Hi,
Both uses (if possible), computer screen and then to look the montage result before burn on disc. My actual monitor is 9 years old and is tired. I edit overall Mpeg2 files.

CRT's are cheap & LCD's are going down. Tigerdirect has a temporary sale on a 19" lcd.. only $190 after rebate.

I prefer LCD's cuz they're cheaper & you can get a bigger, better CRT then a simularly priced LCD. But LCD prices are dropping.

plasma i don't know. never used one.

Thanks for your advices.

The Vegas preview window generally lies to you. If you're making video for display on TVs (i.e. not for computer monitors), then it would be really really helpful to hookup any TV to your editing system.

http://www.vasst.com/resource.aspx?id=341f43a3-f228-4bd8-a67c-7d5f37e4297e

An external monitor will show you things like:
correct pixel aspect ratio
overscan
interlace flicker (if using a CRT external monitor)
chroma crawl if using composite/RCA connection for the video (not S-video)

2- If you have more money to spend, a broadcast monitor will be better than the consumer stuff. The consumer stuff tends to have a bunch of cheats in them (i.e. many compromises to make the image brighter), which means that image you're getting is a lot like mystery meat. Broadcast monitors will follow standards and give you an accurate image.

Thanks a lot for your informations and link. Nice day.

But for everyday this issue is aired (and it is frequently) more and more TVs are LCDs and today almost all good middle size TVs, 26" to 37" are LCDs and not CRTs. LCDs are of course digital and great computer monitors too. The old CRT TV is becoming a very dated answer to this question.

Michael
(edited for grammar)

At a given price point, CRT televisions and monitors still look better than LCD or plasma TVs. This is not going to be the case forever, but currently, a well-adjusted CRT still wins for pure image quality.

John

The best CRT ($50,000 HD production monitor) is clearly better than the best ordinary LCD or plasma (say $10,000). That's a 5:1 difference in price however.

If you have $40K to spend, you can get a 200,000:1 contrast LCD screen with HDRI performance. I saw this at SIGGRAPH, and it can certainly give a CRT a run for the money. Not really comparable, because I'm not aware of any CRTs that big.

Color correction at the major studios is no longer done with a CRT in most cases. They need a big picture that CRTs can't provide (other than with projection which adds other problems), and they have really figured out how to get a phenomenal and stable calibrated picture workflow without vacuum tubes.

Now take a $600 CRT HDTV (27") and compare it with a $600 LCD HDTV (27"). The picture on the CRT is like looking through a bug screen, while the LCD picture is clean and has much better color reproduction in just about every area. It's the CRT shadow mask that is killing the picture.

If you move up to say a $2,500 Sony Trinitron CRT HDTV (are they still made?), and compare that with a $2,500 1080p LCD TV, you 'll find that the CRT has slightly deeper colors and better blacks, while the resolution is the same or worse compared to the LCD.

This is rapidly turning into an academic discussion though, because the CRTs are just too expensive to manufacture. There are only a few TV CRT factories left in the entire world, and they are all scheduled to be closed soon.

Good riddance too, a pile of toxic waste (many pounds of lead and other heavy metals) that takes up too much space and costs a lot of money to ship.

The Vegas preview window generally lies to you. If you're making video for display on TVs (i.e. not for computer monitors), then it would be really really helpful to hookup any TV to your editing system.

Thanks, Glenn. For doing color correction on videos that will go to an SD CRT, I understand this is critical (and perhaps even obvious once we become aware of the things you just mentioned).

I'm just now starting to go through your VASST Video about color correction. For HDV projects (which apparently are different from the SD case you discuss), DSE says we should not use a NTSC CRT for doing color correction on HDV projects. Different color spaces, and so on. And he says one good route is to get a good LCD and hook it up as a second monitor.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but it seems that an LCD used in this manner (particularly if using DVI instead of analog?) is essentially a computer monitor. So how would it benefit over simply using the Vegas preview on my main PC monitor (which theoretically could be an identical LCD to the one I'd use as "external monitor")? Are the factors you mentioned above (like PAR, overscan, etc.) still going to be exposed by using an LCD 2nd monitor? And (maybe another dumb question) will the HDV color space be in effect on the 2nd monitor?

And (third try for "dumb questions"), does this suggest that if we are intending both distributions types for a project (HD and SD) that we should make two versions of the project to apply different color correction schemes?

Hi Jayster,

That's a good and tough question! :D

In Vegas, there's two ways of monitoring HD.
A- Use a Blackmagic card with HD-SDI (or component out). This can hook into a HD broadcast monitor.

B- Use a computer LCD and use Windows secondary display as a monitor. This is cheaper.

------

Assuming B:
Pixel aspect ratio should be fine since the 1080i and 720p formats use square pixels.
The problem with SD is that the PAR is a weird number that's not 1. This means you either see things slightly distorted, or you rescale the image (with artifacts, and not great resolution).

A computer monitor isn't going to crop the image like consumer sets would. So that's something to watch out for.

Interlace flicker: A small portion of the HD audience will be watching on CRTs, and they will see interlace flicker. This is something to watch out for when doing HD titles. No 1-pixel horizontal lines. The titles should probably be pretty big anyways, because you might need a SD version. Also, not everyone is going to be sitting that close to their HDTV.
A HD CRT connected to a Blackmagic card would make this obvious... although this is an expensive route! The simple route is simply to avoid high contrast 1-pixel horizontal lines.

I don't think you have to worry about chroma crawl because it relates to analog transmission and composite connections. HD generally never touches that (digital transmission, component connections).

--In the settings for the secondary display, be sure to check the StudioRGB box. This is how colors will appear. If you leave it off, you'll see colors in their original 16-235 form. It's sort of useful if you want to see the information above 235, but it's more practical to see color in 0-255 computer RGB space. Try it and you should see what I mean.

So how would it benefit over simply using the Vegas preview on my main PC monitor (which theoretically could be an identical LCD to the one I'd use as "external monitor")?
The secondary windows display gives more resolution than the Vegas preview window. Generally, the Vegas preview window has to scale down so that everything fits on screen.
There's also the difference between computer RGB and studio RGB color spaces.

And (maybe another dumb question) will the HDV color space be in effect on the 2nd monitor?
Yes and no.
To get very accurate color, you're looking at a few things:
A- Is the video signal being decoded correctly. Rec. 709 (used for many HD formats) uses different luma co-efficients than Rec. 601 (used for DV and many other SD formats), which means decoding things the Rec. 601 way gives inaccurate color.
Vegas 6 should be decoding the signal correctly.
B- Colorimetry. This involves a number of factors (gamma, chromaticity co-ordinates of the primaries, white point), but consumer LCD monitors typically don't have very good colorimetry. One of the more obvious differences is the exact color of pure red/green/blue. Consumer LCDs typically aren't great in that regard.

And (third try for "dumb questions"), does this suggest that if we are intending both distributions types for a project (HD and SD) that we should make two versions of the project to apply different color correction schemes?
In practice you should only bother with one version. When you downconvert, you want to make sure that the conversion is correctly accounting for Rec. 709 versus Rec. 601 luma co-efficients. Not all convertors do this! Vegas 5 didn't if I remember correctly. A lot of equipment doesn't either.

There are some other subtleties that might theoretically make a difference. A 2-pixel line in HD won't flicker, whereas the downcovert might.

Thanks, Glenn, for your detailed and informative reply to my questions. And, by the way, your video training (with DSE) is helping me enormously. My projects are going to get a whole lot better results!

Q- And (third try for "dumb questions"), does this suggest that if we are intending both distributions types for a project (HD and SD) that we should make two versions of the project to apply different color correction schemes?

What I am gathering from this is that you could do your color correction either way, i.e. on an SD monitor or on an HD-capable display (like an LCD). With the caveat that the HDV source should be correctly converted to account for the color space differences. I am inverring (and hoping) that this is exactly what happens in Vegas when you choose the firewire output, in which the dialog says it will convert the preview to NTSC DV when the project properties have an output that is incompatible with the display. So, you should be seeing color-managed output on your firewire-connected CRT monitor and be able to color-correct with confidence, knowing the resulting project will be ok for both HD distribution and downconvert for SD distribution.

Lots of assumptions in there... I am also inferring that doing it in this manner will be awesome for SD distribution, and ok for HD. But DSE's comments on the video suggest to me that my SD CRT won't be able to show (and make use of) some of the possibilites offered by the superior color space of HDV. If this is true, than perhaps there may be cases where we would need two project versions with different color correction schemes applied. But again, I am making lots of inferences and assumptions.

Since I don't currently have the $$ to spring for an expensive LCD monitor, I shall continue to color correct HDV on my SD CRT monitor. And then make small renders and go view them on my HDTV (which I need to calibrate). Hopefully I can budget for an LCD sometime in the future. And not a cheapo consumer LCD with poor color accuracy.

The traditional answer is "preview on a CRT or real TV" but most moderately priced new displays are LCD. I monitor using the Vegas preview screen on the DELL 2405 and output to DVD with DVDA and play back on my LCD home theater system and the picture is IDENTICAL.

Can't please everyone but LCD is the middle of the road norm. If it looks bad on an old TV people will say "We need get a new TV", if it looks bad on a new large flat panel LCD monitor just bought from Costco then it just plain looks bad.

That's my 2c.

Another method would be to use the "Avia" tv alignment disc to see how accurate your colors are and focus and linearity and black level. . But this would require some knowledge of digital adjustments on your set. Not sure if anyone else has tried this. I ran this disc on my 3 year old Sony HDTV 34" and it checked perfect on the colors but a bit twisty on the linearity and a bit of convergence mis-alignment toward the lower right side. Almost not discernable. However the linearity of an LCD panel can't be beat. (my opinion)
JJK