Display settings for HD editing

[Neil Grubb]

I am a relative newcomer to the forum and to HD video editing. These are elementary questions, I hope. I am using a Canon XL-H1A for wildlife videography and with the intention of producing short (5-10 minute) documentaries to compliment talks I give to wildlife / birding / natural history societies.

The problem I have is that my HD recordings look really good when played back directly from the camera via my HDTV (a LG 47LG50 LCD TV) but when I play back rendered files (via Premiere Elements 4) on my PC via a ViewSonic VX922 monitor set at its maximum (1280 x 1024) resolution the video looks very poor indeed - not sharp and colour saturation looks dilute compared with direct playback on TV. I assume this is because the monitor cannot display 1080i video to its best. I have three questions:

(i) what is the best monitor display resolution setting to use ? Or should I ditch this monitor and buy a better one ? If so, can you suggest some models ?
(ii) when I edit down and play a rendered movie back on the monitor window on Elements should this play back with the same high quality as the original footage ? There seems to be significant degradation to my eyes ? Or is this just because I'm using a monitor that isn't up to the job.

Thanks and sorry for asking such dumb questions.

Neil

[Bryan Sellars]

Hi Neil, I think you're between a rock and a hard place, if your video is interlaced it will play fine on the TV but may not on a computer, you could try making the video for viewing on the computer progressive, but it wont look as smooth on the TV, and the colours on the TV use YUV and the computer uses RGB the result is colours below 20 and above 230 are said to be out of gamut, at least I think that's your problem, I have a feeling that some video cameras use RGB and some TV's, it's just mine doesn't and I have the same problem you do, I post video's to Vimeo and am always disappointed in the results.
Bryan