April 16, 2003
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NTSC COLORS:
Important Tip of The Day
We’ve just been to a “NTSC Colour Meeting” here at WB about which colors are safe for broadcast and which aren’t (illegal colors will be pulled back in Post, also affecting colors in the entire scene!)
Basically, this is what all of us Character/BG Designers and colorists have to do: Make sure that for every color we choose – the RGB values stay within the 16-235 value range. No values below 16; no values above 235.
R: 16-235
G: 16-235
B: 16-235
I.e., the darkest black will be 16-16-16; the whitest white should be 235-235-235. Colors outside this range won’t be registered on screen.
Bradford (from WB Post): If you pick a color you like and notice that one of the RGB values is outside this range, for example 238, just change it to 235 and you’re safe. You won’t notice the difference anyway. well, I dunno about that.
* Same goes for PAL Broadcast.
Comments (2)
interesting. the only color experience i have is with html/hexdecimal. does it relate?
judging by the values, no. but it never hurts to ask.
Hi Saturnalia, the problem is that most web colors (RGB) don’t translate very well to video/tv broadcast, so we need to work with a broadcast-safe color palette when producing TV animation. These colors are more subdued (kinda like CMYK for print).
We’re using Flash here – and there’s a little window where you can adjust RGB values… I don’t know the equivalent for HEX though, not that you would need to worry about this issue. If you’re producing stuff for the web, you can use any colors you want!