Moho Animation Forum

What are peoples thoughts on the best settings for colour grading 2d animation for television so that it looks as close as possible to how we see it on our computers. Keep in mind, many TV's today still have colour saturation and sharpness settings adjusted higher to make the image pop and look better. For 2D animation, it can make the image look worse as the image is already naturally sharp and often rich in colour. Years ago, I used to apply a soft blur and 10% colour desaturation to make it TV-Ready. Do you think this is still necessary, or are more and more TV's today set up with more natural colours and sharpness settings.

Thanks,

HD televisions are so cheap these days that just about every household has one. This is one of the reasons that you see so many shows using vibrant colors and vector sharpness. Personally, I'd suggest just knowing your audience and determining if you want something that looks colorful, sharp and stylized (Great for kids shows) or more unsaturated and soft. I usually export my animations to my TV after production just to check color and I gotta say ... Bright and vibrant vector art on a big HD screen...

A real professional production would include colour grading by some expert. As long as this is not part of my budget, I stick to RGB and my eyesight.

I guess the best test would to have the animation on my laptop, visit a bunch of friends/family and test it on their TV's and get the colour settings at a level that works the best on all TV's. This is just a bit inconvenient though.

New TV technology is so freaking off the hook totally awesome, color grading is starting to be a thing of the past. What is on your computer is going to look pretty dang accurate on the TV.

Most of the new TVs are basically just "big monitors". In the "old days" content on TV didn't have the same color gamut. The old "NTSC" format had a HORRIBLE color gamut. Now with HD and the huge color gamut the color display is the same as the computer. The worse color shifting you might get is probably only going to be some minor color differences because of color calibration difference or possibly some contrast problems (white point/black point).

I have a 24" LED television. It has HDMI, VGA... blah blah, etc etc, all the same connections that my computer monitors have. I can pump my computer through the TV and it looks the same as my other two LCD flat screen monitors. Actually, my computer looks freaking AWESOME on the TV.

I hang out at a buddies house to watch movies on his 60" flatscreen LCD tv. He has Apple TV with that cool Mac "connection thingy" so we can all "flip" stuff from our iPads, iPhones and laptops right to the screen. Sometimes we fight over control . Someone finds something cool on youtube or some website, and can just "flick" it right to the TV. It looks the same as far as I can tell. It's not exactly the same of course. His TV is a few years older and is LCD not LED, the main problem I notice is "gamma" not color. Sometimes some animations I've done the "brights" and "whites" look blown out and the darks are way black. The contrast is off.

This is a common problem with TV. The black and white points or contrast of older televisions isn't as "good" as high end newer TVs.

Word of advice: always check with your client. Get some stills rendered early in the process, preferrably still in development and character design (but with some finished BGs), copy them on your USB stick and sit down with your client at a decent colour grading facility - be it the TV satpion, or some service (and let the client pay for it). Discuss what you have and what the client wants to have, and always check for some technical requirements the TV station may have (some still stick to obsolete rules, don't challenge that too much, they don't like to change procedures ever). Document what you agree about. This way you hopefully avoid future trouble when you deliver the final product.

Good advice Slowtiger.

I still even now when it's not a big problem anymore, find myself avoiding "bright red" because it was an absolute "no no" in the "old days". Bright red would always "smear" and "bleed" on the old NTSC television output. Made me cringe. We always had to "tone down" some of the logos for our clients. Old habits are hard to lose.

p.s. Strange world... I misspelled "habits" and my spell check suggested "Hobbits". Stupid nerdy computer. No wonder it can't get any dates.

I find it hard to know , how my monitor is calibrated. With multiple screens, each one is frighteningly different and even after going through rigorous calibration hoops , I still can't be sure which is closest to a natural standard.
Funny though it all seems pretty pointless when you go to most people's houses and they still have their tv's set to the in store 'dynamic' setting which is deplorable. Even funnier is that these guys are often the most precious about the settings.

I have been tempted by those devices that claim to calibrate your screen.... but I've never heard anyone speak of them.

I use the built in calibration on my mac.

I can't control how others calibrate their televisions or computer monitors, so if my system has relatively good calibration I'm happy. The shifting and changes from what I've seen, is subtle enough that I don't even worry about it.

As for "default settings" on television, they seem okay to me. I might tweak settings based on the ambient lighting. Based on watching "television" or movies, it looks fine to me. I agree though that many people do some odd things to their settings that make me wonder if they have some bizarre type of color or gamma visual mutation. I often say "Seriously! You don't think those people look a bit green? That blood isn't red it's magenta!".

What bugs me the most on other people's televisions is the aspect ratio. Some people INSIST on "horizontal stretching" for everything instead of leaving it at an "automatic" setting. They hate those borders on left and right. When I visit these people and we watch tv everyone on channels that are not "wide screen" format are "short and fat". Drives me nuts. Some cable channels do this when rebroadcasting old tv shows before the widescreen format. That is even worse because the network does it and there is no way to fix it.