Hello

I have my pc hooked up to my tv (for a video project) so I can get feedback as to what my project will look like obviously on the television.  The problem is that what maybe a very dramatic scene on the computer monitor looks pale and washed out on the television.  Are there any light settings or render tricks to achieve a good look when shown on a television..again I have the tv hooked up  to the pc so I can get immediate feedback on the render.

Thank you

Hi Jack, Complex answer for this one. You don't say if you're using an NTSC or PAL standard TV. I'll assume that it's an NTSC version (Standard for the United States - PAL is Europe) There is a range of "legal" colors for NTSC monitors. I suspect that the render has "illegal" colors in it that are out of range of what a TV can produce so the image looks washed out. While many folks think that computer monitors and TVs are the same, they're actually very different on many levels. If you have access to a paint/image editing program like Photoshop, Painter, PhotoPaint etc., there is a filter in those applications that processes the colors into NTSC legal ranges. You'll need to use that. Additionally, if you're going to be doing an animation, the animation will need to be interlaced (another video process) to make it show up clearly. I won't bore you with those requirements now but post back if you need more info. Mark

In your Render Tab under the raytracing parameters (Shadows, Reflec, etc) is the Gamma correction. Turn this on and set it around 1.8 to 2.2. You will be horrified by the way it looks on the computer monitor, but it will look better on a CRT televison. Basically a Gamma correction boosts the mid-range while allowing black to stay black and white to stay white. If you later need to repurpose the animations for web or LCD monitors, it is not much trouble to re-do the gamma back down in your NLE or AfterEffects.

Generally the big movie companies are going to shoot overly bright footage and tone it down in post, rather than shooting dark and trying to brighten it up later. Adding brightness will probably add gain noise, but darkening can be done with no harm to the original renders....

holly

Mark

I can interlace in after effects.

Where is the filter in photoshop as I save the animations as bmps so I can work on each frame.

I guess my question is are there any rendering or lighting tricks to make my work in carrara look more vibrant on the tv screen?

Thank you.

BTW  I joined VTC online to watch your carrara training and seriously I learned a lot.  Your presentation was very professional and precise unlike some others where the instructor goes
"uhm," or "why did that apear?"  etc.  Thanks to those 9 hours I feel I have a basic grasp of carrara.

ps  Its an NTSC tv.

Hi Jack, Glad the tutorials worked for you! The NTSC filter in Photoshop is Filters=>Video=>NTSC My workflow for TV/video is with FinalCut Pro so I can't speak for AE. However, I'm positive that there are some color/gama tools to work with so you can dynamically adjust the entire animation v.s. doing a frame-by-frame in PS. I know you can run a PS action script but those scripts actually change the art. (or you can save the sequence off as a new art but that can be serious extra drive space) I'm too much a tweaker and rely on the NLE tools...

Holly and Mark

Thank you both.  Holly somehow I missed your post early this morning.  I used premiere pro so there is gamma in there and Holly thank you for the gamma tip in carrara will use it this afternoon and report back.

Mark, yes, they really did help that much as the manual for software is always worthless as it is never written by carbon based lifeforms.

Holly

I am confused as the higher I set the gamma the worse it looked so in desperation I set the gamma down to 1.0 and it looks better..am I doing this right?

Thank you/

Funny I have used carrara several times for small tv projects (mostly school plays) and have never had a problem.  It looked the same on the tv as it did on the monitor.  Maybe Final Cut Studio pro automatically compensated for the colour range.

Glad that you got it working for you.

David

David

Its really not..the tv image still looks less vibrant than the computer monitor and its a big screen tv....am taking it into premiere pro and seeing what happens

Hi Jack,

Try the gamma at what looks good in your project (I warned you it will look horrible on the computer screen). I think the general idea is that you could further color correct in FCP so long as you have the information in the pixels from Carrara. Since this is a one-man project, get it as close as you can (but if you need to err, go on the bright side). Not everyone sees the same, and dark or low contrast images are usually the hardest to see.
if you are controlling the presentation (they will see it on your TV) then you have no worries, but if you need to plan for lots of tvs and won't be controlling the end environment, go just a little brighter (I mean higher gamma) than you are comfortable..., especially if there's a chance it wll be seen on a video projector.

good luck!
holly

Thank you Holly.

I'm a little late to this party, but hope the following is helpful.

I use Carrara (5 Pro) animations in Premiere Pro all the time at work.  While I do find that there are some differences in how animations look on the computer screen and how they look on an NTSC monitor, they're not huge.  So, I'd think one one or the other of your monitors is out of calibration.

You can use Premiere Pro to output color bars on both your NTSC and computer monitors and adjust them to match.  Then your animations from Carrara should look essentially identical to the output on NTSC.  If you're using a professional monitor, switch it into "blue check" and adjust the phase until the white, cyan, magenta and blue bars are the same shade of light grey and the yellow, green and red bars are black.  This will ensure that your NTSC Monitor is in proper phase adjustment.  Then you can match your computer monitor to the NTSC monitor.

Finally, as mentioned before here, there is an "NTSC Safe" filter in Premiere Pro, but it's called "Broadcast Colors."  It's under the Video folder in your effects tab.  It will reduce the luminance to bring any "illegal" video into compliance with the NTSC color system.  (It also has a "PAL" setting.)  I usually (out of habit from the old days before we had these fancy filters) just throw a levels filter on the file and bring the black output up to 10 and the white output down to 234 (which is actually a little below the NTSC Legal threshold, but looks fine.)

Hope that's helpful.

-  Dex