You can, but the gamma curve of the TV and monitor are different, so you have to guess what it will look like on a TV and use the waveform display to check it's valid. Since my PC doesn't have a TV attached I've had to make do with color correcting on the monitor and then checking on the TV after burning a DVD or outputting to tape: the main difference is that things that look too dark on the monitor look OK on the TV, and whites that look OK on the monitor may be too bright for the TV if you don't check the waveform display.

What about generating color bars and adjusting accordingly?

A carefully-calibrated LCD is better than an uncalibrated LCD, but still not as accurate as a CRT (CRTs have a greater dynamic range).

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Andrew Gingerich
Exploding Goldfish Films
Check out my vodcast on iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=96931870
and my blog at http://www.exgfilms.com

no, im saying couldnt i calibrate my ntsc monitor with by generating colorbars?

also, back to my original question- WHY can't I color correct on an LCD monitor? Is it because the color scheme for them is CMYK?? What is CMYK and what is the standard (color scheme- CMYK? RGB? some other that i dont know about?) for viewing on tv?

Yes, you should always work with a well-calibrated NTSC monitor so that you're sure your color will remain standard across any screen that it plays on.

The reason you can't use LCDs for color correction is not the actual color scheme?LCDs, like CRTs use RGB (CMYK is used for print media because ink is subtractive rather than additive). The problem is that LCDs do not have the same dynamic range as CRTs?they cannot display as wide a range of lights and darks.

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Andrew Gingerich
Exploding Goldfish Films
Check out my vodcast on iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=96931870
and my blog at http://www.exgfilms.com

To followup on agingeri's response. If you view this forum on a LCD Monitor - on some each post will be white as aposed to grey and white as on a CRT monitor.

??Goofy Horace??

Interesting... SO what are the different color schemes? There's CMYK which is used for print media (right?) and RGB is used for film, tv and video (right?) any others??

Those are the two major ones: additive and subtractive. There are some other schemes used mostly for still graphics work (LAB and HSV come to mind), but those are only used for editing, not display purposes.

One other colorspace you may come across (and should use in color correction as it yields better results than working in RGB) is the scheme used in the encoding of most video signals: YUV, which is a single luminance channel (Y) and two chrominance channels (U,V). You don't really need to understand how it works (I sure don't), but you tend to get less artifacting if you use the YUV colorspace for keying and color correction since you're not first converting it to a different scheme. In most editing programs, the YUV colorspace is used by default.

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Andrew Gingerich
Exploding Goldfish Films
Check out my vodcast on iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=96931870
and my blog at http://www.exgfilms.com

what's LAB and HSV?

Also, if I'm using Avid Xpress Pro HD (on a pc if it matters) how can i check to see if I'm in YUV?

LAB uses (I think) one luminance channel (L) and two chrominance channels (A,B), but it has a different dynamic range than YUV. It's used mostly (again, I think) for high-end photo editing. HSV uses hue, saturation, and value channels to define individual colors. It's mostly used as a color picker for RGB, but it can also be used as an actual color scheme for images (not quite sure why this would be used over RGB, though).

I haven't used Avid much, but there's probably a preference panel dealing with how effects are rendered. It's probably in there.

-----------------
Andrew Gingerich
Exploding Goldfish Films
Check out my vodcast on iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=96931870
and my blog at http://www.exgfilms.com