Video Editing: Put Your Best Signal Forward
Properly calibrate your editing system, and your edited masters look almost as good as your originals. The colors look vivid and accurate, not washed out or muted. Brightness and contrast are good, and you see a generally sharp, clear image. Leave your system uncalibrated, however, and there's no telling what you'll get.
To keep your videos looking their best, here are tips on how to use a few basic tools, and a few not-so-basic ones, to tune up your editing suite. Even the inexpensive options can improve picture quality in your projects.
The NTSC video standard (the one used by nearly all video gear in North America) is built around the color bar pattern: a group of six vertical bars of color and one white bar.
Use the color bar pattern to measure how well your deck or camera captures, records and reproduces video signals. You can judge the performance of a camera or VCR based on how well it reproduces the color bar pattern.
Most video equipment shops carry printed color bar patterns perfect for shooting with your camcorder. These work well for videographers on a budget or whose tapes won't screen outside a circle of family and friends.
For a more dependable, higher-quality color bar image, get an electronic color bar generator (some cameras have color bar generators built into them). These devices plug directly into the Video In on your deck or camcorder and provide the cleanest possible sig…
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