Grading Broadcast vs. Web

Question

Trying to find a work flow. When I grade a video, the final product differs greatly when viewed on a TV versus on website. That's to be expected. But it is a huge difference. Do people grade grade twice, once for broadcast and then once for web? I come from a photo/print world which I can utilize printer and monitor profiles which is great for photos. I can do my color in Photoshop, and then apply the profiles to the file depending on where it will go and the color will more or less be very similar to what I saw on my monitor. Is there anything similar for video? Most of my video stuff that I do is viewed on the web so I usually just grade stuff on my regular computer monitor. But sometimes I like to view my projects on my TV and soon I will have projects that will be broadcast and the files look like **** compared to my computer monitor. So then I have to grade them a second time for a broadcast signal. I got a Matrox Mini box hooked up to an HDMI monitor (just a regular HDMI TV but it works pretty good) so I can see what my color looks like. I'm hoping/looking to see if there is anything like a profile that can be applied to files so that I can grade once and then pick the final destination and have all the color being magically good. Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

If you're using COLOR, the operating assumption under which the application was developed was that its users were delivering content for Broadcast. It has a fixed "profile", to jump off with your vocabulary, (broadcasters don't use that term at all) specified by CCIR Recommendation 709 for High Definition and CCIR Rec601 for Standard Def (good old NTSC and PAL). There is an associated contrast index (called "gamma") associated with each, and if you are aware of the numbers, it is 2.2 (sometimes 2.4) for HD. Up to OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard), so-called "linear" video, RGB for GPU output over DVI connectors, and I'm assuming you're simply converting that into HDMI, is gamma 1.8. That's only one difference. COLOR also does all of its internal computations in RGB, while Final Cut operates in Y'CbCr, and its an imperfect conversion. We know that.
Snow Leopard attempted to "unify" its whole contrast standard to 2.2, and after a few versions, it finally seems like its starting to work out. Otherwise, this issue is very well known and has been explored, dissected and kvetched about for quite some time in innumerable forums, ever since Apple released this application into the wild with no explanations or recommendations. You know, other than what's in the manual.
I cannot say whether or not this particular factor is wholly or partly to blame for your material looking like "tiot", but it has also been discussed to death that both graphics displays and consumer TVs are wholly inadequate and inappropriate for use as critical judgement monitors, for a host of reasons. If one were to spend a lot of time looking at a lot of monitors in many facilities, it would be more apparent as to exactly how enormous this problem is.
Something you could otherwise possibly explore is the concept of a "LUT", which is a global "correction" usually employed to manage differences between output media -- they started coming into widespread use to migrate digital cinema values to film-printing gamut in the "DI" process, and is more similar to your "profile". COLOR has this facility -- you can develop a LUT inside the application. Its essentially a Primary Correction stored in a special location and can be loaded to affect the downstream preview of your work and then can either be "rendered in" to your final grade media or subtracted. It might be a way for you to achieve two versions simultaneously, although you would need to do some quantitative analysis (real numbers, as opposed to "pretty good") of how the final image is diverging between your broadcast and web delivery.
The other alternative is to render for Broadcast, and simply re-compress using a different gamma characteristic. This is an option in Compressor.
In OSX 5 (Leopard) (under Quicktime preferences) try to defeat ColorSync within the computer: you should find a checkbox which enables "Final Cut compatibility" with Quicktime. Snow Leopard does not have this option.
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