Do the PP settings affect the camera's generated color bars? And if so, should those bars be used to visually calibrate an external monitor (via the 'looking through a blue gel' method in my case), or should the camera's default picture settings be used? I'll be shooting my first dance concert with my newly acquired EX1, and I want to be sure that my external monitor is accurate.

One more catch: my external monitor is most likely going to be an SD CRT (that's all I have access to at the moment). Does anyone know if any 'gotchas' using the SD out for monitoring? I'm mostly concerned about exposure, because most of the lighting is very contrasty and somewhat on the dark side.

Any ideas/tips are greatly appreciated!

I'd be amazed if they did affect it - surely they're set to a standard (SMPTE etc.)?
Steve

The only reason I bring it up is because I had some camera bars in a Vegas 8 timeline next to Vegas' generated bars, and they were quite different. I guess I should roll some with default settings and compare them to bars with PP turned on.

You're right, after switching to the EX1's color bars and changing picture profiles, there is no change in the bars. Any idea why the bars generated by Vegas 8 would be so different than the bars from the EX1? And if such differences are normal, then what adjustments should be made to compensate?

...because the bars generated by Vegas are Rec601, while the bars generated by The EX1 are REC709...two different standards.

So are the visual calibration procedures for an external monitor the same with the EX1 bars under this new standard? On my next job, all I have available is an SD CRT monitor, and I was hoping that the SD down conversion out of the camera will be sufficient to check colors and exposure.

This is my first jump into HD production. I spent several years in the late 90's & early 2000's doing a lot of SD production. HD wasn't really around at that time, and video editing on the computer was still new (I was using windows 98 and the DC30!), hence my line if questioning...

The whole color thing is still in its infancy, and is very confusing. My general impression is that if you're going out to RGB monitors like NTSC broadcast, you want to use SD color bars. TV sets are calibrated to and the phosphors use Rec601. If you're going out to HD monitors(and HDTV sets?) that use YUV color mapping, you want to use the Rec709 color bars. You should be aware that the differences are very small, some people choose to ignore them. Some NLE's do the chroma and luma conversions for you. Some do it incorrectly. To make matters even more confusing, some codecs use Rec709, exclusively, others use Rec601, exclusively, and some are ambi-dextrous. No one seems to advertise what standard their codec uses. If your final output looks washed out, or the shadows are crushed, chances are, there's an incorrect conversion going on in your workflow. It's always a good idea to carry a 2-pop(1 frame of color bars and audio cal signal) in all my footage to cross check this.

Bill, Is that the origin of the website logo 2-pop? Never heard that before and never heard of the idea of using 1 frame of colorbars. Can you expand on how that is used.
Thanks

wikipedia is your friend
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-pop