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Obama looks like Blanka on European TV's. Is he black or green?

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Blanka:
Last days a lot of Obama on the television. He is mentioned the first afro-american president.  :afro:
But I wonder is he really black?
On our televisions he's always kind of green (no my TV is not bad, I see the same on all TV's here)
Are those americans still filming in NeverTheSameColour standard def cam's? And is it so hard to convert it to a decent PAL signal?
Please colour-manage your video Americans. It's not the Hulk you voted for I guess.

MonMotha:
Chances are this was all recorded in HD since it's network originated content in almost all cases.  In the USA, that means 1920x1080@60Hz interlace or 1280x720@60Hz progressive depending on the network.  It would likely be YCbCr colorspace (since the final destination is MPEG2), but it'll be kept digital and likely losslessly compressed until it's actually broadcast.  i.e. no opportunity for tint shift.  We do have a digital TV standard here, you know.  In fact, as of Feb. 17, that's all there will be OTA.

Now, many TV stations in the USA aren't fully digital yet.  In fact, most are still 100% NTSC-M until the very end where they hook a composite video line up to an encoder, but they can bypass all the studio stuff to show HD network content.  No, I'm not kidding.  Yes, it looks awful.  In fact, my analog signal (while it lasts) usually looks better than my digital signal on local (non-network) content since I can apply all the filters that have been developed over the years to work around NTSC's shortcomings.  I can't do that on the digital side since it's already been upconverted for me.  Many stations have to switch to SD (and very obviously NTSC composite at one point) in order to do station logos, weather alert bugs, or crawls.

Chances are, the issues are the people converting it to PAL (assuming you're still using that archaic system) on your side of the pond.  They're likely taking NTSC-M composite video (since it's readily available and means they don't have to mess with digital or HD video - they're probably still set up the same way they were 20 years ago for handling North American content) and mashing it into whatever they are broadcasting.  NTSC-M to PAL-"whatever the hell letter you guys happen to use there" is a somewhat complicated process as it involves a field rate conversion, a resolution conversion, and then you have to change the NTSC color to PAL color (which is actually the easiest part since you're already doing everything else).  It's a complicated process, and I've found that most TV people gave up on being "correct" years ago because 99.9% of their viewers don't even notice when they're grossly wrong.

Of course, the advantages of PAL kinda went away some time in the late-80's to early-90s anyway.  PLLs got so stable and oscillators got so accurate even at cheap prices that the phase drift across a line of the color subcarrier was no longer a problem.  That's all PAL really addresses.  Modern analog TVs in the USA (since about the early 90s) tend to bury their tint control in a menu since it's no longer a major issue.

To actually answer your question rather than rail on you for railing on the ancient US TV standard, he's black or a dark shade of brown.  You know, a skin color that you'd typically expect of individuals of African descent.  He looks pretty much the same on all the TVs I've seen him on, and he's not green.

Blanka:
Just checked the inauguration speech on Youtube, and there the colour is right. Webconversion is better than trans-atlantic TV conversion.

protokatie:
On a similar note (although not really related to Mr. CiC) there is a "green" shift in many digital encoding methods that cause noisy dark colors to appear with a slight greenish tinge. I've seen this in many web streams, but before that it was common in 16 bit color mode (either in the GFX card or the compression bit depth). This was due to the fact that 16 bit color usually used a 5 bit Red 6 bit Green and 5 bit Blue, which could cause rounding error when converted to another bit depth (EG 15 bit 555 or 24 bit 888). 16 bit 565 was still better than 15 bit 555 since it placed emphasis on green bit depth (as our eyes can see green better than red, and much better than blue).

danny_galaga:

he seems the right colour on PAL in australia...

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