An Improved Automatic Color Corrector for Telecine

Television pictures from film can almost always be improved by making color and brightness corrections for the characteristics of a particular film. Frequently these corrections need to be changed from scene to scene if the best possible results are to be achieved. They may be made manually as the film is being run, or they can be preprogrammed during a rehearsal. Alternatively, systems of fully automatic correction can be used which are capable of substantially improving poor film without the need for a rehearsal, but they cannot equal the performance of a trained operator. A corrector has been designed that makes some basic statistical assumptions about average color pictures. As a result of operational use, a number of modifications have been made so that large errors are not introduced on pictures that do not conform to these statistical assumptions. One modification in particular is a clipping circuit to inhibit complete “integration-to-gray” on scenes with large areas of saturated colors. The corrector can be used in a number of different modes depending on the particular problems to be dealt with, but the number of modes has been limited to those that have been found most useful.

Print ISSN

0036-1682

Published

1978-02

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/J17431