Those brightly-coloured bars you see when your television isn’t quite working properly actually have a purpose. But they’re not generated from your television – they’re created by either the camera itself or the post-production equipment.
They are used to provide a reference point for videos and video equipment to help set up the monitor.
If you’re a computer user, you may be aware of the fact that colours can look different on all monitors. This is true for televisions, and it is also true to the monitors used to create the television and film we know and love. While the colours in the bar are bright, bold, blinding and colours you rarely even see on television, they definitely serve a purpose.
How to set up a monitor using colour bars
If you’re setting up a monitor using colour bars, the first thing you want to do is turn off any lights in the room so that there is no confusion over the colours and that there are no reflections on the screen.
Your editing system or camera can be set to feed the colour bars to the monitor. After this is done, you can tweak the settings until the colour bars are set properly. Video University has a fantastic tutorial with pictures on how to set your colour bars properly, and it’s one of the best tutorials around – even one that was noticed by the inventor of the colour bars test pattern. It’s available here
These colour bars are important in ensuring that your final product – whether it’s a film or television broadcast – is coloured properly and will display as you intended on television screens and monitors. Every film maker or individual working in the broadcast industry should become familiar with them!