[laid back jazz music]
[computer buzzing]
- Greetings, and welcome to an LGR thing!
And today is a bit of a more laid back,
unscripted, relaxed type of video
while I'm working on more involved things.
But this is a topic I've been wanting to talk about
for long time and that is computer CRT monitors
and how to record them half decently,
which is something I try to do here on LGR
as often as I can.
I love showing these things,
but they can be an absolute pain to get on video
and not look like total garbage.
It's not just eliminating flicker either,
it's all sorts of other issues
that I've run across over the years
that I've had to come up with workarounds
and mess with my own hardware and software
and other kinds of set ups just to make it work
for what I wanna show.
And hopefully this will be informative to you as well.
I know I get a lot of questions
about how to make these things look okay.
So yeah, that's where we're gonna dive into.
And, yes, I know that there are some other videos on YouTube
that actually do a really good job
of showing how to record CRTs of various types,
but computer CRTs are their own beast.
They're a bit different than what you would experience
on just like a consumer TV set
that's stuck at 60 or 50 hertz or whatever.
And yeah this is a -- ahh, it's a thing man, it's a thing.
Let me preface this by saying that this will assume
that you know a little bit about how cameras and CRTs work
and their relation to each other
with refresh rates and shutter speeds.
We'll get into that starting with the refresh rate,
that's the first main topic I wanna cover,
then moiré patterns and the problems that arise there,
color and contrast issues,
reproducing what you see in your eyes versus the camera,
reflections, dealing with those, and audio because, yes,
CRTs can be a bit loud depending on certain situations.
So, let's dive into it.
[VCR and old TV sounds]
So, starting off with refresh rate.
And this is pretty much the most well-known method
of reducing flicker
and generally making CRT imagery look better,
and that is syncing, or getting as close to syncing,
the refresh rate of the monitor,
the vertical refresh rate that is,
and the shutter speed of your camera.
And in this case here in NTSC-land
that would 60 hertz, or really 59.94, rounded up to 60,
and the shutter speed of 60 on my camera.
And those more or less make it look good.
And if you're in PAL territory,
it'd be of course be 50 hertz and a shutter speed of 50.
And there you go.
You can also cut that in half
and get some interesting results,
sometimes it might be better.
But that really is just the beginning of the story
when it comes to these things.
If this were like a consumer television,
that would pretty much be it
'cause those for the most part just stick
to whatever the cycles are if you're a power source.
But this is...
Yeah computer monitors, man, they're all over the place.
So, for instance, this right here.
This is Johnny Castaway, a screensaver going on Windows 95,
and if I press the buttons of the front here
and go into the menus and look at the status,
you'll see that it's actually running at 60.1 hertz.
But then if we just move the mouse and go back to Windows 95
and check that exact same menu and status again,
you'll see that it's slightly changed.
Now we've got 60 hertz exactly.
And that's just one example of the many different deviations
you're gonna be seeing on computer CRTs,
depending on the software, the hardware,
the operating system, any number of other variables,
the monitor itself.
It's just gonna be all over the place
and that's something to keep in mind,
especially when you're looking for a camera
or just thinking about filming these things regardless
because, yeah, it's just gonna be all over the place.
So, sometimes it will not be anywhere close to 60.
Sometimes it'll be like 70, 72, 75, 85,
depending on what the software demands are,
what your settings are, and all kinds of things. [laughs]
Now, if we're talking just Windows 95
and a lot of the games on there,
typically they will stick
to whatever your control panel settings are.
So if you have it set to like the refresh rate of 60,
they'll try to hold to that,
especially if they're like Direct3D games.
But you go into DOS
and a lot of other software-rendered things like that,
and sometimes it'll be 70 or whatever.
It really helps to have a monitor that shows you
what exactly is going on at any given time.
But you can also just play around
with your camera's shutter settings
and see what gets as close as you possibly can,
but a lot of cameras don't have that kind of fine-tuning.
You can from like 60 shutter speed up to 80,
or maybe there's a 70, but not a 72,
and what are you gonna do then?
Well, that's one reason that I use the cameras that I do
for many reasons.
But, yeah, I've got these Lumix GH5 series cameras
that I use nowadays.
This is a GH5S, I'm filming with a GH5 there,
and these have a feature on there called Synchro Shutter.
I believe on Canons it's called something like Clear Scan.
But it's on a whole bunch of different models of cameras
these days.
But it's a thing that let's you dial in to the 10th,
or really in between that even, the shutter speed,
and you can really dial that in there
to get to like 60.1 or 72 point whatever.
And it's really helpful for things like this
where it is just a 10th off or a 10th a little bit different
otherwise you'll see that rolling line more prominently.
And it's also really useful for systems that aren't PCs,
like that recent Macintosh video that I did,
the 6100 DOS compatible.
Mac OS side of things I think runs at 67 hertz-ish,
66.7 maybe, I don't remember.
Yeah, it's a weird thing and it just looked crazy
if I didn't have that going on.
So Synchro Shutter is something
that I can't really do without
with filming these CRTs these days,
at least if it's outside of the norm of 60 hertz.
Although you can reduce it through software
depending on your editing suite.
I use Adobe Premiere Pro,
and there's some various things
that kind of reduce flickering on there.
But the one that I use the most is actually a plugin.
It's a paid plugin called Flicker Free,
and that does a great job of eliminating CRT flicker.
It was made for reducing flicker in time lapse video
and stuff like that, but works great with CRTs.
And also for older LCDs,
especially those with older CFL
or fluorescent lighting behind them,
the backlighting,
that can flicker regardless
of what the actual refresh rate is on the display itself.
The lighting behind the panel is just different, [laughs]
so that plugin helps.
So the next big area of concern,
and perhaps an even bigger one than refresh rate,
at least for me, is the moiré pattern problem, or "Mwar"
I'm gonna say "moiré" 'cause it sounds less silly.
But anyway, moiré.
It's like an overlaying pattern
that's just conflicting with the camera sensor
and it's caused by really a couple of different things,
usually like the aperture grille,
or the shadow mask, or whatever.
There's like this pattern that overlays on top of the image
and looks terrible.
And if it's ingrained in your footage,
you pretty much just stuck with it.
You can alleviate it a little bit in post,
but for the most part it's just in there.
And I think it looks terrible.
In fact, it bothers me way more than flicker does.
For whatever reason, it just hits my brain a certain way,
I'm like [groans]
And unfortunately, it's ended up in a lot of my shots
because I just wasn't paying enough attention
and was just sort of trusting what I saw visually
or not looking close enough on the viewfinder of my camera
or the screen that was on the back of it
or anything like that.
And it became even more of a problem
when I really upgraded to better 4K cameras a few years ago,
especially the Lumix GH5, the original GH5.
It was really exacerbated on that
because of how crisp and sharp the image was.
While that was great for certain shots,
I mean, it made a lot of things look amazing
when I recorded it,
it made the moiré pattern effect way worse.
And it was really hard to dial that in
and get it correctly, I don't know, appearing correctly.
[laughs] So, what did I do about it?
Well, I tried all sorts of different things
when I had the GH5, and that was...
I mean, we'll see, really the first most obvious thing to do
is just focus the camera a little bit differently.
And that usually means getting it slightly out of focus.
So you can eliminate that by getting that aperture grille
or the shadow mask or whatever is on your CRT
slightly out of focus so that it's not so sharp
on the image on screen.
And that will usually get rid of the effect.
Another thing you can do is just mess
with your aperture settings and make it really wide
so that it's not such a shallow depth of field.
And that way you're not getting weird bits of moiré
in the middle of your image,
usually diagonally if you're shooting at an angle.
And another thing to do is just mess around with the angles.
If you're shooting at an angle like this,
then it can really cause that pattern
to emerge more obviously,
and then it's gonna be stuck in your footage and it sucks.
Shooting directly straight on
will fix that problem a lot of times,
but then you're just stuck with a boring kind of shot
of just looking directly at a CRT.
And a lot of times I don't wanna do that
'cause I'm showing other bits of hardware or me in the shot
or something like that.
So you have to compensate with those other methods
to get it looking half decent
and try to eliminate that pattern.
Even then it's not perfect.
There's almost always gonna be that
with certain cameras, and certain angles and situations
depending on how you're focusing.
Another thing that I've tried
is actually using different diffusion filters,
like this one right here is a Soft/FX 2 something or other.
I've tried probably 10 of these,
I don't like how any of them look.
They do eliminate the pattern or decrease it
on certain sharper cameras like the GH5,
but it makes everything soft.
And I'd rather just have a portion of the image softer
and you can do that in post,
so I just don't even do that.
One thing that made a huge difference though
was completely stopping using this camera anyway.
And I upgraded the GH5S for multiple reasons,
but one of the biggest was because it has
a built-in optical low pass filter in the hardware.
And that means effectively that it is putting,
well, a filter [chuckles] in your footage no matter what.
You can't turn it on or off,
like it's not even on the options of the camera.
I don't even know if they advertise it, but it has it.
And it makes your image slightly softer,
but in a way that I think is pretty smart,
and honestly I think the footage looks way better overall.
That optical low pass, man.
I didn't even know that was a thing
that a lot of cameras were going without these days,
like the original GH5.
So if you can find a camera with an OLPS in there,
it's awesome.
Yeah, that's pretty much that.
Again, you really just kind of mess around with angles
and placement of your camera and lights and everything else
just to make sure that it's all coming together properly.
And also don't rely too much on the smaller screen
on the back of your camera if that's normally what you use.
I've started using an external monitor because of this.
Because sometimes it'll look great in that little screen
on the back of your camera,
and then when you get the footage on your computer,
you're like, "Oh, well this, [laughs]
"there's a moiré pattern there
and it's just ruined the whole shot."
And that's one of those things
because of the nature of the way that pattern works,
when you scale it,
scaling it down maybe there's no pattern at all,
but when you scale it up to like a full-sized image,
then you're gonna be seeing it very obviously.
So, yeah, there's a lot of things to mess around with there,
but holy crap, be aware of it.
I see so many people shoot CRTs
and the moiré is there, and I'm like, "What are you doing?"
Is it just me? [chuckles]
Does this not anyone else?
Anyway, it's a thing, look out for it.
So another thing to consider with CRTs
is the color and contrast settings,
and brightness and things like that.
Just basically making sure that your CRT looks good
in the resulting footage.
And I'm gonna throw in reflections in here as well
because if you have a reflecty, kind of glossy CRT,
that can cause some issues.
And lighting and things like that,
like I have a light right there and over there.
So, that can all wash out the image on the CRT itself.
In fact, if you look at this one
that's behind me right here,
here's how it looks normally
if I just don't touch the footage.
I don't know, it's not as impressive.
The blacks aren't as black as they should be,
and the whites, and the highlights and shadows,
like everything is just kind of wrong.
So I do a lot of adjusting in post just on the CRT itself,
not affecting the entire image.
I mean, I color correct everything, I adjust everything.
But the CRT in particular,
I put like a little mask around that
and feather it and whatnot.
And, again, I use Adobe Premiere Pro,
so I use the Lumetri Color plugin that it comes with.
And I usually do a few different things
depending on the situation,
like just adjusting the contrast, the highlights,
the shadows, sometimes the white and black level,
but usually not.
And then I mess around with the actual saturation values
of individual colors,
especially on a CRT I've noticed that a lot of extremes
for like red, green, and blue, for instance,
just don't look correct, so I bump those up.
And then also lower some to make sure they're not too insane
like the blues, especially on a CRT, can look...
I don't know, everything can have this kind of teal,
light blue look to it.
Like grays look more light blue than they should.
But, yeah, that's all like filters and stuff.
The rest I try to get the best possible image
in camera to begin with.
And that just comes down to a lot of experimentation
with lighting and angles of the room, ambiance itself,
like if you're filming a CRT in a room with sunlight,
that's really easy to screw up. [laughs]
Right now it's dark outside
and I'm just using inside lights,
so I got more control over it that way.
And since we're kind of on this whole topic
of like lighting and making sure the colors
and everything look good contrast,
reflections can do a lot to degrade the CRT's image.
So one thing that I love using
are these little filters here.
This is a circular polarizer.
It is of course going to,
being that it is darkened and such,
you're gonna lose some stops
and your image is gonna be darker.
But as you can see here,
just sort of plopping it on and off the lens,
not only is the CRT looking darker
as far as the black levels and whatnot,
but everything really is, [laughs]
and it eliminates some of the reflections
like around the keyboard area
where you can see the reflection on the bottom of the screen
or my hands or just all sorts of things.
The wood on the table looks better.
It's not picking up so much of that light
bouncing off of the whites on the walls and whatnot.
I just like these polarizers.
I use them for absolutely every shot
that I use or that I make on LGR.
Yeah, I've got a bunch of these.
This is the one in particular.
This is...
Yeah, I'll put whatever it is right along the bottom
of the screen here. [laughs]
It's got kind of a long name.
But, yeah, circular polarizers,
very much recommend those if you have the light for it.
If you don't, you might not wanna bother.
You can make it look good on a CRT without these,
but these definitely help in reducing reflections
and glare and things like that.
Now, it's not gonna get rid of everything of course.
If you've got lights directly on your CRT,
it's just gonna be glare all over the place.
And you're always gonna see yourself in the screen
if you're filming at a certain angle.
Again though, that's just playing around
with like your camera placement
and trying to eliminate that in the scene
and not worrying about it later on
or with filters or anything like that.
Although again, there's settings in Premiere that I use
and adjust the color and everything else.
Also, you can tend to get rid of some of those reflections
if you're decreasing the highlights and things like that.
You just don't want to ruin the CRT image
or make it look unnatural or anything,
I mean, unless you want to, but I don't.
So, the final thing I wanna touch on here,
or at least for this video about recording CRTs,
is the audio side of things.
And, yeah, that is something to consider in your recordings.
Even if you can't hear it yourself,
which is very much possible
depending on your hearing situation.
A lot of people start to not be able
to hear these really high-pitched frequencies like this,
but, yeah, certain CRTs,
especially like consumer television sets and older ones,
like this one right here is an IBM-154,
that has a horizontal refresh of around 15 kilohertz,
it's like 15.7 I think is the frequency range,
and that actually equates to some audio feedback.
Actually, if you listen to this,
right here I've had it filtered out
for the rest of the video, now I don't.
[high-pitched frequency]
Yeah, [chuckles] let's get rid of that now.
Typically, I just put this audio filter
on every single one of my videos that have a CRT
in this kind of range of horizontal refresh like that
around 15.7 kilohertz.
And that just involves lowering something
in like a graphic equalizer or a notch filter
or whatever is going to get rid of that range of audio
so that you don't hear it.
Sometimes I add a couple of passes within Premiere
just to make sure that it's really gone
'cause I don't trust my own hearing,
so I make sure to look at the levels and stuff
on the software.
Yeah, another thing to consider is that other CRTs,
like for instance this one right here,
makes another sound and that has to do
with the components in there actually aging.
Usually it's around the flyback area.
You've got like ceramic capacitors
and ferrite transformer cores
and all sorts of weird things in there
that are going bad or slightly off,
or something is just making a sound.
And it's a little bit different from that audio whine
that is just inherent to the horizontal refresh
of these older ones like this or just regular TV sets.
So yeah, that's something to keep in mind as well.
Sometimes I forget about that,
and then in the recording I'm like [yells frustratedly]
that noise is overwhelming.
But anyway, so those are two different kind of sounds
that I really listen out for with CRTs
when I'm going through the footage.
And something else to keep in mind is that,
like the other CRTs that I was showing earlier,
those have a horizontal refresh of around 30 kilohertz.
That is typically not audible.
In fact, I don't know anybody can hear that.
You don't have to bother with any kind of getting rid
of the high-pitched whine in the footage that way.
So audio, it really is an important aspect.
Even if you can't hear it yourself,
it's just one of those things that absolutely sucks.
You go through all this pain
of getting this nice CRT footage and you put it on YouTube
and then you forget about the audio.
And somebody's inevitably like,
"I can't watch this video because it's killing my ears
"and it hurts." [laughs]
So yeah, just something to keep in mind,
as with all these other things.
All righty, well that's about it for this topic
on this video anyway.
Of course with things like this
there are always more ideas and solutions to discuss,
and I'm sure you've got some of your own,
if you had any experience with this kind of thing.
If so, let me know in the comments
'cause really half the reason I wanted to make this video
is not only to inform, but to learn myself.
And maybe we can get a discussion going
and come up with some new things.
I mean, for instance, like different lenses,
and focal lengths,
and situations that can change on the camera itself
can change the result on the CRT,
especially with a moiré pattern problem and whatnot.
And there's also things like etchings and anti-glare filters
and things on the front of certain CRTs,
or that you can put on there yourself
that provide interesting results,
or you can even start adjusting the options on the CRT
in terms of the brightness and contrast and color
to help it look a little more accurate to what your eyes see
in the resulting video once you've recorded it.
Not have to mess around with software and filters
in post so much.
There's just all sorts of things.
I mean, not even mentioning stuff
like the whole genlock idea,
and other scalers and hardware adapters and solutions
to take one frame rate, or refresh rate,
and adjust it to something else.
And yeah, man, it's a pretty endless topic,
so let me know your thoughts
and, again, any of your experiences in the comments.
And I hope that you enjoyed this
and maybe found it a bit informative as well.
[relaxing jazz music]
And if you liked what you saw then awesome.
Perhaps you'd like to check out some of my other videos here
on the channel.
I've got new stuff going up every week here in LGR
and all kinds of topics,
typically retro computer hardware and software related.
But, yeah, whatever the case may be though,
thank you very much for watching.