Calling on Colorists!

Question

Calling on Colorists!

Hi Color professionals--

I’d love to pick your brains about color for a bit. We produce a TV series that is beginning to do fairly well on Vimeo on Demand. There are a few of us in post. We each have a generally understanding of scopes and we are confident in our skills to get each episode looking uniform and looking good on our primary distribution medium -- a computer screen. Because VOD offers their service on Apple TV, Roku, and other smart TV devices, we are now running into issues that we are not readily equipped to handle.

We know enough about the world of TVs that we know no two look the same, and that fact is the bane of every colorist’s existence.

Our show looks great on the average computer device (iPhone, Mac, PC, iPad, Andriod), but the same video file, when streamed to your average TV looks like absolute rubbish. It looks amateurish with color so intense that is looks cartoon-like. Some TVs are better than others and some are ever worse than I described. After testing our show on various TVs, I always flip around Netflix and watch other stuff -- and it looks fine. It’s not the TV settings. OR it is, but colorists smarter than us, adjust for it.

About 20% of the people who are buying our content now watch it on their TV. We need to get it looking better.

How do the big boys do it? Do they produce a version for broadcast and a different one for streaming.

Do they compromise and make content that looks “decent” everywhere? Quick note on this: I spent some time yesterday and re-colored one of our episodes. It does look better on TVs, but does not look as look on computers -- it looks overly desaturated.

A few points.

-We shoot with both Red Epic and Panasonic GH4. All of the episodes talked about here were shot with the GH4. The issue seems to be the same on both cameras.

-Modern TVs seem to be more forgiving. The more modern, the better.

-interesting enough, even the versions that look way oversaturated on TVs, I do not see any evidence of it being oversaturated on the vectorscope.

Thanks!

Posted on Nov 29, 2015 8:38 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

151,010 points

Nov 29, 2015 8:58 AM in response to Steven Galvano

TThe best thing to do is to get a good broadcast monitor and use it to check your output.

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Answer 2

Nov 29, 2015 9:14 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

I should have mentioned that we have and use 10/12 bit broadcast monitors. The image on most consumer grade TVs look much different.

The basis of my question isnt so much coloring for broadcast, it's understanding the compromise between coloring for multiple end uses.

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Answer 3

fox_m

Level 6

12,226 points

Nov 29, 2015 12:28 PM in response to Steven Galvano

I can't be much help with your color issues, I am not a professional colorist—so consider the source 😉.

As an explanation to why consumer monitors suck (and they do) is that they do not support the full gamut of color (where we expect 8-8-8 RGB bit depths, many have less 8-6-8, 8-6-7, etc.) and manufacturers pull a lot of other tricks to get the image to "look better" (artificially increasing the contrast - aka contrast ratio, etc.) On top of that are the differences between LCD, LED (back-lit), plasma, etc., and pixel density (I've seen monitors with as low as 58 pixels per inch, and the larger the monitor, the more obvious that becomes.) Computer monitors, phones, tablets etc, have pixel densities in excess of 100 or more. This has a huge impact on subtleties like gradients. A simple modest vignette on a very colorful background creates all kind of banding issues. LCDs are the worst. LED back-lit flat panels have improved a great deal.

When it comes to coloring for these end devices, I've found that increasing contrast or saturation at all but the most subtle amounts will degrade an image very quickly. Less is more. A slightly desaturated look is a "look". One that's become popular. Simply increasing contrast will artificially (and usually unintentionally) increase saturation, so if you need to increase contrast, back off the saturation a little to compensate. Commercial tv sets are already doing a lot of contrast adjustment for you, and therefore driving up the saturation.

For your GH4 settings, you should probably shoot in All-Intra mode (every image is a full frame image.) That will help out somewhat. All formats from the GH4 are compressed (but have exceptional bandwidth!) When shooting Red, use the lowest compression setting you can manage. Compression algorithms work themselves into color treatments at every level of editing ("blocking" artifacts).

Ultimately, I believe you will have to experiment to see what works best for your production. If you know what you're up against, you have a better chance of succeeding. So, lower than computer grade resolutions, artificially cranked contrasts, lower color depths than required, and video compression. Time will improve the end (user) environment... so... patience as well.

HTH

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