Forum: Carrara


Subject: How to make renderings look good on tv monitor

jackhalsey opened this issue on Sep 12, 2007 · 13 posts


sfdex posted Mon, 01 October 2007 at 6:03 PM

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