DV Filmmaking

Making Your Video Broadcast Safe

For years, the thought of having to make something broadcast safe struck fear into many a video editor. No one argued that making video levels broadcast safe was unimportant, or that it wasn’t worthwhile, but checking levels and making them legal required specialized equipment and a specially trained operator. Even with the introduction of the Avid digital editing system in the mid 1990s and its complete array of finishing capabilities, many editors still outsourced color correction to experts at a postproduction facility.

Fortunately, both After Effects and Final Cut Pro offer effects to bring both the luminance and chrominance levels within broadcast-safe ranges. This section shows you how to use both. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, ensuring your work is broadcast safe helps avoid technical problems even if you never plan to broadcast your project.

How to Determine Whether Footage Is Broadcast-Safe

To check the brightness and color levels in a video clip, technicians use a waveform monitor and a vectorscope. A waveform monitor measures brightness, or luminance, and a vectorscope measures color, or chrominance.

Waveform monitors and vectorscopes can be either hardware-or software-based. A hardware-based waveform monitor or vectorscope is a standalone piece of equipment connected to an editing system. Some video editing and compositing applications, such as Final Cut Pro, ship with a software-based waveform monitor and vectorscope built into the ...