Sales and Rentals

  1. New to Our Catalog
  2. Audio
  3. Cameras
  4. Decks and Storage
  5. Display
  6. HD Gear
  7. Lenses
  8. Lighting and Grip
  9. Matteboxes and Filters
  10. Non-Linear Editing
  11. PAL Equipment
  12. Power
  13. Printers
  14. Production Gear
  15. Routers and Servers
  16. Used Equipment for Sale
Print this Page

Tech Tips:

How to Set Up a Monitor

By Rule Broadcast Systems

Upon return, all monitors at Rule are cleaned and setup in our shop before going back out on jobs ensuring a consistent “look” for our customers.

The tools we use include a color sync generator, a degausser and a high tech bottle of Windex.!

If you would like to setup a monitor yourself, first start by feeding your monitor SMPTE color bars from a signal generator, a live camera sending bars, or from a test videotape with bars recorded. It might be handy to carry a small color bars chart in your grip kit. I still have mine from Profax (remember them?).

Locate the BLUE ONLY button on our professional PVM or BVM series monitors or if you’re working with an older monitor, switch off the red and green color switches. Your image will either be different shades of blue or simply gray.

The object is to make the color and brightness of the alternating vertical bars match with the small rectangular bars underneath them. By adjusting the PHASE and CHROMA controls on the monitor, try to get them to match as closely as possible. Once adjusted, turn the red and green bars back on or simply depress the BLUE ONLY button again.

To adjust BRIGHTNESS, locate the sixth bar from the left (red) and notice the three narrow vertical bars underneath called pluge, which are shades of dark gray. If these bars are not visible, simply turn the BRIGHNESS control up until they can be seen. Then, reduce the BRIGHTNESS setting slowly until the middle gray bar just barely disappears from the screen but the right hand bar is just barely visible.

Locate the CONTRAST control and adjust it until the white reference square in the lower left is bright enough “to appear white”; almost all the way up. If the dark squares on either side appears to “glow”, it’s up too high.

If you have a degausser, take off your wristwatch (to avoid magnetic exposure to that Rolex) and rotate the coil clockwise around the screen. While rotating, pull the coil away from the screen until the “psychedelic” pattern disappears. Monitors often have a built in Degauss button which when depressed gives you a similar, temporary “psychedelic” pattern.

Turn your monitor off and clean the screen with Windex or a comparable alcohol based cleaner. You are now ready to take on whatever challenge awaits you with a clean and properly setup monitor.