Red image looks terrible!

klloyd wrote on 7/3/2003, 12:17 PM
I am in the process of making a presentation which, since we are a Sharp dealer, needs to have the red Sharp logo in it. Here is a link to the logo in PNG format:

http://www.wattscopy.com/images/Sharp_no_motto.png

The logo fades in to my presentation, floats across the screen and stops. What is happening is the logo looks perfect in the preview window even while in motion. But when it is rendered as MPEG 2 the logo is very blurry and during motion looks like it waves like water. When rendered as an uncompressed AVI it has flickering lines all over it.

I've never experienced this before with any of our graphics but none of them are red either. I say that because I've read in some places that the color red is very difficult to work with in video. Is there any truth to this? This logo is saved as a PNG directly from the perfect original EPS file from Sharp so it is not an image quality issue.

If anyone can help I would greatly appreciate it!

Kevin

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 7/3/2003, 3:08 PM
Yes, the color red is extremely difficult for televisions to deal with, particulary pure red. You could try reducing the saturation on the logo slightly until it renders correctly.

The flickering lines on the computer monitor when viewing the .AVI file may be simple interlacing, which is perfectly normal and will display correctly on a television. That's if the lines are horizontal. If they are vertical and about 8 pixels apart, then it the colorspace conversion in the DV codec having a hard time with the red logo. In this case, reducing the saturation may help.

John
craftech wrote on 7/4/2003, 7:40 AM
If you have "reduce interlace flicker" enabled it will introduce motion blur. Try the quick blur option instead. If you want to maintain the proper red color you will have to experiment with the color correction tools. Billyboy's tutorials are very helpful:

http://www.wideopenwest.com/%7Ewvg/tutorial-menu.htm

If you simply reduce saturation it will eliminate color bleed but will not reproduce the color you are after.

John
mikkie wrote on 7/4/2003, 10:26 AM
Well, after cable being down for the last hour, perhaps I can get away posting this...

Quickly, ran a quick test -> took the sharp logo from their web site and grabbed the color at 203, 46, 46 -> slapped this onto your downloaded logo -> added a selection border, feathered, and filled with 0, 0, 0, black -> brought into vv4c -> rendered a 15 sec fly thru using the dvd stream template -> looked fine, though could have been better with supersampling -> (R) that I didn't alter looked NASTY!

OK, got that much posted, now if cable allows... which it didn't, may not get this posted but let's see...

Red is difficult under the best circumstances, perhaps a bit worse using 4:1:1 DV, and any text/graphic looks better interlaced on a tv when blended with it's shadow. Adding other tints to the mix helps, using strict level & color contraints for 7.5 helps, having the red more subdued helps.

Realize that a lot of companies have strict color specs for their logos, and the web page may be wrong and all that, but just something that did work if I get to post it and if it helps.
SonyDennis wrote on 7/15/2003, 12:54 PM
4:1:1 and 4:2:0 are particularly bad with hard chroma edges. See Adam Wilt's fine articles, such as this one:

http://www.dv.com/columns/columns_item.jhtml?LookupId=/xml/feature/2003/wilt0603&category=Technical%20Difficulties

///d@