CompuServe Messages

Ah yes. The client who brings a pantone swatch to the video editing room. There was a article I read in a video trade mag titled "Clients from Hell" There was one example of a client who was not satisfied with the color of their logo. They held up the swatch to every monitor in the facility and weren't satisfied. Eventually they ended back at the edit room they started in. The editor claimed to have made an adjustment to the color (in actuallity had done nothing). And they were completely satisfied. You're right, black is the best color to reduce chroma crawl. Highly saturated colors and VHS don't mix well. Not only will it crawl, but you'll get ugly color shifting (where the color info blurs). First, I would try to convince the client that you know what you are talking about. Second, if that fails. You could always crank up the saturation on the monitor your showing it to them on. It's better than having them come back after running 2000 dubs of the show, and complaining that the image looks fuzzy. One last thought is that you could play with different background colors. It won't reduce the chroma crawl, but certain background colors might make the blue and green appear to be more saturated.