Tutorial: Improving Video Color Quality

If you have never used a CCU before, it allows you to control almost every aspect of the camera. So when should you use a CCU and when should you go straight to tape? Most people associate CCUs with broadcast or multicamera shoots. The truth is that it’s up to your standards. If you’re satisfied with the default white balance, black balance, and filters, then go straight to tape. If you are not and want more, then look into CCUs.

That said, not all cameras can use CCUs. The trend over the last few years has been to allow professional camcorders to be attached to CCUs. Most use them with dockable cameras, where you can put on a studio back and connect it with 26-pin cable or Triax.

However, if you can’t afford a dockable with a CCU solution, a box camera may be right for you. You can find them with bayonet mounts and 2/3" CCDs along with many of the same features that the dockable cameras have. Almost all of the box cameras can be hooked up to some form of CCU.

Some box cameras are better than others, and the price will reflect that. But you can’t beat their size for travel, and their cost is usually lower than the dockables. However, you can’t attach a VTR to the back of them. You can set them up in studio configurations with viewfinders and lens-control systems. But since you might want to use CCUs, the video will then go to your real VTR, where it will be processed by your personal settings. Yes, you can set filters and the pedestal. Some box cameras even have options to control remotely with pan and zoom. This is great, except then you need to do multiple multicamera shoots, and you may not have the staffing to do them all.

Getting Your Settings Straight
When it comes to balancing your whites and blacks, some of you may already be thinking, "I just use the on-board white balance. I flip the toggle and wait for the screen to tell me it is complete." However, there is a real value to doing a more detailed white balance and black balance. The defaults on most cameras are fine, but if your camera or equipment allows it, tweaking the white and black balances allows your colors to pop and makes your picture appear warmer or cooler, depending on how you set them up. Most people do a quick white balance, which allows skin tone to look OK. The camera’s colors are going to be close to the right range, but there is no guarantee that they will be exactly where they should be.

When adjusting the color range, most people forget to adjust the black balance, but this is just as important as the white balance. Without setting your black levels, it’s difficult to truly set your white balance. The black level is the base. In most cases, the white level is set to 100 IRE, while the black level is set to 7.5 IRE. The reason black is set to 7.5 IRE is because blanking is set to zero. (Blanking is the NTSC interlaced scan line.) This is done so no one will constantly see the line constantly in the video. With LCD and digital displays (computer monitors and now home television), there is no blanking, so black can be set to zero. The tools you can use to set your blacks and whites are called waveform monitors and vectorscopes. It is key to know about these tools, IRE, illegal blacks and whites, and how to make your videos appear cold and warm.

Using waveform monitors and vectorscopes seems to be a dying trend. I guess it’s more of the way the analog guys used to do it. I’m not calling them old, I’m just saying that, in the digital world, the analog ways of doing things aren’t exactly being transferred. They’re not wrong, they’re just not being taught anymore. That said, it may be a digital world, but it’s an analog workflow. Waveform monitors and vectorscopes allow a person to see where whites, blacks, and the full-color spectrum fit. I bet you would be surprised where your default settings are and where your colors are with each day-to-day use. You may even have software versions of waveform monitors and vectorscopes on your nonlinear editing system. You use them and probably don’t know it.

Basically, waveform monitors and vectorscopes are oscilloscopes that are designed to be used in the video environment. Waveform monitors are used to see where black levels and white levels are, while vectorscopes work with chrominance information. The vectorscope shows where the colors should be. Typically, this is where you would use your color bar chart. On the scope are red, magenta, blue, cyan, green, and yellow. So you can see that by using these two devices, with proper adjustment, your colors can be dead-on and give you the extra pop that most companies’ videos just don’t have.

IRE, named for the Institute of Radio Engineers, is a unit of measurement in the video world that was developed to measure the amplitude of video signals. For standard NTSC—the analog television system used in the U.S. and named for the National Television System Committee—these settings are as follows: White is 100 IRE and black is 7.5. However, with computer monitors and digital displays, the blanking frequency has been 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 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.