re: What's a good shade of red to use?

A little basic question: In a DV NTSC timeline, with font sizes around 16-20 (Helvetica Black Condensed), what would be a good shade of red to use? I need a bright deep red like nail polish, not a matte or dulled red, but the red colours are smudging on my TV (not broadcast monitor) as well as High Quality enabled, full-quality self-contained QuickTime movie. I'm using Boris Title 3D. This thing will eventually be output to DVCam tape, so I can't use an Uncompressed SD timeline.

Red is notorious for smearing - it's one of the worst colours to use. If you have no option, choose the colour you really would like it to be, then go to the onboard scopes and keep tweaking it until it gets totally legal.

This is not just a DV thing though. Check out the reds on any old VHS that wasn't prepped for broadcast. Bad colour. Bad bad colour.

We once had a show where the designer painted the entire kitchen that "nail polish" red. Yikes! What a nightmare! The entire season while color correcting we had to put a secondary correction on all the shots just to deal with the oversaturated red.

My advice.... avoid red if at all possible. If you must use it, be aware of the limitations and watch your scopes carefully.

These days I'm a big fan of "BLUE"!

mark

I use Magic Bullet to remove red DV "stair-stepping" with great success. There is a built-in DV Artifact remover that is just plain magic.

Red doesn't scare me anymore - I use it all the time

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Yeah, I know red is a tricky thing...I've taken the RGB levels down to 180, 20, 20 and the clarity's improved, no smudging as far as I can tell, though the fact that the red on my TV looks nothing like the red shown in Boris is something of an impeding factor. Got no choice in this one, though -- the red is part of the colour scheme.

Over the obvious chroma crawl and Consumer Color distortions, red only contributes 30% to the overall brightness of the picture. So in black and white, you're illustrating your images with dim gray text.

That Consumer Color thing will kill you, too. If you set up a TV with the blue viewing filter and colorbars, red text (or most red things) will blow the picture into overload and smearing--at least on a glass monitor/TV. I'm not sure what will happen on an LCD or Plasma.


<<<Red doesn't scare me anymore - I use it all the time >>>

I wonder how you're viewing the work. Red is one of those magic colors that changes a great deal depending on the viewing equipment. That's one of the reasons producers are very careful about using it.

Koz

...wonder no more:

Sony Broadcast monitors (PVM-2950Q - 29" at home & PVM-20L5 20" w/SDI board at work).

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

<<<Sony Broadcast monitors (PVM-2950Q - 29" at home & PVM-20L5 20" w/SDI board at work).>>>

That may be the problem rather than the solution. We have one of each. The 20L5 doesn't have Consumer Color and the 2950Q's can be switched off.

What happens when you look at the work on an actual TV, like, say, after a Radio Shack TV modulator?

Koz

This thread ain't about me, koz. I am not asking for any help - derek is. I am fine with my reds.

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Funny how the sidetrack happened...

And yes, I'm looking at this on a TV. Not calibrated. All the problems associated with that method. But the colour scheme of the piece is red, black, fleshtone and white, mostly, and red is the way to go on the text. Basically I have to make it work!

<<<I am not asking for any help>>>

Maybe you should be. I'm always suspicious when somebody claims to cure a problem we've been having for 45 years.

I'd be fine with them if I wasn't looking at them, too.

Reds are a pain. WGBH in Boston broadcast a kiddie show which involved shooting characters over a bright red card. They weren't paying attention and the resulting video took out the twelve foot long vestigial sideband filter and burned one of the power combiners at the transmitter in Needham. It was the first time anyone had ever seen plain copper tubes catch fire.

Anyone who had been through that developed a new respect for illegal colors--which are really easy to do in red.

Koz

...no thanx, koz...REALLY (?)



Post Edited (07-26-06 19:04)

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

<<<so ease up, there, mr. engineer.>>>

I don't want to come across waving stone tablets (I mean really, have you ever tried to even *lift* stone tablets? Those suckers are *heavy*. Moses must have been a *horse*.) but you did claim to have cured the Dreaded Red Text Problem.

I totally believe you that you can make it look better by running software that can manage the video edges and chroma details of a text key. Equipment has been doing similar things in very expensive hardware for a while.

But I'd be a lot happier about recommending this to others had you claimed you had seen the work on a Discount Drugs TV in addition to your two stable and respected television monitors.


How 'bout we do the first five commandments and then change off? I think I can deal with these rocks one at a time.

Koz