pretty close to HDTV quality. And I always make sure to blow that up to full size and play it back at least once.

C

Carl, what settings do you have your on cam LCD monitor on?

Reason I ask is that for the life of me, try as I might, I'm having no luck whatsoever in achieving an accurate brightness level, and colours always seem to be shifted toward the reds.

Thanks Carl for the info.

Rog Lee

SD TV sets are notorious for poor color fidelity, especially in NTSC land, and should not be relied upon to judge color, at least without first validating the actual performance of the TV. Worth noting that some TV sets included various types of automatic image adjustment circuitry (a bit like AGC and auto white balance functions in a camcorder), so what you see may not accurately reflect the actual video recording. Further, many TV sets have rather low resolution, perhaps 330 lines of video resolution (~the NTSC broadcast signal), or less, and similar limitations on audio. Computer monitors and graphics adapters, unless specifically intended for video editing, may not provide accurate TV color and contrast as well, and may not process/display motion well.

What this means is that unwanted video and audio artifacts that are in the higher resolution (meaning higher frequency) video, or in the high/low frequency audio, and white balance, contrast, brightness, and similar image flaws may not show on a on a TV set, nor can a typical set be used to reliably judge image corrections you make.

However, by the same token, video you deliver to clients should look and sound acceptable (if not 'good') on their likely viewing systems.

Thus the better approach is to edit using high quality monitoring equipment to ensure the video and audio are the best they can be, are accurate to the video standard being used, and will perform well on high end viewing/listening gear. And then check on the lowest level viewing/listening system for which it is targeted to be sure it remains acceptable. If there are problems, address them and check again.

Two examples of the need to address and test on both the high and low end gear.

Consider the home-made DVD edited with the $59 all-in-one editing application. The DVD looks good on a 12" combo TV/DVD set from the local discount box house. Play that same DVD on a 46" HD set with a HDMI upscaling DVD player and you may be in for a major disappointment as you watch the dancing encoding artifacts around every moving object in the video.

Than consider a video with stereo audio that happened to have left and right channels recorded out of phase, and perhaps some 15 kHz horizontal frequency noise in one channel. On a good stereo system you still hear both channels and the high frequency noise , although the stereo image may float around a bit. But on a mono playback system, the sound will likely be subject to serious signal cancellation artifacts, and the high frequency noise is invisible because the poor sound system cannot reproduce it.

The kicker is quality monitoring gear costs real money. Using a SD TV to judge the image is better than nothing. And you an use color bars and a #47B blue photo filter to help you adjust the set color, contrast, brightness and tint settings to the best your set can do. See
http://www.greatdv.com/video/smptebars.htm for details on how to do this.

I don't own an A1, I've just used one a good bit whilst working on some shows. Don is 100% right about the monitoring issues.

I got slightly confused towards the end of your post that you were talking about, well, post work. On set, manually white balance off a white sheet of paper or something, then in post, I view back on LCD and SD (color corrected with SMPTE bars, as Don spoke of). I honestly never changed the LCD settings on the A1, and don't remember what options are available, sorry... But you may want to look for a way on the camera to send color bars to the LCD and any external monitor...

C

Thanks again all. Helpful stuff.