Monitor Calibration (Procedures, Test Patterns/Bars) - Datavideo se-500 Instruction Manual

One important way, perhaps the most important way, to make sure that your video really looks as
good on other monitors as it does on yours is to monitor the video with a properly calibrated monitor of as
professional-level quality as you can afford. See below for some methods to calibrate monitors. And it goes
without saying that you should have dependable, high quality audio monitoring as well, either through
headphones or speakers you can trust.
A second way to be sure that your video looks as good as it can is to use, if available, monitoring
test equipment (waveform monitor, vector scope) in parallel with the well-calibrated monitor mentioned above.

Monitor Calibration (procedures, test patterns/bars)

The following technique was suggested by an old broadcast engineer who began working in video
when tape was two inches wide and scene changes were made with razor blades and tapes; Fades and
dissolves did not exist. One had to walk up 6 flights of stairs to the studio and back, often carrying a 65-
pound camera. Test instruments were expensive and often unavailable. Network engineers had to find a
convenient, simple, reliable way to calibrate monitors that could be done in the field. (You could always
recognize one of these fellows by the Wratten 47B (dark blue) they kept in their wallets or in their mechanical
pencil pocket protectors, along with their little screwdrivers.)
To calibrate a monitor is to adjust it so that it displays colors that are the same as a standard. That
standard, and a major aid to calibration, is called color bars: a pattern of colored strips (and in some cases
gray scale strips) of very specific colors, arranged in a very specific way.
To do the following calibration procedure, you will need a source of standard color bars. There are
several possible places to get this: your camera may generate bars; perhaps your black burst generator puts
ouT-Bars; you could use a graphics program on your computer to display an image of standard color bars.
There are numerous places on the Internet to download standard color bars if you don't have them; do an
Internet search for "color bars" and take your pick.
The following procedure will be described using SMPTE bars, but EBU bars will work for most of this
technique as well. As you will see, they bars are different in format, in part because of the differences in
broadcast systems between NTSC and PAL, but much of the usage will be the same. You can use the
SMPTE bars regardless of where you are and what video system you are producing for, just as you can use
EBU bars wherever. You'll notice that the EBU bars don't have the gray scale information
The first thing to do is to get the color bars displayed on the monitor you want to calibrate. And then,
locate the image controls on the video monitor, as these are the ones we will be adjusting.
Turn the contrast control to its midpoint. Turn the chroma (color) control all the way down so the
screen image is shades of black, white, and gray.
Look in the lower right corner of the color bars. In the absolute lower right corner is a black square.
Immediately to the left of that black square are three thinner vertical bars. (These are called Pluge Bars,
which stands for Picture Lineup Generating Equipment.) Actually, when the monitor is correctly adjusted, you
should only see two of these bars. Adjust the brightness control until the bar on the right is just barely visible,
and the bar in the middle is just not visible.
Now look at the lower left hand corner: the second box in from the left is a pure white. Turn the
contrast control all the way to maximum and watch the white box flare and bloom. Now turn down the
contrast control just until the white box begins to change noticeably. At this point, the Pluge Bars should still
look as you set them in the previous step above: only the right most should be barely visible. If that is not the
case, adjust the brightness control until it is.
If your monitor doesn't have a blue only switch, you have to do this next bit strictly by eyeball and
luck: put the color control to the midpoint, and adjust the hue control so that the vertical yellow bar is a lemon
yellow (no orange or green tint) and the vertical magenta bar should not tilt toward red or purple.
If your monitor does have a blue only switch, or if you can find some blue lighting gel (like Wratten
47B dark blue), make it so the monitor is blue only. As you look at the top half of the bars, the large vertical
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