color balance

E

egendron

Member
so, I'm almost ready to color balance my hour long film. I've burned a couple of test shots onto DVD and heres what I've found;
when played on the computer they look stunning.
when played on my TV they often (but not always) look too hot.
how do I figure out which to balance for?
-edg
 
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[B]color balance[/B]

color balance

well, I agree, that's sorta what I was thinking. But what I'm asking is how do I determine which is gonna best represent my colors to the many different tv sets of my audience?? Is there any sort of standard I can apply? should I consider my computer screen to be a "standard"???
-edg
 
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Yes, that's what SMPTE color bars are all about. Calibrate your television so that it properly displays the color bars, and then you know what your footage is actually looking at.

But you can't control how misadjusted your end consumer's TV is... you just have to do it "right" on your end and hope that they have a TV that's somewhat close to accurately calibrated.
 
color bars

color bars

(thank you)
Ok, this is a real nubie Q. But what do I calibrate them TO? I mean to say that I can get some color bars on my screen, but what do I use a reference? Is there someplace to get a hardcopy?
Or do I just keep them from looking too hot? ...or what?
-edg
 
egendron said:
(thank you)
Ok, this is a real nubie Q. But what do I calibrate them TO? I mean to say that I can get some color bars on my screen, but what do I use a reference? Is there someplace to get a hardcopy?
Or do I just keep them from looking too hot? ...or what?
-edg
Click to expand...

Try this.


-A
 
ok........guys where do I do this calibrate, I mean do have to buy a tv monitor to do this color balancing or can I get by without it.?........



sorry but .....I am here to learn
 
monitor?

monitor?

I was told the asnwer is YES, you need a monitor bc computer screens are not reliable enough. (I had expected the reverse to be true)
 
If you cannot get a proper monitor, the least bad thing is to monitor on your TV-set and use the scopes to read that you're within broadcast legit limits.

If this is DV and you have a DV camera, chances are that you can monitor through firewire to yuour cam and S-video to your TV.

If you have one (extra) of the CinemaDisplays @ hand, you could try to use the digital cinema desktop function in FCP. It does a pretty good (but far from exact) job at emulating screencolors..

Gunleik
 
There's the tech way to do it... and the "Eyeball" it way. The technical way is to feed the video signal to a waveform monitor (oscilliscope device) and set the video via the known correct levels shown on the waveform. That's the engineer way. Those of use that don't have a waveform monitor and/or the knowledge to adjust things... and that's most of us... do it the "eyeball" way. In other words, we adjust the Hue, Chroma (color), Saturation, etc., until it "looks" like the original electronically generated colorbars. In addition to the that, you can use the "blue gun only" trick as noted in the Video University link sent by "adkimery" above...and that should get you pretty close. Truly, without a waveform monitor, it is only guess work! And as Barry said, who knows how misadjusted your viewer's set will be! Good Luck.
 
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