Re: [ARSCLIST] Where to find NTSC Color Bar and sound tones

[Rod Stephens <savecal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As we progress in this discussion, we are getting more into the basics of professional video reproduction which may be off topic for our forum, but I wanted to add that about one to two minutes of these color bars and audio tones are generally put on the head of a professional video tape when it's recorded to enable an engineer to be able to play it back at a later time with the proper audio and video settings.  So, both the video tape and the monitor used to view it must be properly set up for things to be up to SMPTE standards.

Fortunately, as someone has already mentioned, most home equipment playback equipment does a pretty good job of this, automatically, so such "standards" are truly academic to the average viewer.  Generally, it's the picture (or TV) monitor settings at home that distort the original intent and the balances of audio and video of the recording when it was mastered.

Rod
Family Theater Productions


Aaron Z Snyder wrote:

Rod Stephens wrote:

  

When I worked for a video company in the '60's, we had a variation on
the NTSC phrase: "Never Twice the Same Color" since, unlike many
European systems, we have knobs on our equipment that allow us to make
the video picture look any way we want.
    

The simplest way to set up a monitor is to use SMPTE (Society of Motion
Picture and Television Engineers) color bars, which is a long-established
variant of simple color bars. The extra information allows the user to set
brightness and color-balance to a (more-or-less) repeatable setting so that
the color of a production can be properly evaluated.

Aaron Z