Apple Color: Broadcast Safe for the “Big Boys.”
Recently a thread in the Creative Cow Apple Color forum had somebody remark that if you’re delivering to the “Big Boys” such as Discovery and PBS you really should have external scopes in your shop. It’s also been suggested that external legalizer boxes really should be used as well when delivering to the high end networks.
The true fact of the matter is, the scopes in Color are very accurate, to the point that I don’t see any differences on an external scope when we do have one. The Broadcast Safe in Color is good enough for “the big boys.” We have delivered about 66 episodes of “Good Eats” in HD to the Food Network, not a single rejection for video quality, and have now delivered two HD series to PBS. No external scopes, no external legalizer. Just FCP to Color to FCP and out to tape. In fact, about 20 or so episodes of Good Eats was color graded ONLY using FCP’s 3-Way CC, Broadcast Safe and Levels filters. All of those were legal too.
If you can afford an external scope and want to drop $12,000 to $20,000 for a good Tektronix scope, then by all means have at it. We actually could afford one if I really felt I needed it, but I personally would rather spend that money on something more useful to our day to day operation, say like 3 FSI color reference monitors to replace our aging CRT monitors.
But as far as being perfectly broadcast legal and delivering to the “big boys” of broadcast, the tools within FC Studio are perfectly capable of delivering a legal product in the hands of an operator who knows how to use them.
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