Letters and Tips – ONY HC3
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Do a 360 Degree Scan Through Your Camera Viewfinder
Brian Peterson: Welcome back. I’m Brian Peterson, Videomaker Editor in Chief.
Charlie Fulton: And I’m Charlie Fulton, Videomaker’s Associate Editor.
Brian Peterson: And we have a series of reader tips this time. In the past few episodes, we primarily did a Q&A sort of thing. It’s still can be that way kind of thing, but,
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: occasionally, we get some really, really, really wonderful suggestions from readers, and some of them we’ve tried ourselves, and some of them we go, hmm, I should’ve thought of that myself.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: I don’t think we have any of those here. These are pretty basic suggestions, but they’re really, really powerful, and if you haven’t either run into the problem, or experienced the problem, these actually could be relatively new to some people.
The first one, and this is one of those habits that you either get into at an early age, or at least early in your video career, or you don’t and have to really think it through each time you touch your camcorder, and that’s composition.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: This one is from Luis Rodriguez from Daytona Beach, Florida. And he says, when I was quite young, my father had one of those early video cameras, you know, the kind of that had a separate camera case from the briefcase, VCR-
Charlie Fulton: I remember those.
Brian Peterson: And you needed to kind of do that.
Charlie Fulton: You’re tailing around those 10lb of equipment both in your hands and on your shoulder, and… egh.
Brian Peterson: They were designed by chiropractors, I think?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, yeah, or orthopedic surgeons.
Brian Peterson: Orthopedic surgeons. Out of business now. So he says, he had one of those camcorders, so obviously had to spend a lot of time just lugging stuff around, but his dad said, make sure every minute or two that you do a full 360 degrees scan with your eye in the viewfinder. And that way you’re just making sure that nothing extraneous is in frame. Just a wonderful idea to make sure that your composition is clean and that you’re getting what you’re subject warrants. So, it’s just a really good idea. Every couple of minutes, think of that, just scan the outer edge of the viewfinder, and I think that you may be finding that you have leaves, or branches, or people poking their heads and doing funny things.
Just a good habit to get into.
Charlie Fulton: That was one of the things that we learned in a photo class back when I was in college. It’s to make sure you make sure when you’re framing people so that you don’t have like telephone poles sticking out of their heads, and then the importance of the rule of thirds. That’s one thing you can never forget.
Of course, all the rules are made to be broken, but some of them are more important, more just vital than any others.
Brian Peterson: Exactly.
So, 360 degrees scan. Thank you very much, Luis.
So this next one is a question, and I’m going to ask you, if we haven’t kind of already figured it out. Charlie is from, well, we call him by many affectionate names, and not at least of which is a Good master, Rainman, let’s see, what else? He has a tendency to remember just about everything. In fact, what was it the other day that I caught you, you said I’ll have to check, and all of us were (keeps open mouth)!
Charlie Fulton: I don’t remember what that issue was, strangely I forgot.
Brian Peterson: You forgot? Now you forgot?
Oh, well. This one is a question we got from several readers, so, I’m not really crediting it to anyone, but this one particular person that I’m paraphrasing here, says, since 2002, I had problems with the DVDs I burned playing on different DVD players. I’ve done plenty of research, and alternatively been turned to using different blank media or even different players. Well, apparently, this one person has DVD recorder break down on them, and was forced to buying a new one. And he’s finding now that everything is working fine. He’s able to burn on this new burner and is playing on same players that hadn’t, to that point, been able to play.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: What’s going on?
Charlie Fulton: The first thing I would suspect would be the firmware, and that’s in DVD burner itself. A lot of the new media that’s coming out, the faster speed media, especially, they require special firmware to be in your burner so that it knows, okay, this is a certain kind of media and it needs certain, it’s called a write strategy, to write to that media most effectively.
And of course, the higher speed one, the higher speed burners tend to have a little bit more trouble burning, quite as, I don’t know how would you say, dark as thoroughly as some of the other slower speed burners do.
But there’s one thing you can check pretty easily is, if you go to the manufacturer’s website, who made your DVD burner, and see if there’s a firmware update for it. That can usually help a lot. And some older players, particularly Toshiba, is notorious for this, and there’s a lot of others, I’m not singling out anybody by name-
Brian Peterson: Of course you just did, but that’s all right.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: We’ll take it back later.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Some of the older players especially will have firmware that doesn’t handle burned discs quite as well as pressed or standards that you would buy at your friendly neighborhood electronic store, or the movie department, or the movie that you would rent at wherever you like to rent movies.
So the cheapest way to fix that is actually go to your favorite neighborhood electronic store and buy a new cheap DVD player. And you’ll have pretty good results reading the newer discs.
Brian Peterson: And there are a couple of myths surrounding this, and I guess one of these is that you have to have a certain type of media and maybe, well, answer that, is that really a case where you have to have a certain brand, or certain type, or certain degree of reflectivity on the recordable media itself? Is that even a factor?
Charlie Fulton: Well, to some extent, yeah. If you use the cheapest discs, they will tend to have less reflexivity than more expensive, highfalutin discs that you can buy. And a parallel discussion to this is whether using –R or +R media, whether it’s rewritable or not. A lot of DVD players will have trouble with rewritable discs, any kind of rewritable discs, but they work better with the right ones, + or – types.
Brian Peterson: Okay, so let’s do the suggestion – check your firmware upgrade with your existing player, just go online, check it out, maybe you can upgrade your firmware. If not, run out to whatever box store you want, buy a cheap DVD that should have an upgraded firmware and be able to write more robust images of your media, I’m assuming.
And then just don’t buy at department basement, anything but the + or -?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Probably. All right.
Another tip. This one comes from Kate Lamberson of Little Rock, Arkansas. And she has a series of tips for glare. And I know we have a couple of people, Morgan, yourself,
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: that wear eye glasses, and, as the person behind the camera, you’re, of course, charged with making the glare at least reduced to a point where it’s not obscuring, at least the people, I mean you really want to be able to see a catch light in the eye without seeing a real good flashes in the glasses.
So, if you haven’t run into this already, she suggested four different things. Four or five?
Charlie Fulton: Four.
Brian Peterson: Four things. One, move the light higher. Simple. You just try to change the angle between the angle of hitting the subject to the lens of the camera. That’s pretty easy, normally, of course, you want to look at your shading and how it affects your subject. That should do it.
The next thing, if the light is fixed, such something of a camera light, you can’t change that directionally or at least the angle, but you can, directionally, excuse me. So, bounce it of a wall. If a wall is nearby, you can do that, or even feathering a light a little bit, sometimes that will help. That’s another good one.
Of course, you can angle them down. Try, Charlie, for a second, angling them down. See, it works pretty good for Charlie because he’s got some hair over his ears, but for Morgan it would be kind of tough, because he’d have his little, wings of his glasses poking out on top of his ears, so that wouldn’t work. That’s another one.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: This is one I tried and it’s dangerous. And that’s probably not popular any more. It’s popping the lens out. You can do that? But how much did your glasses cost?
Charlie Fulton: Oooh…
Brian Peterson: You prefer not to say. If I paid for them, I’d pop those out. That’s one, and frankly, the cameras right now are good enough to wear, you can see that shit, so I reckon you’d probably be against that. As the last resort.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Did you, as a kid, did you wear glasses too?
Charlie Fulton: I think in 7th grade I got my very first glasses.
Brian Peterson: Okay.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, and when my senior pictures, I had that done. The photographer actually took the lenses out, so I had the frames there, so he could do all the shooting. And I couldn’t see what he was doing but he assured me, okay, you’re doing fine. Just tilt your head a little bit more, and then. Yeah, that worked out.
Brian Peterson: And then he put the lens back in?
Charlie Fulton: Oh, yeah, the lenses went back in.
Brian Peterson: Oh, well, the optometrist shooter. That’s great.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
And I have another tip here. This is from Alex Tiadoropoulos from San Francisco, California. And his tip is to, well, as it follows, I use a technique that I actually learned in one of your workshops that I would like to submit, so all Videomaker readers can use it. One of your instructors taught as that we should record first 20 seconds of a new tape with material that we don’t want to use because editing software needs preroll before it can capture audio and video. He shot us a watch for the first 20 seconds which showed both day and time on the head of the tape. That’s a great idea. I just shot a documentary where I used 60 tapes. 60 tapes! Wow! And I’m not always best at labeling them. But all I need to do is rewind it to the beginning of the tape to see what the day and time is when I started shooting and I know what footage is on it. And then I can properly label it.
Brian Peterson: What a great tip! And when you are just jamming, I mean, Alex, very honest. I mean, we’re all not the best at labeling tapes, if we want to be honest. When you’ve got so much of everything else going on, and if you’re the camera person, the director, the audio person, which many of us are, it’s fundamental, but, just stick your arm up in front of the camera. That’s a great idea. So, nice. Thank you very much, Alex!
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: This is something we’re not going to do very often, but we’ve got, this is just the first few episodes that we’ve been doing, we’re going to dark a little bit. A couple of comments that have already hit iTunes, and one came from Christopher Allen, saying great stuff right out of the gate. He says he’s not a big fan video podcasts, ironically because it is a video business, but this one I liked because it was to the point, quick for what it was trying to achieve. Added a little more humor to the mix, and this could be something great. Texture equally informative and fun, yet it’s head and shoulders above the first episodes I’ve seen. I’m really looking forward to what they pull off, I say episode 4. So, the pressure’s on.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, we’re on the hot seat. Because this is episode 4.
Brian Peterson: Okay. Well, humor, man, you force it and it’s not fun. But we’ll try, we’ll try. Good, thank you.
And we have another one, too.
Charlie Fulton: We do, yeah. It’s from an anonymous user at iTunes, who says, wide screen is cool, and gives us four stars. Cool content for their first episode. They actually play readers’ videos, too. The one they showed was really good. This is also first wide screen video I’ve seen on iTunes. Right on!
Brian Peterson: We’ll keep it wide.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah!
Brian Peterson: We’ll keep it wide, and in fact we’ve coming up real soon, we’ve got one more thing to do, but we’ll show another reader video submission, a 3rd place winner from our video contest. Another really cool one. You and Jennifer will do that?
Charlie Fulton: Yes.
Brian Peterson: But before we go to that, I want you to show me the toy that you got and that you used yourself and you thoroughly feel it’s mandatory for everybody.
Charlie Fulton: Yes, I did use this myself on my own personal television. This is a spider TV from data code. So what you do is you slap this little guy on your TV screen, there’s a little suction cup back here, and then you put this little color sucker right in the middle of your set, as close as you can get it.
If you’re using LCD, you want to use this tripod here instead of using the suction cup, otherwise it’s going to leave a mark on your LCD which you don’t really want to have happened.
So, what you do then is once you have it stuck to your TV like so you would attach this USB cable to your computer and then, I did this with my laptop over there. You install a piece of software on your computer and then you play this DVD that comes with it to put some test signals on the screen. It will set your brightness, your contrast, your color, your tint, and even your color temperature settings if you have a television that is so equipped.
And then, final settings that I found on this, and I’m also a user of test discs like Video essentials, Ovia, which you can also get, and those are the discs that come with test patterns, and you play them on your TV screen, and then you can use the filters that come with them to see is your color on the right setting, your bright, well, brightness and contrast are also there, but your tint also. Those are with the blue filter, you pull it in front of your TV so you can see how your TV is set up.
But this does everything automatically. And what it will do even if you have a TV that has a scale, a numbered scale from 0 to whatever might be-
Brian Peterson: 10 it might be.
Charlie Fulton: 10 or 63 or 100, the software will tell, okay, set your TV to number, and then it takes a reading from that, and then it suggests other settings and then it locks down on the perfect setting for your set.
And when you’re all done, it will give you a report in PDF that you can read, analyze and say, wow!
And I noticed, after using this, my color was a lot better, I was actually using a wrong color temperature setting
Brian Peterson: Oh?
Charlie Fulton: which really surprised me. I had it on normal, when the warm that was optimal for my Panasonic TV. And I found that the brightness and contrast, I had them on a little bit too conservative setting, so I pumped them up a little bit for me.
So, I learned a lot using this device. It was easy to use, I was out in or out maybe 25 minutes or so. So…
Brian Peterson: Very cool.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Spider.
Charlie Fulton: The spider.
Brian Peterson: So, if you don’t have one, people, you would recommend that, I guess?
Charlie Fulton: I would, yeah. I had a lot of good time with it. And then if you’ve got a laptop, especially, and you know other people have televisions, you know.
Brian Peterson: You could be the cool nerd on your street going around with your spider.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, you could.
Brian Peterson: You already are a cool nerd, so you don’t have to carry that with yourself.
Charlie Fulton: Oh, thank you.
Brian Peterson: Right. There you go. We’ll keep bringing products like this since we happen to in our different segments.
But I think this is it, yeah, for now?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Next is going to be our reader profile and her submission. Like always, make sure if you have any suggestions or tips you want to have us talk about, please, send it to editor@videomaker.com, and if we haven’t covered it before, and we’ve got time, we’ll make sure we bring it on the segment.
See you next time.
Brian Peterson: Welcome back. I’m Brian Peterson, Videomaker Editor in Chief.
Charlie Fulton: And I’m Charlie Fulton, Videomaker’s Associate Editor.
Brian Peterson: And we have a series of reader tips this time. In the past few episodes, we primarily did a Q&A sort of thing. It’s still can be that way kind of thing, but,
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: occasionally, we get some really, really, really wonderful suggestions from readers, and some of them we’ve tried ourselves, and some of them we go, hmm, I should’ve thought of that myself.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: I don’t think we have any of those here. These are pretty basic suggestions, but they’re really, really powerful, and if you haven’t either run into the problem, or experienced the problem, these actually could be relatively new to some people.
The first one, and this is one of those habits that you either get into at an early age, or at least early in your video career, or you don’t and have to really think it through each time you touch your camcorder, and that’s composition.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: This one is from Luis Rodriguez from Daytona Beach, Florida. And he says, when I was quite young, my father had one of those early video cameras, you know, the kind of that had a separate camera case from the briefcase, VCR-
Charlie Fulton: I remember those.
Brian Peterson: And you needed to kind of do that.
Charlie Fulton: You’re tailing around those 10lb of equipment both in your hands and on your shoulder, and… egh.
Brian Peterson: They were designed by chiropractors, I think?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, yeah, or orthopedic surgeons.
Brian Peterson: Orthopedic surgeons. Out of business now. So he says, he had one of those camcorders, so obviously had to spend a lot of time just lugging stuff around, but his dad said, make sure every minute or two that you do a full 360 degrees scan with your eye in the viewfinder. And that way you’re just making sure that nothing extraneous is in frame. Just a wonderful idea to make sure that your composition is clean and that you’re getting what you’re subject warrants. So, it’s just a really good idea. Every couple of minutes, think of that, just scan the outer edge of the viewfinder, and I think that you may be finding that you have leaves, or branches, or people poking their heads and doing funny things.
Just a good habit to get into.
Charlie Fulton: That was one of the things that we learned in a photo class back when I was in college. It’s to make sure you make sure when you’re framing people so that you don’t have like telephone poles sticking out of their heads, and then the importance of the rule of thirds. That’s one thing you can never forget.
Of course, all the rules are made to be broken, but some of them are more important, more just vital than any others.
Brian Peterson: Exactly.
So, 360 degrees scan. Thank you very much, Luis.
So this next one is a question, and I’m going to ask you, if we haven’t kind of already figured it out. Charlie is from, well, we call him by many affectionate names, and not at least of which is a Good master, Rainman, let’s see, what else? He has a tendency to remember just about everything. In fact, what was it the other day that I caught you, you said I’ll have to check, and all of us were (keeps open mouth)!
Charlie Fulton: I don’t remember what that issue was, strangely I forgot.
Brian Peterson: You forgot? Now you forgot?
Oh, well. This one is a question we got from several readers, so, I’m not really crediting it to anyone, but this one particular person that I’m paraphrasing here, says, since 2002, I had problems with the DVDs I burned playing on different DVD players. I’ve done plenty of research, and alternatively been turned to using different blank media or even different players. Well, apparently, this one person has DVD recorder break down on them, and was forced to buying a new one. And he’s finding now that everything is working fine. He’s able to burn on this new burner and is playing on same players that hadn’t, to that point, been able to play.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: What’s going on?
Charlie Fulton: The first thing I would suspect would be the firmware, and that’s in DVD burner itself. A lot of the new media that’s coming out, the faster speed media, especially, they require special firmware to be in your burner so that it knows, okay, this is a certain kind of media and it needs certain, it’s called a write strategy, to write to that media most effectively.
And of course, the higher speed one, the higher speed burners tend to have a little bit more trouble burning, quite as, I don’t know how would you say, dark as thoroughly as some of the other slower speed burners do.
But there’s one thing you can check pretty easily is, if you go to the manufacturer’s website, who made your DVD burner, and see if there’s a firmware update for it. That can usually help a lot. And some older players, particularly Toshiba, is notorious for this, and there’s a lot of others, I’m not singling out anybody by name-
Brian Peterson: Of course you just did, but that’s all right.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: We’ll take it back later.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Some of the older players especially will have firmware that doesn’t handle burned discs quite as well as pressed or standards that you would buy at your friendly neighborhood electronic store, or the movie department, or the movie that you would rent at wherever you like to rent movies.
So the cheapest way to fix that is actually go to your favorite neighborhood electronic store and buy a new cheap DVD player. And you’ll have pretty good results reading the newer discs.
Brian Peterson: And there are a couple of myths surrounding this, and I guess one of these is that you have to have a certain type of media and maybe, well, answer that, is that really a case where you have to have a certain brand, or certain type, or certain degree of reflectivity on the recordable media itself? Is that even a factor?
Charlie Fulton: Well, to some extent, yeah. If you use the cheapest discs, they will tend to have less reflexivity than more expensive, highfalutin discs that you can buy. And a parallel discussion to this is whether using –R or +R media, whether it’s rewritable or not. A lot of DVD players will have trouble with rewritable discs, any kind of rewritable discs, but they work better with the right ones, + or – types.
Brian Peterson: Okay, so let’s do the suggestion – check your firmware upgrade with your existing player, just go online, check it out, maybe you can upgrade your firmware. If not, run out to whatever box store you want, buy a cheap DVD that should have an upgraded firmware and be able to write more robust images of your media, I’m assuming.
And then just don’t buy at department basement, anything but the + or -?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Probably. All right.
Another tip. This one comes from Kate Lamberson of Little Rock, Arkansas. And she has a series of tips for glare. And I know we have a couple of people, Morgan, yourself,
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: that wear eye glasses, and, as the person behind the camera, you’re, of course, charged with making the glare at least reduced to a point where it’s not obscuring, at least the people, I mean you really want to be able to see a catch light in the eye without seeing a real good flashes in the glasses.
So, if you haven’t run into this already, she suggested four different things. Four or five?
Charlie Fulton: Four.
Brian Peterson: Four things. One, move the light higher. Simple. You just try to change the angle between the angle of hitting the subject to the lens of the camera. That’s pretty easy, normally, of course, you want to look at your shading and how it affects your subject. That should do it.
The next thing, if the light is fixed, such something of a camera light, you can’t change that directionally or at least the angle, but you can, directionally, excuse me. So, bounce it of a wall. If a wall is nearby, you can do that, or even feathering a light a little bit, sometimes that will help. That’s another good one.
Of course, you can angle them down. Try, Charlie, for a second, angling them down. See, it works pretty good for Charlie because he’s got some hair over his ears, but for Morgan it would be kind of tough, because he’d have his little, wings of his glasses poking out on top of his ears, so that wouldn’t work. That’s another one.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: This is one I tried and it’s dangerous. And that’s probably not popular any more. It’s popping the lens out. You can do that? But how much did your glasses cost?
Charlie Fulton: Oooh…
Brian Peterson: You prefer not to say. If I paid for them, I’d pop those out. That’s one, and frankly, the cameras right now are good enough to wear, you can see that shit, so I reckon you’d probably be against that. As the last resort.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Did you, as a kid, did you wear glasses too?
Charlie Fulton: I think in 7th grade I got my very first glasses.
Brian Peterson: Okay.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, and when my senior pictures, I had that done. The photographer actually took the lenses out, so I had the frames there, so he could do all the shooting. And I couldn’t see what he was doing but he assured me, okay, you’re doing fine. Just tilt your head a little bit more, and then. Yeah, that worked out.
Brian Peterson: And then he put the lens back in?
Charlie Fulton: Oh, yeah, the lenses went back in.
Brian Peterson: Oh, well, the optometrist shooter. That’s great.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
And I have another tip here. This is from Alex Tiadoropoulos from San Francisco, California. And his tip is to, well, as it follows, I use a technique that I actually learned in one of your workshops that I would like to submit, so all Videomaker readers can use it. One of your instructors taught as that we should record first 20 seconds of a new tape with material that we don’t want to use because editing software needs preroll before it can capture audio and video. He shot us a watch for the first 20 seconds which showed both day and time on the head of the tape. That’s a great idea. I just shot a documentary where I used 60 tapes. 60 tapes! Wow! And I’m not always best at labeling them. But all I need to do is rewind it to the beginning of the tape to see what the day and time is when I started shooting and I know what footage is on it. And then I can properly label it.
Brian Peterson: What a great tip! And when you are just jamming, I mean, Alex, very honest. I mean, we’re all not the best at labeling tapes, if we want to be honest. When you’ve got so much of everything else going on, and if you’re the camera person, the director, the audio person, which many of us are, it’s fundamental, but, just stick your arm up in front of the camera. That’s a great idea. So, nice. Thank you very much, Alex!
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: This is something we’re not going to do very often, but we’ve got, this is just the first few episodes that we’ve been doing, we’re going to dark a little bit. A couple of comments that have already hit iTunes, and one came from Christopher Allen, saying great stuff right out of the gate. He says he’s not a big fan video podcasts, ironically because it is a video business, but this one I liked because it was to the point, quick for what it was trying to achieve. Added a little more humor to the mix, and this could be something great. Texture equally informative and fun, yet it’s head and shoulders above the first episodes I’ve seen. I’m really looking forward to what they pull off, I say episode 4. So, the pressure’s on.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, we’re on the hot seat. Because this is episode 4.
Brian Peterson: Okay. Well, humor, man, you force it and it’s not fun. But we’ll try, we’ll try. Good, thank you.
And we have another one, too.
Charlie Fulton: We do, yeah. It’s from an anonymous user at iTunes, who says, wide screen is cool, and gives us four stars. Cool content for their first episode. They actually play readers’ videos, too. The one they showed was really good. This is also first wide screen video I’ve seen on iTunes. Right on!
Brian Peterson: We’ll keep it wide.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah!
Brian Peterson: We’ll keep it wide, and in fact we’ve coming up real soon, we’ve got one more thing to do, but we’ll show another reader video submission, a 3rd place winner from our video contest. Another really cool one. You and Jennifer will do that?
Charlie Fulton: Yes.
Brian Peterson: But before we go to that, I want you to show me the toy that you got and that you used yourself and you thoroughly feel it’s mandatory for everybody.
Charlie Fulton: Yes, I did use this myself on my own personal television. This is a spider TV from data code. So what you do is you slap this little guy on your TV screen, there’s a little suction cup back here, and then you put this little color sucker right in the middle of your set, as close as you can get it.
If you’re using LCD, you want to use this tripod here instead of using the suction cup, otherwise it’s going to leave a mark on your LCD which you don’t really want to have happened.
So, what you do then is once you have it stuck to your TV like so you would attach this USB cable to your computer and then, I did this with my laptop over there. You install a piece of software on your computer and then you play this DVD that comes with it to put some test signals on the screen. It will set your brightness, your contrast, your color, your tint, and even your color temperature settings if you have a television that is so equipped.
And then, final settings that I found on this, and I’m also a user of test discs like Video essentials, Ovia, which you can also get, and those are the discs that come with test patterns, and you play them on your TV screen, and then you can use the filters that come with them to see is your color on the right setting, your bright, well, brightness and contrast are also there, but your tint also. Those are with the blue filter, you pull it in front of your TV so you can see how your TV is set up.
But this does everything automatically. And what it will do even if you have a TV that has a scale, a numbered scale from 0 to whatever might be-
Brian Peterson: 10 it might be.
Charlie Fulton: 10 or 63 or 100, the software will tell, okay, set your TV to number, and then it takes a reading from that, and then it suggests other settings and then it locks down on the perfect setting for your set.
And when you’re all done, it will give you a report in PDF that you can read, analyze and say, wow!
And I noticed, after using this, my color was a lot better, I was actually using a wrong color temperature setting
Brian Peterson: Oh?
Charlie Fulton: which really surprised me. I had it on normal, when the warm that was optimal for my Panasonic TV. And I found that the brightness and contrast, I had them on a little bit too conservative setting, so I pumped them up a little bit for me.
So, I learned a lot using this device. It was easy to use, I was out in or out maybe 25 minutes or so. So…
Brian Peterson: Very cool.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Spider.
Charlie Fulton: The spider.
Brian Peterson: So, if you don’t have one, people, you would recommend that, I guess?
Charlie Fulton: I would, yeah. I had a lot of good time with it. And then if you’ve got a laptop, especially, and you know other people have televisions, you know.
Brian Peterson: You could be the cool nerd on your street going around with your spider.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, you could.
Brian Peterson: You already are a cool nerd, so you don’t have to carry that with yourself.
Charlie Fulton: Oh, thank you.
Brian Peterson: Right. There you go. We’ll keep bringing products like this since we happen to in our different segments.
But I think this is it, yeah, for now?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Next is going to be our reader profile and her submission. Like always, make sure if you have any suggestions or tips you want to have us talk about, please, send it to editor@videomaker.com, and if we haven’t covered it before, and we’ve got time, we’ll make sure we bring it on the segment.
See you next time.
