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Rod Stephens wrote: > When I worked for a video company in the '60's, we had a variation on > the NTSC phrase: "Never Twice the Same Color" since, unlike many > European systems, we have knobs on our equipment that allow us to make > the video picture look any way we want. Talk to any European, other than the French (they're, as usual, a special case), and they will tell you that their PAL (Phase Alternating Line) system means "Perfection At Last". Then ask him/her about how he/she can stand the 50 Hz flicker in the picture (the US rate is approx. 60 Hz) and the response will be "What flicker?" The French had to have their own system called SECAM (pardon my spelling, but it's approximately Systeme Electronique Colour Avec Memoire), which some people call "System Entirely Contrary to American Methods." It's an incredibly complex system which prevents production and post-production work in its own standard (i.e. signals must be manipulated as component signals or composite PAL signals). Of course, with the coming of digital video much of this information may quickly be for historical purposes only. > Unfortunately, there is no > "standard" way for most people to set up their picture monitors unless > they use professional vector scopes with a system generated (as in a > professional video facility) color bars test signal. I've seen some > pretty strange results when people use their naked eyes at home. The simplest way to set up a monitor is to use SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) color bars, which is a long-established variant of simple color bars. The extra information allows the user to set brightness and color-balance to a (more-or-less) repeatable setting so that the color of a production can be properly evaluated. Aaron Z