Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009 - (Page 25)

Figure 3 (near right). Leader Instruments LV5800 with white balance set too high Figure 4 (far right). Leader Instruments LV5800 with illegal blacks and over-saturation removed, and now, black can be set to zero. But doing this can cause your videos, when played on nondigital devices, to have issues. For example, if switching, you might hear a pop in the audio with each dissolve or cut. Also, your colors’ brightness may be different on the two settings. Setting the black to zero is known as super black or enhanced black. Illegal whites and blacks, which cannot be reproduced by traditional CMYK printing, are a bad thing. Whenever you hear the term illegal, it’s never good. What the term means is that your color settings are out of the norm. With illegal whites and blacks, or even just one or the other, all of your colors become illegal. Your colors will be either blooming or crushed, so your skin tone and other colors just won’t look good. This is why you should take control of your camera’s settings. When you use the automatic setting on your camera, the settings are approximations and Figure 5. Leader Instruments LV5800 with correct settings not true settings. So your black settings may be at 3 IRE or even 15 IRE, while your whites may be at 70 to 80 IRE or even above 100. Both are bad. Figure 3 shows a white balance set too high, while Figure 4 shows illegal blacks and oversaturation. Figure 5 shows correct settings. Some great tools you can use to prepare your settings are a Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) color chart and a warm card. The SMPTE color chart is considered the broadcast standard for setting colors and has multiple shades inside of it. When you look on a vectorscope, you will be considerably more accurate. The warm cards are a nice tool that very few people use. They are white balance cards, but they are not pure white and are set for different levels of lighting and filaments. If you use them, you can shoot in fluorescent lighting and your whites will look white and not green. So with these cards, you can make your video warmer or colder as you see fit. Warm and cold videos are easy to define. Warm has a tendency to be on the red side, while cold is on the blue side. Again, choosing which way to go is really up to personal preference. However, you need to know your audience before you make the choice. Do you think your audience is on CRTs or on LCD and plasma displays? Since CRTs are tube-based and tend to run warm, you might want to make your videos on the cooler side. If your audience is more webbased or even HD-based, they are on the cooler side, so you will probably want to work on the warmer side. There are some exceptions. Again, this is where you need to know your equipment. Are your cameras on WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM 25 http://WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009

Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009 Table of Contents User-Generated Politics Netflix Needs a Business Model Technology and Business Trends by the Numbers Improving Video Color Quality What Makes for Compelling Video? Game On: Bringing the NHL to IPTV Give! The New Era of Corporate Communications New Video Frontiers: Taking It Beyond the PC The HD Showdown: Codec Vendors Battle It Out for Supreme Quality The Ultimate Guide to Creating Online Video Content That Works, Part 2 Planning for Webcasting Success: Considerations for Deploying an Enterprise Video Communications Platform All Mobile Devices Are Not the Same Datmedia Datpresenter LSI Tarari Encoder Accelerator LCPX-6140 Gomez Active Streaming XF Transcoding for Global Reach Executive Visions 2009 The Revolution Is Being Televised

Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009

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