Background

The National Television System Committee (NTSC) set the foundation for television in the United States. For a more complete history and additional information visit www.ntsc-tv.com

What is NTSC safe?

For video to fit within the standards set by the NTSC it must meet a few requirements. These involve color and brightness values.

Certain colors don't display well on television. These colors may 'bleed' or 'flicker'. Two notorious examples are pure red and yellow.

The Solution

There are many ways to make sure your work is displayed as closely as possible to what you intended. If you composite your projects in software such as After Effects or Combustion you can use tools such as Effect>Video>Broadcast Colors (in AE) to reduce the Saturation (vividness of color) or Luminance (brightness value of color). An example can be seen to the right showing the original RGB colors and the resulting colors after being reduced to Broadcast Colors.

You also need to look out for pure white and pure black. In RGB these have values of 0,0,0 = black and 255,255,255 = white. As strange as it sounds, in video you can have values that are darker than black. When seen on TV anything with a value lower than black is simply seen as black, but they might be assigned different values. This is useful for pulling detail that would otherwise have been lost from the dark end of video. This goes for white as well.

Here the problem is if you create a graphic or animation that has 0,0,0 black and 255,255,255 white you will be loosing the detail on both ends of the value spectrum. This makes your image look too contrasty with blown-out whites and crushed blacks.

An easy solution is to apply a 'Levels' to your image with output levels set to video black and video white. Values commonly used are 16 for black and 235 for white. Doing this often fixes many NTSC safe color issues as well because it also reduces how bright and saturated colors look, however it is still often necessary to apply the 'Broadcast Colors' effect. Just be sure to place it after your levels change.