General Tips/Rules for creating broadcast video?

[beenyweenies]

Anyway, I've done a lot of work on the movie itself and it could not look better on the computer. It's razor sharp, ultra clear and the color correction is perfect. I'm completely aware that a TV is never going to look as good, and that's fine, but after using the highest quality encoding settings I can and making sure the source movie looks perfect, the amount of degredation I'm getting is just unacceptable.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

First of all, TV and computers monitors use totally different color profiles to show images. Monitors use RGB, and have a much, much wider degree of color and tone available. Doing any color correction in any computer based environment, without watching it on a TV as you go, is suicide. it is akin to painting a beautiful portrait, but working under a red lightbulb.

So first thing's first, you must get a television monitor of some kind to watch as you work. After Effects outputs previews through any available firewire port on your computer, but getting the firewire signal to a consumer grade TV requires a mediary device. For my cheaper home setup I use the Canopus ADVC100 (http://dv411.com/advc110.html), which takes firewire from the computer and converts it into component video which can be fed into my el cheapo toshiba monitor (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=6988584&type=product&id=1099390204094). In AE preferences you tell it to send previews to both your computer screen and your external monitor, and when you RAM preview it will show on your TV. This way, you aren't flying blind anymore, and can somewhat reliably color correct.

Also, AE has a "broadcast colors" effect that can be applied to an adjustment layer that sits atop all your footage, which will reduce offending colors to within a usable range for the NTSC color space. At the very least you need to slap this on.

By the way, running the s-video output from your video card to a tv will send the signal so you can view it, but don't even think about color correcting with this setup. s-video doesn't have anywhere near the color carrying strength to give reliable information. You will be no better off using this method. Even using the method outlined above isn't anywhere near perfect, you really need good hardware and a professional broadcast monitor for reliable color work.


Now, for the quality issues -
1. Don't use the progressive setting unless you have a progressive scan DVD player. Also, don't just crank the quality settings. There are specific roles for each setting and with most compression technologies, you will get dramatically diminishing returns once you have cranked the levels too high. If you are setting it around 8mbps and turning off progressive (unless you have a progscan dvd player) and it still looks bad, it's not the settings but more likely something else.

2. Sharpness - The lack of sharpness could be a very wide array of factors so can you post some specifics, such as what the content of your video is (footage, animation, 3d renders, output settings etc.).
Whatever the issue is, it is surely being compounded by your color problems. When oversaturated colors are displayed on a tv they actually cause distortion. All color and brightness on a TV is just an electrical signal - subtle tones are mild electric signals, oversaturated signals are hot. Think of it like shining a light from behind window blinds. Use a 100watt light and you will be able to see the detail of the blinds pretty well; shine a 25,000 watt light and the whole thing will blow out. You are in effect doing this with electricity when your colors and brightness values are too much. These hot signals spill over into the neighboring lines of resolution and cause bleed, blurriness etc. so if your colors and brightness are out of control, your image will suffer greatly. TV stations will promptly reject any video that is over limit like this as well. Back in the day you could actually hear an audible buzz when the screen went white from this hot signal spilling into the rest of the signal, before the TV stations really buckled down and enforced limits on saturation and brightness values.
Another factor to consider is that you will never get hollywood quality DVDs from Encore (or any other program). Hollywood uses very expensive hardware compressors that really pack the bits in and do a very good job of retaining information.
Try playing the DVD on your computer instead of the TV and see if the blurriness persists. If so it is the compression, if not it could be the color issues mentioned above.

3. Jaggies - unless your scanline patterns are perfectly matched up to the pixel rows on your tv (forget about it!), your effect is going to be compromised. You should apply a 1-2px blur to the scanlines to soften them just enough for your tv to spread them across more lines of resolution. This is a common tactic for dealing with jaggy objects including your text issues. Apply subtle blur - 1-2px at most - and preview on your new monitor (mentioned above). Surprisingly doing this doesn't make the object look soft if you go easy, it just smooths out the interlacing jagginess your tv is introducing. If you have the time and spare DVD blanks, you could also try rendering out from After Effects interlaced and non-interlaced files and seeing which one handles your scanline effect better on your TV. Also, make sure your text is a suitable size, text smaller than like 8pt sucks on television sets, especially since the viewer will likely be 6-10 feet away from it.

4. Don't obsess - the biggest disappointment in motion graphics is actually doing broadcast work. The television set will destroy your beautiful artwork from all angles - color, sharpness, miniscule title safe area etc., and as such the next few years of your life will be spent learning how to anticipate these problems and head them off at the pass. Just know that nothing ever looks as good on your tv as it did on your computer, and that no one but you will even notice...

[scrimski]

Don't obsess - the biggest disappointment in motion graphics is actually doing broadcast work. The television set will destroy your beautiful artwork from all angles - color, sharpness, miniscule title safe area etc., and as such the next few years of your life will be spent learning how to anticipate these problems and head them off at the pass. Just know that nothing ever looks as good on your tv as it did on your computer, and that no one but you will even notice...

Words of wisdom.

[tuomok]

...nothing ever looks as good on your tv as it did on your computer, and that no one but you will even notice...

Have to add a thing here...

Now with the arise of digital broadcast distribution (and especially with HD resolution) motion graphics designers will actually see everything exactly as they did on their own workstation (if equipped with a proper broadcast SDI monitor and) if your set-top box & TV are any good...

When doing graphics for analog distribution you could be certain that your image will be blurred a bit and there will be some analog noise and you could hide behind these issues. But in digital world these are gone and you as a designer or compositor have to be more accurate and precice, because the image quality will not degrade noticeably during the transmission.

But still all the rules mentioned earlier apply.

[avinashlobo]

My vote to make this thread a sticky.beenyweenies post is the sort of Holy Grail that I'd have loved to have read back when, as a total newbie, I was just blindly thrashing around for a while.

[suds]

My vote to make this thread a sticky.beenyweenies post is the sort of Holy Grail that I'd have loved to have read back when, as a total newbie, I was just blindly thrashing around for a while.

I second that!

[beenyweenies]

Have to add a thing here...

Now with the arise of digital broadcast distribution (and especially with HD resolution) motion graphics designers will actually see everything exactly as they did on their own workstation (if equipped with a proper broadcast SDI monitor and) if your set-top box & TV are any good...

When doing graphics for analog distribution you could be certain that your image will be blurred a bit and there will be some analog noise and you could hide behind these issues. But in digital world these are gone and you as a designer or compositor have to be more accurate and precice, because the image quality will not degrade noticeably during the transmission.

But still all the rules mentioned earlier apply.

Unfortunately that's not really true for several reasons:

1. Go to your nearest Best Buy or similar TV dealer and check out their walls of Digital/LCD/Plasma HDTVs. Not one single set will match another. Some have great color, some bad - some have horrible fuzziness, etc. There is no guarantee that even with a perfectly clear broadcast signal the end user will ever see it that way.

2. Then there's the issue of encoding. Your production team may lay off to HDCam (newbie note: "laying off" basically means transfering your animation/video to tape) or some other pristine format, but the broadcast facility isn't going to stream directly from HDCam to the homes of your audience. All digital TV streams are compressed, and that process varies wildly in quality from web-worthy to about DVD quality. Some broadcasters may dupe that lovely footage of yours to send out to affiliates, etc. They may put it on analog tape, D1, HDCam, who knows! You sure won't. Also, some broadcasters really crush down their digital streams to the point that banding and color loss are apparent. Then there is always the possibility (likely) that they will ALSO tweak your colors and levels to match their particular broadcast specs - no stations will broadcast footage that is over certain levels of brightness and saturation, but that standard is different for everyone. usually they will just reject the tape, but some will actually override your creative decisions (and control) by putting some lackey to work "correcting" your video to meet their specs.

Not to shoot down your point because you are right, digital TV can look closer to our originals (especially HDTV), but we are a long way off from being able to write that off as an issue!

[trichiman11]

bump ... great thread!

[m|3]

-- 4. Don't obsess - the biggest disappointment in motion graphics is actually doing broadcast work. The television set will destroy your beautiful artwork from all angles - color, sharpness, miniscule title safe area etc., and as such the next few years of your life will be spent learning how to anticipate these problems and head them off at the pass. Just know that nothing ever looks as good on your tv as it did on your computer, and that no one but you will even notice... --

---- ---- --- ---

I SECOND the above!

But then then there are a new breed of clients who have FCP or something similar runing at home and after you deliver your perfect spot, sometime later you just may see a horrible hacked/re-edited version (with new cheesy graphics) runing on air! Aughhhh.... if it were not for those damn bills one has to pay.......

[beenyweenies]

But then then there are a new breed of clients who have FCP or something similar runing at home and after you deliver your perfect spot, sometime later you just may see a horrible hacked/re-edited version (with new cheesy graphics) runing on air! Aughhhh.... if it were not for those damn bills one has to pay.......

Oh man, don't get me started... I just wrapped up an HD motion graphics project, and the editor comes in to chat. He tells me that the client has requested one of the segments we were creating on DV tape for final output. !! Spending so much money and extra time for HD only to deliver in DV Codec, the bottom rung of the quality ladder. Then the director snips up my work to make it fit his "revised" VO. Bottom line is, there could be an entire thread just on horror stories to make this point. In fact, maybe I should go start one now...

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