I editted a documentary out of a bunch of behind-the-scenes footage I shot. It was all run and gun, a lot of it had darkness problems but I (thought) I was able to fix things in post somewhat. At least to the point that it all looked fine on a 9" JVC high res composite monitor, which was connected to the NLE and how I reviewed things.

But on a lot of people's TV's my images look very dark or have color problems (esp. with red bleeding over, etc). People still liked (or said they liked) the video, but I was always groaning when someone's face would be messed up or some visual came out miscolored.

I try not to blame myself too much since when I look at a test pattern on most of these TV's the three "brightness bars" (lower right) don't even begin to show up. They are sets of the caliber that can't be adjusted or are turned up already.

Does it sound like there is some reason why stuff that looks fine on the compsite monitor with the NLE looks junk on TV?
And if my friends' TVs are junk, then how come broadcast TV looks ok (or at least passable) on them?

(PS: I know that footage on the computer monitor is not what you will see on the TV, that's why I went through the trouble of previewing over firewire on an real video monitor. And it does play back well on the JVC monitor and my roomie's modern widescreen [which I have to turn up a little])

when I look at a test pattern on most of these TV's the three "brightness bars" (lower right) don't even begin to show up.

As I understand it, the only PLUGE bar which should be visible is the third one at 11.5 IRE. The first bar is 3.5 IRE which is below analog black level, and the second bar is 7.5 IRE which is equal to black in the analog world.

Thanks for the right term, now I can look it up :}
None of the bars show up on the tv's I've played on except for the widescreen. When I use my monitor I always tweak it until the third is barely visable.

Ever since I started doing video, it's been a deep pain for me to watch my own productions played on the miserable TV sets most people have. Only about half of them have TVs that can show good pictures at their best and many of those are way out of adjustment. Rear-projection sets are the worst, as few of them have their 3 beams synched precisely. Now that HD is spreading, this situation is improving somewhat. But, until HD playback machines become common, that can use any media that I could produce, the problem will largely persist. What makes me feel the worst, is when I'm playing something on a very bad TV and the people tell me how good my video looks. Are their sensitivities for quality that undeveloped or are they just trying to be nice? Now that I've got a 10" portable DVD player with a .19mm dot-pitch screen, I'm going to use it when I'm putting on a traveling show and eschew most of the bigscreens that might reside on the premises.

hi Jeff,

Our project will be ready in a couple of weeks and I'll send you a copy then.

I've actually had the opposite experience as you. Watching my SD footage on a standard crappy TV looks fine, but when viewed on an HD plasma screen, the footage looks terrible, especially in low-light scenes.

Yeah, I agree. My stuff looks great on old fashioned CRTs of any kind, from the $67 clearing house models to the $300+ 27" models. It's the big rear projection, LCD and Plasma TV's that make me wonder what the heck I'm doing in this business!