SMPTE Colour Bars

[oli]

I own two PAL HVX200's.

One does not have SMPTE colour bars, only basic non-professional bars, while the other can generate SMPTE bars for calibrating a field monitor.

Can anyone shed some light on this unusual difference? It seems crazy as to work with the first camera, I have to export SMPTE bars onto a P2 card through FCP and then play through the camera to calibrate the monitor?!?

[mikkowilson]

A PAL camera should generate EBU color bars, not SMTPE color bars.

- Mikko

[oli]

I updated the firmware of one of the cams, and now it has also this simple color bars like this http://www.mivs.com/products/videoproducts/tsg/images/ff-bars100-75-0-640.gif
insteat of color bars like this http://examples.oreilly.com/imovie06tmm/ColorBars.gif
Why is that?
Can I change the bars somehow?

[mikkowilson]

These ones are correct for PAL: http://www.mivs.com/products/videoproducts/tsg/images/ff-bars100-75-0-640.gif


- Mikko

[oli]

How should you calibrate a monitor with this?
There is just no way how I could calibrate, brighness, contrast, chroma and phase with this.
Why did the bars changed when I updated my firmware?
It just dosn t make sense to me.

[Postmaster]

Yeah, I would also prefer the SMPT bars for calibrating.

[Erik Olson]

Why don't you have pluge on European color bars? I don't see what NTSC versus PAL has to do with this decision.

e

[mikkowilson]

PAL doesn't have setup. Black is 0%, not 7.5%. So you can't have "plunge" in PAL as there is no "Blacker than black"

SMTPE bars shown on a PAL monitor will either have the "0%" bar and the "7.5%" bar at the same brightness - this pushes the 7.5% bar down to 0%, which as a result throws off the rest of the levels slightly as you stretch contrast.
Or the monitor shows the 0% bar as black, and the 7.5% bar a little lighter than black - this would be due to an incorrectly fed signal, again, the levels would be off if you adjusted normally as you'd be setting 7.5% to zero.


To set up a PAL system correctly, you need PAL color bars. Or a different PAL test patern.

- Mikko

[stuckfootage]

Thanks for the clear explanation, Mikko.
I like the idea of Black = 0.

So I guess you might think NTSC should actually be NTSB,
Not The Same Black.


Les

[ulisses]

now I'm curious, how to adjust phase in pal ?

ulisses

[mikkowilson]

Hehe, you can't. It's self calibrating :)
There are no "phase" (AKA "Hue" or "Tint") adjustments on PAL equipment.


- Mikko

[Derrick_SA]

Does anyone maybe have instructions on calibrating a PAL monitor with PAL bars?

thanks,
Derrick