Calibrating Your Broadcast Monitor

Excerpt Taken from FCP Manual

4/13/07

• Calibrating Your Broadcast Monitor

• Monitors are calibrated using SMPTE standard color bars.

Brightness and contrast are adjusted by eye, using the color bars onscreen. Adjusting chroma and phase involves using the “blue only” button found on professional video monitors. This calibration should be done to all monitors in use, whether they’re in the field or in the editing room.

• To calibrate your monitor:

• Connect a color bars or test pattern generator to the monitor

you’re using.

• Alternatively, you can one of the built-in color bars generators in

Final Cut Pro. Avoid using still image graphics of color bars.

• Turn on the monitor and wait at least ten minutes for the monitor

to reach a stable operating temperature.

• Select the appropriate input on the video monitor so that the

color bars are visible on the screen.

• Near the bottom right corner of the color bars are three black

bars of varying ntensities. Each one corresponds to a different brightness value, measured in IRE. (IRE originally stood for Institute of Radio Engineers, which has since merged into the modern IEEE organization; the measurement is a video-specific unit of voltage.) These are the PLUGE (Picture Lineup Generation Equipment) bars, and they allow you to adjust the brightness and contrast of a video monitor by helping you establish what absolute black should be.

• Turn the chroma level on the monitor all the way down.

• This is a temporary adjustment which allows you to make more

accurate luma adjustments. The chroma control may also be

labeled color or saturation.

• Adjust the brightness control of your monitor to the point where

you can no longer distinguish between the two PLUGE bars on

the left and the adjacent black square.

• At this point, the brightest of the bars (11.5 IRE) should just

barely be visible, while the two PLUGE b