Composite vs. Component vs. S Video

I?m thinking of buying an external monitor. Is there any reason why I should be spending the extra money on a monitor with the Component option. I am currently working on small projects (non-broadcast at the moment) and small documentary films on FCP HD as well as some After Effects. Are there any other benefits to it other than greater image quality over composite (HD compatibility, etc). Also, does S Video give better image quality over Component/Composite?
Thanks in advance for any feedback.

(Thank you Wayne, Justin and Thomas for your feedback before on the JVC monitors. Greatly appreciated).

Composite or "real" NTSC is the worst of the lot. The color information and the luminance are crammed onto one wire and the color usually gets the worst of it. Classic problems are color crawling around brightly colored objects, fuzzy edges, and a complete inability to carry red text.

That's also the one you get at home, so if you want to see exactly what's coming off your cable or television antenna, that's it.

S Video or "Separate Video" eliminates several of the NTSC objections by having two wires. One wire carries exactly the same fuzzy color as NTSC does, but the luminance does not get damaged by having to share the wire with the color. The system appears sharper but you can't broadcast it in analog.

Component comes in many flavors, but you can think of it as the video signal(s) as they were made in the camera. No shortcuts. But, however, it takes one wire for each color. The camera makes red, blue, green and sync and RGBS is one flavor of component. You can eliminate one wire by jiggering and mixing the colors to produce Y, R-Y, and B-Y. Most color television systems are based on variations of that one. That's basically black and white television on one wire, red on one and blue on the third (I know that's too simple. Sue me).

One of the cool things that happen to Y, R-Y and B-Y is that you can make the two color channels fuzzy and nobody misses them. That's saves bits when you try to encode and compress video.

So Composite is the bare minimum to see analog broadcast and others are handy to have because you *can* broadcast them on digital television.

Koz

The best and most expensive input into a production monitor is SDI. It stays all serial digital from the computer to the monitor.

It is my understanding that S-Video is the next best quality and composite is the least acceptable interface to the monitor.

Component video is not too bad but S-Video is even better!

S-Video is better than Component? I've always been under the impression (as Koz said) that it's the other way around. What's your take on it, John?

No, component is better than S-Video. Basically, in order of quality from least to best:

Composite (one RCA cable) > S-Video > Component (3 RCA cables, typically colored red, green, and blue) > RGB (5 RCA cables typically colored red, green, blue, black, and white or VGA) > SD SDI.

Component or higher are also capable of passing HD signals, although SDIx2 is required for 4:4:4 uncompressed HD.

You can certainly get away w/o component input. I just use S-Video at home. On the other hand, a monitor is something you'll probably hang onto for a while. If you start doing broadcast color correction in the future you'll want component inputs. Of course this would be useless w/o a deck and/or card that could send out a component signal.

Other variables of mention would be 16:9, PAL, blue gun, and number of actual scan lines. The important thing, of course, is that you have a dedicated monitor at all.



- Justin Barham -

In the NTSC encoding process, the Red, Green, and Blue camera signals are mixed together in 30%, 59% and 11% to create the "Y" or black and white signal. Tack the sync signals on and you can broadcast that as a perfectly legal black and white television show.

Back at the camera, process the color signals again into two NTSC color signals which are called Color Separation.

There are two color separation signals and each one carries two colors. NTSC was designed as a four color system. The R-Y signal, when it exists, tells the system if there is either red or cyan in the picture. It *separates* the black and white into either red or cyan. If R-Y is missing, both colors are, too.

The B-Y signal tells the system if there is any blue-purple or green in the picture. If B-Y is missing, both of those colors are missing, too.

R-Y and B-Y are **very** low quality signals. Worse than 4:2:2 or 4:1:1. They are severely bandwidth restricted so they can be combined with each other and hidden inside the black and white signal and broadcast with minimum damage. The black and white signal was made slighly softer to accomodate this process. That's why the words "Sharp" and "NTSC" should never be said in the same breath unless you're trying for comedy effect.

They found that all these signals got along much better if they changed the frame rate just slightly. From 30.00 to 29.97. If you're into blame, that's who to shoot. This all happened in 1945, by the way, so act fast.


A full quality black and white signal--with no damage-- travels down the "Y" wire in an S Video Cable. The encoded, combined, restricted, and fuzzy color signals travel down the "C" wire. You can get NTSC from S by making the black and white slightly fuzzy and smashing the two signals together.

Of course, then you can't get them apart again.... That's why once you go S Video, you have to stay S Video to get the benefits.

So, yes. Working up; full-on NTSC, then S, then everything else.

Koz