Tutorial: Improving Video Color Quality

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 web-based 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 the warm or cold side? What looks better to you? How is your contrast?

Encoding for Maximum Quality
Now that acquisition and color correction have been covered, the final element for great-looking video on the web is complexity and contrast. Since the original days of streaming media, we have been looking for ways to make videos look better. In the early days, there were only a couple of codecs, and live and real-time encoding was difficult. We could add filters, but more importantly, they gave us control of contrast. As mentioned earlier, televisions and computer monitors used different technology, and as such, the contrast would be different. So using the aforementioned programs, you can tweak web videos by adding more contrast than you would for normal videos. What this will do is give colors more saturation, which will make them seem fuller and brighter. If your contrast is too low, your video will look washed out, dull, and a little more gray. If you look at most web videos, this is the case. So in many cases, adding extra contrast will cause your videos to have some pop.

Another option to help make your video look better is encoding it in high complexity. High complexity can be used in both live and transcoding workflows. Using high complexity is basically giving the encoder more information to work with. It’s like shooting the same content at the same angle with both HD and SD cameras. It’s the same information, but the user has more to work with (not to mention a completely different frame shape!).

Now, that is an extreme example. From doing my own lab tests, there isn’t any noticeable file size difference. But there is a definite image quality difference. I know it can be hard to tell at first glance, especially if your largest video size is 320x240. But when you start doing 640x480 and above, it’s much more noticeable. I’m not saying that if you do a side-by-side of smaller-sized images, you won’t see the difference. You will. So now you’re saying, "If this is such a great thing, why isn’t everyone doing it?" The answer is time. As such, you must choose between speed and quality.

So which is more important? There is an old saying that time is money. That is true. The faster you get things done, the more you can get done and the more money you can make.

But I come from the school of doing the highest quality work possible. Why invest all this time and creative ability only to kill your work in the encoding process? Again, this is a personal judgment. Back in 2000, my crew and I did about 160-plus hours of footage per week. We then had to edit it and get it up on the web with Synchronized Multimedia (SYMM) technology. We always went for the highest quality and the largest-sized videos. Most of our competitors were doing videos that were 240x180 or smaller. Our smallest was 240x180, and our average was 320x240. Some customers requested even larger videos, such as 640x480. We always did high-contrast and high-complexity work. This gave us a competitive advantage over our competitors. We never lost a show or lost a bid because of quality.

But this had a drawback. We had a good-sized encoding farm, and the machines were going 24/7. Back then, there was no hardware that would assist with this. Now, there are accelerators. I’m familiar, obviously, with the LSI Tarari Encoder Accelerator. This is a hardware accelerator that speeds up the software encoders such as Windows Media Encoder, and it accelerates at higher complexity. So it basically offers hardware speed with software quality and high complexity.

Summary
To improve your quality and give yourself a competitive advantage over the other guys, you should know your equipment and how it operates. You don’t need to be an engineer and know every facet, but be familiar with how your equipment works and the tweaks needed to make your video stand out. After you know your equipment, remember to make sure you adjust your white and black levels during acquisition. By doing this, your color saturation will be where it should be and not an approximation. Lastly, take advantage of adding to your contrast and encoding in high complexity. Encoding with high contrast will allow your colors to have a deeper saturation that will make your video seem to have more pop. Using high complexity will make your video appear to be clearer and encoded at a higher bitrate than it actually was.