One of the biggest challenges in documenting my projects is actually filming the images on the TV screen. If you’re like me and grew up watching tube TVs but haven’t powered one on is a while, your eyes are in for a jolt. They are brighter that you might remember! On black-and-white sets in particular, the white is almost like neon. The electric color of cathode ray tubes is also notoriously difficult to reproduce accurately in video because cameras sometimes struggle to balance the intense brightness with other objects in the room.
To get accurate color and exposure with vintage TVs, I use a combination of techniques. While every situation is different, there are a few common tricks that I use to make the video that I capture appear as closely as possible to what I’m seeing in-person as I film it.
Disclaimer: These are techniques that I’ve learned through trial-and-error. I’m not an expert photographer or any sort of technician, so I can only pass on what I’ve learned through my own experiences.
In the example above, I’ve filmed a black-and-white TV with an iPhone and my digital camera, simultaneously. The video from the raw iPhone capture doesn’t have too much banding but the color gradations appear blown out with large areas of digital artifacting. My Canon camera allows for more flexibility over frame rate and having a detachable lens also lets me use lens filters. More on filters later, but first here are some TV and camera settings that can help improve the chances of capturing a quality image:
I recommend against using a smart phone to capture CRT video. Phones often use advanced realtime exposure adjustments and post-processing which can make for unpredictable video when filming an old TV. This might result in video where the entire room around the television appears to become brighter or darker while the TV plays as the phone attempts to adjust exposure on the fly. Also, unless the phone allows for accurate frame-rate adjustment, there will likely be lines crawling across the screen of the TV in the finished video. Neither of these things are ideal when trying to accurately reproduce video from a TV screen, so save the phone for posting the finished file to Instagram.
Currently, I use a Canon EOS M6 MkII digital camera. Any camera with manual control over video settings like frame rate and exposure will probably work and it would be even better if the camera can swap lenses and/or use filters.
I have a running list of the gear that I use for my projects (including cameras, filters, and lighting) here on Notion.
Most old televisions have a Brightness/Contrast knob on the front or back of the set. Some TVs from the 1980s and 90s have those settings buried in the on-screen menu system. It’s a good idea to adjust the brightness and contrast with the camera on so that you can compare how the CRT looks through the lens of the camera versus with your eyes. In my experiments, I usually dial the brightness way back and sometime lessen the contrast at the same time. Often, the image looks faded or dim to my eyes but it looks great on the camera’s display.
If adjusting the brightness and contrast on the television isn’t enough, sometimes it’s possible to change the opacity of the video when editing on a computer. With this option, it’s a good idea to make sure that the layer below the video is black so that the video layer fades into black a little and dims the resulting image sent to the television.
If your digital camera has an HDR (High Dynamic Range) mode, test it out with a moving image on your CRT. My Canon sometimes produces decent results in its default HDR video mode if the room is evenly lit. If there are problems with the video in HDR, skip it and head straight into manual mode, if possible. In manual mode, you’ll want to take a look at frame rate (FPS) and the Exposure and Aperture settings.
Tube TVs work by projecting a single line of light across the entire height of the screen, line by line. It does this so fast that we perceive the finished image as one full frame of video. While our eyes can’t see the movement of the line of light, cameras do see it and it sometimes appears in video as a dark band moving down the screen. To compensate for this, it helps if the camera can synchronize with that movement. Changing the frame rate helps with this. A frame rate of 30fps (frames per second) or 60fps will often solve the banding issue on most cameras. If it’s possible to adjust the frame-per-second at a more granular level (29.96fps, etc) that might work even better. With analog televisions, it’s difficult to prescribe an exact FPS, but I’ve found that 60fps worst best in my experiments and sometimes 30fps is just fine too. Anything lower than 30fps will likely result in significant banding and/or flickering.