Digital Video - February 2008 - (Page 48) DV 101 BY JAY HOLBEN PICTURE PERFECT MONITOR CALIBRATION IS AN OFTEN-OVERLOOKED KEY TO ATTAINING EXPERT IMAGES. ne of the greatest advantages to shooting digital video is the fact that you can immediately see the image you’re capturing, either live or on playback. This may seem like an odd, obvious statement, but, as I spent most of my career shooting 35mm film, this was a novel discovery for me. Learning to trust the on-set monitor as an accurate representation of the image I was capturing was a bit of an uphill battle, but once I saw that what I got in post was the same image I had on set, a whole new world opened up. That said, you’ve got to make sure you’re properly viewing that on-set image. I’ve seen far too many digital video shooters who just run out into the field and start shooting with nothing more than their camera’s viewfinder and/or a flip-out LCD screen. These little screens are great for composition, following the action, focus (sometimes), and for quick evaluation of the exposure and color, but they’re not sufficient for the fine evaluation of your image. To take advantage of WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) digital video, you need a professional-grade CRT monitor. Check out Jay’s DV101 Blog for addiProfessional-grade CRTs have a lot tional information of advantages over their consumerand images related to this grade cousins, not the least of which story. Visit DV online. is better resolution and color fidelity, 48 dv february 2008 O in addition to more consistent repeatability of color. Secondly, if you’ve got the right monitor, it has a “blue only” or “blue check” function, which is of paramount importance, as I’ll discuss in a bit. The most vital thing to understand about evaluating your image on a monitor is that your eye is extremely adaptable — and vulnerable — to changes in light and color in your environment. What may look great on the monitor in one environment might look horrible on the same monitor in another environment. It’s very important to calibrate — that is, properly adjust — the monitor to your eye in each and every environment it resides. The key to doing this is color bars. To be more specific, SMPTE Engineering Guideline EG 1-1990 color bars. The importance of these bars is in the two separate collections of color bars. The first collection, which takes up about 2/3 of the image, is of seven large bars at 75-percent intensity (white, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red and blue) in the top row. Below that is a chipset of another seven, smaller, bars (blue, black, magenta, black, cyan, black and white). In a perfect world, you want these color bars to be generated by the camera that you’re using, and most professional screens — as well as many prosumer units — are capable of doing this. There are, however, many cameras out there that don’t generate the SMPTE bars, but rather, if they generate bars www.dv.com http://www.dv.com http://www.dv.com
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