Having a terrible time with colors...

[Dermot]

Dermot, the suggestion was for me to use a $20 CRT television, outputting signal via firewire, through a DV camcorder, and inputting to the TV via either S-video or component cables. It's already been pointed out that using a CRT computer monitor, connected via VGA, would still be problematic.

I appreciate all the help. I really do.

Sorry David i misread somewhere…

the output chain you describe should all be 601, the output from Vegas is 601 in my (limited) experience, so the weak link seems to be monitor callibration

Can you;
1) hire a calibrated mon for a day, like a Flanders, Sony or Panasonic set mon that are pretty accurate out of the gate
2) take your monitor to somewhere that has a calibrated mon and put them side by side and tweak your to be a close as you can to a known good reference
3) render the show as a Qt file with bars at the head and have that output by a system with a calibrated mon, a local grading / finishing suite perhaps would do this for very little
4) borrow/rent a probe and use the free lightspace software to check you mon, it will not build a LUT, but it will give you the real goods about how accurate your screen is and you then tweak it by eye and re-check, rinse and repeat until it's fairly close

 

[David W. Richardson]

Can you;
2) take your monitor to somewhere that has a calibrated mon and put them side by side and tweak your to be a close as you can to a known good reference

Why can't I just take my preview TV and put it beside my entertainment center TV and calibrate it to match?

 

[Dermot]

Why can't I just take my preview TV and put it beside my entertainment center TV and calibrate it to match?

If the entertainment center is accurate enough, then yea, go for it

 

[David W. Richardson]

If the entertainment center is accurate enough, then yea, go for it

Well my goal is to get the video to look the same on both screens, when played from a DVD. Actually, that's not true -- my real goal is to have the video preview from Vegas, displayed on the smaller TV, to look just like what the rendered DVD played on the big TV will look like. So matching the two TV's isn't really going to do what I need to do.

The only thing I can think of to do is a bit complicated. First, burn a DVD of the color bars rendered out from Vegas. Already done that. Next, move my editing PC with the LCD TV preview monitor into the living room, setting the TV up beside the entertainment TV. Pull up the Vegas project with the color bars, and display the color bars on the small TV. Play the color bars DVD on the big TV. Then walk through adjusting brightness, contrast, color and tint on the small TV until everything matches how it looks on the big TV. That way what my preview monitor in Vegas shows me on the small TV is roughly identical to what a burned DVD from Vegas of that same material will look like on the big TV.

Big pain, but worth a shot.

 

[David W. Richardson]

Okay, I finally bit the bullet and did what I should have done a long time ago.

I took my entire editing system into the living room and set it up. Then I played, on the big TV, a DVD of footage from the video I'm working on. Paused it. Found the same frame in the footage in Vegas, so it was displayed in the preview window on my small LCD TV. Then I adjusted the settings on the small TV until the image matched as closely as I could get it to the image displayed on the big TV.

Moved everything back to my office, and now things seem a lot better. Now when I burn a DVD and play it on the big TV in the living room, it looks very much like what I see on my preview monitor. Whew!

 

[arco1]

Based solely on the images you posted, the issue is one of "set up" or pedestal level of the signal. In the digital realm, black can be represented by a value of zero; television systems use a higher level (engineers call it pedestal) to indicate black. Unfortunately I am not familiar with Vegas and do not know where to tell you to make the change, but you may want to look in your help files for the above terms.


Jim

 

[David W. Richardson]

Based solely on the images you posted, the issue is one of "set up" or pedestal level of the signal. In the digital realm, black can be represented by a value of zero; television systems use a higher level (engineers call it pedestal) to indicate black. Unfortunately I am not familiar with Vegas and do not know where to tell you to make the change, but you may want to look in your help files for the above terms.


Jim

Apparently what you call 'pedestal', Vegas calls 'luminance' or 'gain'. As far as I can see, there's no master setting for this -- it's applied clip-by-clip using various FX.

The thing I hate about using Vegas Movie Studio HD 11 is that it doesn't have the scopes that Vegas Pro 8 has. However, Studio is better able to handle the h.264 files - Pro 8.0 isn't good at all with them.

 

[David W. Richardson]

Oh my God....

I think I've finally found the answer!

All I had to do was set the Video Output FX to use the Color Corrector, with the Preset set to "Computer RGB to Studio RGB". Now my LCD TV that I use as a preview monitor actually shows me the same thing that I get when I burn a DVD and play it via a DVD player to the big TV in the living room.

HALLELUJAH!!!!

This is a SANITY SAVER!