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Full Range & Broadcast Delivery

February 6, 2018

A member asks a question about working in Full Range but delivering a video rendered to legal/broadcast levels. We work through the thinking.


Series

Help! Data Levels & Considerations For Broadcast Delivery

Team Mixing Light got an interesting question from Mixing Light member Victor:

‘I have a color grade project planned to deliver for the Internet. The postproduction manager of the film has asked me to prepare a broadcast version, but I have never done that. My settings in Resolve are set to full/data for my levels and I do not have any particular software to check gamut errors, etc., … can you advise me on how to release a broadcast version from my full data level version?’ 

Data levels (full-range) vs. Video Levels (legal-range) is a confusing topic and the thing is –  Resolve gives you different places to set this option – in your monitoring settings, on per media basis and when rendering.

After lamenting that unless a client or workflow is specifically asking you to work in Data/Full-Range levels, you’re best sticking to legal-range. We discuss some ways that Victor can get his data-level graded project back to video levels and then we go on to discuss a range of things to consider when delivering for ‘broadcast’.

Enjoy the MailBag and remember, you can submit your questions via the contact form or by emailing us at team.ml@mixinglight.com. Your questions can be technical, creative, about gear or anything else related to the world of color correction.

-Team Mixing Light


 

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Comments

Homepage Forums Full Range & Broadcast Delivery


  • rneil@rneilphotog.com
    Guest

    To be clear … you’re all setup for 16-235/2.2-2.4 monitoring? As that is what most common folks think of as “video” levels vs data.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Correct.


  • rneil@rneilphotog.com
    Guest

    Lotta folks out in the wild be unhappy with that … they wanna grade in their pretty new ultra-wide-space monitor’s widest spaces. “So it looks good on displays like mine & my pretty new wide-space TV too.” What can anyone say … 😉

    Been in some long discussions on this. Sigh.


  • Robbie Carman
    Guest

    neil – keep mind that gamut and levels are two seperate things. One could work with a wide gamut P3 display for example in legal or data (assuming the display supports switching). They’d still be working wide gamut.


  • rneil@rneilphotog.com
    Guest

    This stuff is all so blazingly obvious & clear, isn’t it? lol

    As someone who works more in editing mode and does my own color … and chats with quite a few … the mis-perceptions & misconceptions of how to use what set how are massive.


  • Bob
    Guest

    May be an old discussion but a great and important podcast. I think it`s very interesting that you as colorists do “all” your work in a legal video space while your software is designed for and working in fullrange RGB.

    I am working as editor (Avid) for many years and mostly for television. And yes Avid is original designed for working in and with video levels but also understand fullrange levels. Well, we are working more and more the opposit way. We do the complete job in fullrange. Cause today you get many CGI and composits to put it into your edit, exchange with graphic-departements, have to deal with many different camera codecs and records that are mostly of a legal television space. And at the end nearly every edit for television get also an output for web. So, to legalise our color and luminance for television we put at the end a set of curves or special colorlimiter over the timeline, thats all.


  • Scott A
    Guest

    Hey guys! As always, I love your insights. Do you have anything pertaining to working in an HD timeline (with 4K footage) and then upon final delivery, exporting an SD deliverable. Current project is a letterboxed SD but recently had to do a center cut one as well (with pan and scan)

    The main issue I am running into is QCing the SD deliverable outside of Resolve. When comparing the file in QT and VLC, the QT video looks great but VLC seems to be squishing it a bit. Is this a PAR upon delivery issue? My timeline is set to 1920X1080, but I am monitoring in NTSC, input and output scaling set to scale entire image to fit but output resolution changed to NTSC (720X486) with 4:3 standard def for PAR both in output scaling and in delivery page. (The PAR in the delivery page doesn’t seem to have any effect – only the option in the image scaling page does)

    I want to know which video player I can trust. When this file goes to broadcast will it look like it does in QT or VLC (squished) and if VLC is accurately displaying it, how do I change the PAR so its looks right. The opposite of the players may also be happening (QT is stretching) Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!!

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