FCPx films look terrible on TV Screens

Wondered if you could help. My projects when exported look great as QT movies, Youtube, vimeo etc. They look great on phones, ipads, computers but awful on TV screens. If you access youtube on a TV screen, the colours seem very deeply saturated and its ultra contrasty, bias towards darks. It just looks pathetic. Today I have shared to DVD. When playing that DVD on a TV, the problem with a poor, over saturated and contrasty image is worse than ever. Any advice please as I don't understand how it can be nice on all screens but TV. Thanks in advance.

There are so many things at play it's not even funny. If you're aiming for TV, then you need to grade to a TV, or better yet, a broadcast monitor. I think over the next decade the difference between the two will evaporate, but for now, if you're colour correcting to you computer without any kind of video-out as a balance, then your results will vary WILDLY.

How is your monitor configured? How is the TV configured?

This isn't an FCP X problem, it's universal to any broadcast workflow.

Thanks for your reply. I understand what you are saying in that it is a universal problem with respect to balancing colours etc to find a happy medium between monitors much like music and different speaker situations and that with each TV screen there will again be changes given each characteristic. But to exclude FCP doesn't make sense to me for the following reason. If I play the footage shot, straight from camera to TV it looks fine - pretty much as shot. On the marshall monitor I used during shooting it looked great. But putting through FCP with no tweaks what so every to colour, contrast or light balancing, on output, it looks terrible on TV. It's fine on iphone, ipad, computer and marshall and PC monitors and android phone etc but not TV. So where does it go wrong? And I mean it is considerably worse - not anywhere near acceptable. Considering I have made no tweaks what so ever, if I were to make adjustments for a TV set then it would look awful on everything else.

How are you playing it to the TV?

What are the TVs colour settings? These are the first two questions to ask.

Wes,
This is a universal problem that editors have had to deal with since digital acquisition first became possible.

The first step in trying to correct it is to understand the setting in your working timeline.
FCPX color manages your sources by reading the metadata from your original files. X is doing a lot under the hood to ensure that your color gets rejiggered to conform with the timeline your'e editing in.

Most TVs are incorrectly set to be over saturated and over contrasty. in fact, many manufacturers intentionally setup their sets to overcrank these items to make the tv standout more on showroom floors.

Many broadcasters will actually correct to desaturate and flatten their broadcast work more than they would if delivering to a corporate client or for theatrical release. TVs are notoriously good for messing up your content.

I would suggest that you double check your project settings, and make sure your format is what you want.

Then, calibrate your monitor properly. Then go back and correct your footage keeping your scopes up. The scopes are very accurate inside fcpX, and I have found that they can be relied upon completely.

If your stuff looks good on a calibrated monitor, and it looks correct on the scopes, then you will know if the TV sets your using are overcranked or not when you look at your edited show.

Color Management is a tricky thing. I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Scott M

As my esteemed colleague Marcus has pointed out, TVs are a mess. CRT TVs were pretty much all over the place. But blacks and whites as well as the response curve were pretty consistent. Now with TVs being really just large computer monitors, they are unfortunately getting worse. Not the display technology, but rather the addition of marketing "display enhancing" features that make one TV look better than another in a showroom. Dynamic Contrast (the worse), sharpening, 120hz (i.e. i like frame bending it will add additional frames to make something look like it was shot at a higher frame rate), or worse yet 240hz. In addition many folks are still pumping SD signals that are then put in a "wide" mode and stretched horizontally and therefore images look about 20% wider than then reality. Go to most any hotel lobby or room to see this in action. What is happening is a great distortion of reality and the perception of what is deemed good is getting worse and worse. And talk about a distortion of what people think is good....

Okay sorry, I just you didn't ask for that, and I'll jump off my soap box now. (As you can tell I am passionate about this.)

There are thousands of us doing broadcast work in FCPX passing QC and looking very good on broadcast TV. My monitor setup is nothing fancy. A couple of HDMI displays that are in the ballpark of REC 709 (just TVs with all the enhancements off) I have a trusty Sony Broadcast CRT that is calibrated so I can double check broadcast work. Granted I do very little broadcast work now as my delivery is typically for the web. But if you really need to do critical color work, you MUST get a proper monitoring setup. I would suggest reviewing some of the posts over at liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php .

If you don't have these monitoring capabilities, turn off the dynamic contrast and other enhancements on your TV and then "work by reference." That is find some video material that you watch often on the TV in question (TV show or movie, again without the "enhancements"), and then bring that into FCPX and note the color, contrast and how it behaves in the scopes. Now use that as a reference when color correcting your project. It will be a great way to hone your color correcting skills and see how colorists dial in their color.

I hope this helps.

How are you accessing YouTube on the TV? (Built-in TV app, HDMI out of Mac?)
I think that is where the shift in gamma and color saturation is taking place...

Thanks for all your comments and help. I do really appreciate it. I think what niggled me is the massive shift in image quality. Since I replied earlier I have done a couple of things. Spoke with a friend who also uses FCPX - he too finds the quality of his work shifts massively when viewing on a TV screen however it is viewed (from a DVD, through apple TV or via the TV's own you tube app). And perhaps as you say, this is not a FCP issue but one arising from a need to find balance that best suits all outputs. Like many, much of my work is for the commercial world looking for online solutions so until now, it hasn't really been an issue for me but it is likely to be increasingly so with projects I have up and coming.

To answer some questions raised: As stated above, it matters not how I get the footage to the TV screen (DVD, Youtube via PS3 or Apple TV etc) it always looks mega over contrasty. So I accept this is something to do with colour balancing and how the TV displays it. It is terrible on my Sony Bravia and also on a bush LCD TV, but worse on the Sony). Interestingly I have just played the footage on a very new panasonic TV through its own youtube app and it is much more acceptable and closer to my monitor.

I am working on a fully calibrated monitor which is why this issue niggled me so much.

I think like you have stated - I almost need to balance to scopes and stay flatter than I would like in an ideal world.

Having been a sound engineer for some years where we used several speaker types to achieve the best balance for all, are you guys saying work with both my computer calibrated monitor and a LCD TV monitor to strike the balance and make comparisons?

Thanks guys for all your input.

Wes36 wrote: I am working on a fully calibrated monitor which is why this issue niggled me so much.

Oh I'm sorry I didn't understand. Do you have a calibrated reference monitor? I thought you were viewing them through consumer TVs. What monitor do you have?

If you are an audio engineer that you absolutely understand how different room sizes, speaker placement, etc. can radically change the frequency response and therefore how you perceive the sound.

Think of a typical consumer TV as a Bose speaker. It adds a bit of reverb, emphasizes the high end and while might give a typical consumer a good feeling, it just doesn't sound like what was done when an engineer mixed on reference monitors.

When you say fully calibrated monitor, is it a calibrated broadcast monitor that's hooked up to a broadcast signal coming from something like a Blackmagic or Aja card (tuned to REC 709)? Alternately, it's out of the HDMI port on a Mac Pro and calibrated to REC 709. Anyway, even if it's just your normal monitor that's connected to your computer, FCPX is much more color consistent even in the regular viewer than older versions.

Anyway, it's not a problem specific to FCPX at all. You can aim for any target you like, but there's a reason that you're supposed to do color timing off of a calibrated broadcast monitor. There are too many variables otherwise, and an infinite variety of poorly tuned screens. You can only really worry about your master version that looks great on a reference screen. Trying to aim "in-between" will drive you crazy because the question will always be "in-between what?"

Check your TV settings most of all. Even if you set it right for one input, most TVs these days can remember different settings for different inputs or modes. If you tried to play it off Youtube, there could be a difference between whether the TV is connected to a computer vs. playing it from an app, etc.

I have produced many TV shows and short films without a broadcast monitor. It's not ideal but if you know how to read the scopes then you will be able to produce a consistent image across all forms of media delivery.

Try this as an experiment. Duplicate your project and then select everything in it and create a compound clip.
Now get the Broadcast Safe filter and apply it to that.

Now export it to DVD or whatever and see how it looks on TV.

Quote: "I think like you have stated - I almost need to balance to scopes and stay flatter than I would like in an ideal world."

This is actually your basic problem. Don't ask me for the correct technical terms but what it boils down too is that your computer screen is behaving very differently from your TV signal. The only common guide you have are your scopes. So you have to basically stay within legal scope levels to have consistency across media displays, at least if they also contain broadcast.
Now that doesn't mean that you can't achieve the look you where able to get before on your online video. The way to do it is to check the output (as said before) on as many possible screens as possible. But always staying within the legal levels of the scope. It might happen that you have to use blacks, mids and whites differently to get the same contrast look you want, but when you make the scopes you're baseline for everything you'll see that of course you get slight differences between diff monitors and signal passes, but they never really change your look.

Happy editing

Thanks for this. Clearly I've missed the point here with calibrated monitors. To explain how I have come to this, I am a still food photographer who has slid into filming with the advances of dslr filming capabilities. So when I say a calibrated monitor I'm taking NEC Spectraview. And I also don't believe that my Mac Pro or MacBook Pro have hdmi output. If I'm honest most of my editing is done straight on the MacBook Pro and I check colours then on the NEC monitor. In a nut shell - what would you recommend as a simple set up that will offer a decent solution for me, as like you most of my work is for digital online solutions.

Great advice re bringing in footage and making the comparison. Thanks again, much appreciated :0)

If you don't want to get a permanent video out to TV monitor I think the easiest solution is to learn how to stay in the legal confines of broadcast scopes. This will ensure that even if you decide to go broadcast at a later stage you haven't boxed yourself in.
Secondly grade something on your NEC and than take it via DVD or iPad/iphone w HDMI adapter to diff TV's and see what it looks like. See how blacks/greys/whites differ from what you see in the edit.

To be 100% sure every single time the only way is to have a broadcast quality video out connected to a broadcast ref monitor. Everything else is experience and hard work (lots of comparing)

I for instance have a good computer monitor displaying my viewer full screen all the time. FCP now uses colour sync so it's pretty close. But to check I have a BM decklink monitor card connected to an old CRT monitor.

Happy editing

Nothing substantial to add here but to reinforce the point of checking scopes and apply broadcast safe filters as a backstop as well.

I am still amazed at the quantity of material that gets aired around the place where it's quite clear that Chroma and Luma levels are outside accepted 'safe' or 'pleasing' areas.

Learn these areas and your editing journey will be a lot more pleasant.