Why Yellow Is So Common for TV Graphics
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- čas přidán 14. 10. 2024
- Yellow! It's everywhere especially in television graphics. But why? Well let's seriously overthink it and explore some color theory concepts on why this color is the king of graphics color.
#ColorTheory #Filmmaking #ClassicTelevision
I was an engineer in the TV broadcast business from 1974-2014. White text graphics were just transitioning to yellow and gold then. Adding just a little red (or clockwise on phase) mad it gold, which is what we used. ABC Sports used to push it even further to almost orange on their texts. When the Chyron started getting widespread use in the 80’s then cyan text and red lines in addition to the gold text became popular for text. In the 90’s pastels became big. Geometric shapes, with cyan, magenta, turquoise and blues were everywhere.
Now that we are in HD 1080, the lettering has become smaller skinnier (lighter) and pure white all the time to take advantage of the extra definition. Rarely see anything other than white now.
TV engineer here. Everything you stated is spot on... and not really overthinking it. Trust me. Plus, there was another influence on why graphic are in color: when color TV was new, and you just bought a a new color TV on credit, and the peacock just told you this show is in Living Color... by golly those opening titles better be in color. Hence, the graphics for BONANZA are golden yellow. I always thought of it as Pacific Title Yellow, but I think Cable Yellow is even better.
Sometimes I wonder if Star Trek existed to sell colour TVs. 😁
That's why you had that voice announcer say "In color!" So the people watching on black and white knew they were missing out! :P
@@crimzongaming5470 In part, it was... Specifically RCA color TVs. RCA owned NBC at the time. Legend has it that in the early days of Trek, TV stations would receive calls from worried viewers about the color. Spock looked green. Yes, he did. He's supposed to. Spock is a Vulcan with green blood. The makeup artists used green tint on his face.
In the late '60s, I wonder if yellow was also used to show off that the show was in color while still having a high luminance, so that the text was legible for people who still only had black & white TVs.
I think it likely. Plus there's a bandwagon effect. Some people will like to use yellow because lots of other people are using yellow. Other people will want to avoid yellow because lots of people are using yellow. People are delightfully complex.
@@jonathanguthrie9368 Indeed!
Bingo!
Might have been something to do with minimizong herringbone shimmer from the colour subcarrier on B+W sets too.
You're correct; you are overthinking it. What you call "cable yellow" is (or was) originally ABC Sports Gold. Back in the days before electronic character generators, graphics were created by printing white letters on black art cards and shooting them with a TV camera, or more often by printing black letters on white cards, photographing them on 35mm film and mounting the negatives as slides and projecting the slides on a telecine. A graphics PA, Roger Goodman, came up with the idea of colorizing the slides by adding an amber gel in the light path. Roger eventually rose to become creative director of both ABC News and ABC Sports.
In later years, when character generators were still primarily black and white only, the graphics were keyed into the program material by using the background generator in the production switcher to create a flat-field foreground signal that was the same color gold. That color was not originally specified in RGB values; it was specified as a specific hue at a specific saturation and luminance. The hue was 157 degrees, or 33 degrees up from burst, which not coincidentally is the top of the 10 degree box around yellow on a vectorscope. The luminance value is 50 IRE, and the magnitude of the color is 80 IRE, so the envelope of the subcarrier extends from 10 to 90 IRE. This assumes you are working i NTSC analog composite and your signals have 7.5 IRE setup. Once we got color character generators, this color was generated by the character generator.
The choice of color, particularly the luminance and saturation, was indeed heavily influenced by the technical limitations of analog NTSC television. Saturated colors, particularly dark ones, could cause breakup in microwave links and videotape recorders, while overly saturated light colors such as yellow and cyan could cause television receivers to buzz horribly. Limiting the extent of the subcarrier to between 10 and 90 IRE eliminated the potential for either problem, while producing a very saturated gold, much more striking even than the yellow of typical color bars, such as SMPTE color bars.
I hope the history lesson helps. I lived through the transition from all-analog to digital production and broadcast starting in 1975 and I had to deal with implementing a lot of this technology.
Love it! But I don't think the history contradicts my overthinking the subject... It's a great way to see how it was accomplished.
@@FilmmakerIQ Fair enough. I am going to call you out on your statement at 11:45, though, regarding the BT 601 luminance equation. The RGB values that are the input to this equation are not linear; they have had the nonlinear optoelectronic transfer function, commonly called gamma, applied. The same is true for HD signals, though they have a different OETF and matrix equation as specified in BT 709. And please don’t get me started on the differences between YUV, YCbCr and YPbPr (yes, I know I wrote them incorrectly, but I can’t do subscripts in this text).
I know they're not linear but it doesn't necessarily negate the point being made...
Interesting observation. Even more interesting is that Sharp introduced a fourth subpixel, yellow, in their Aquos television designs. They claimed it was added to increase the range of displayable colors. Probably fodder for another video? Anyway, really enjoyed this vid.
Interestingly enough, in 1954 Gibson introduced its "Les Paul Junior" model in "TV Yellow" color, to avoid appearing exaggeratedly bright, haloed, or fuzzy under the very bright, almost daytime studio lighting levels.
Just want to say thank you very much for this priceless deep info. Now i know i need to change all my thumbnails. Thanks.
Really thorough video essay. This motion graphics artist approves
Didn't watch the rest of the video yet but wanted to comment before I forgot. But when i was volunteering at a local access TV station in 2011 and such (it was still SD) they said it was because it bled a lot less than the other colours. Like red on an SD tv with the SD broadcast just fell apart SOOO fast. I produced a show and for the intro I had that like moving paint dripping and being brushed graphic that was a default in Motion, or Final Cut or whatever. I picked red and whenever a producer would see if they were like "You sure you want red?" and I was like "Yeah, red is cool" and they'd always be like "Okay" and walk away but no one explained it to me. Then i watched it back on my friends small tv when it aired and I could read a god damn thing. The next time I was in the station manager was like "Yeah, everyone asking should have told you to not do red, but it's because it bleeds too much on highly compressed SD broadcast, especially if they have an old tube tv.
Yup... which is sort of why I love red so much. Because when I was starting out, I was starved of it.
@@FilmmakerIQ Oh, man, I'm still going through the damage of it, though. I still vividly remember the day one of our anchors was wearing red and the other was wearing houndstooth.
MPEG video codecs also *murder* red.
Saturated reds and blues were especially bad but pure white text could cause problems too. White text (usually on a dark background) sometimes made weird audio buzzes. An engineer told me it would not happen if the video level was properly set but it was pretty common.
@@mdwyerfoo Just reading the word "houndstooth" gives me headaches.
Wow, this is the second time I find an explanation to my question on your channel (First time it was with one frame trick, when I felt like video going before sound looks better and you explained this, mentioning that youtube messes the sound a little too). The same with yellow. I noticed that yellow titles were used in many Tarantino films. Also now almost every Tik Tok video or CZcams Shorts has yellow captions. Also emojis are usually yellow 🙂. I tried experimenting with different colors for Tik Tok (CZcams Shorts) captions just like you showed in the video and also always came back to yellow-orange. It looks like people went through all the problems I go through long time ago. I just didn't know about it. Thanks for educating and thanks for the video.
The psychology of color themes is fascinating! I'd love to see your take on that.
Great thoughts! I would also think from a compositing perspective: Cyan and Magenta wouldn't have very good contrast against sky, greenery, or skin tones; so that golden yellow really is a good all-around winner.
This was my initial thought, too. It's a "natural" color, but most video isn't going to contain and overwhelming majority of highly saturated yellow, so it's going to be most legible over any given video played underneath it.
Contrast that (no pun intended) to the examples of white titles, and any bright skies behind the titles tended to blend with the text.
When you consider this, along with its B&W proximity to white, and the fact that early titlers were going to have limited color mixing capabilities, then yellow is almost the _only_ valid generic option.
Dear John, thank you for all your tireless work. Your channel is brilliant! Please don't stop or be discouraged by the low click rate. It's not your fault. It's the audience. There is no hope for this world. So please carry on working. Your channel is super important for all future filmmaker generations. It's a piece of moviemakinghistory.
It should be noted that the color yellow was a large part of ABC's branding between the late 1970s through to the early 2000s. ABC literally had a set of promos set to the tune of Coldplay's "Yellow" in 2000 during their "TV is Good" campaign --- and even released an "ABC Collector's Edition" of Coldplay's album. A single network accounted for as much as an entire third of television programming before cable, so it stands to reason that so many of the classic shows we remember would be branded similarly --- and a good portion of those sitcoms which had those bright yellow titles were, in fact, ABC sitcoms.
I also noticed that British television idents (from the beginning of color(u)r to about the early 80s) tended to use yellow graphics on a blue background. Plain backgrounds were very frequently blue.
Good point. I also noticed that when they did start using blue as a graphic color, it would be over white (The Home Improvement and Boy Meets World examples in my vid)... same concept as yellow on black but in reverse.
This video taught me so much while answering a question I never knew I had. I think I'm in love. 💛
In web design, we have the opposite color preference, since we're usually working with white background yellow is the most useless text color, and green is the second most useless.
There's a reason why blue and purple is the default link colors; since those are the only colors that has both good brightness contrast with white and still is obviously a color different from black. Trying to use green, orange or yellow for link colors its either too bright to read or you have to make it so dark that it's impossible to tell it apart from the black non-link text.
Simple thoughts like this with the deeper dive, truly open the mind to producing better work.
Your insight also explains why even the news here in the UK (BBC) can get away with the headache inducing "fear red" we now have.
No. Not because they were starved in the past! But because they can. The justification is a different matter entirely.
The too many cooks addition was a nice little touch!
SO NERDY, I love it. I've learned a lot from your channel over the years, and you don't stop surprising me!
This is one of my favorite channels and this is an example why. I hope you won't mind a very minor quibble: Contrary to popular belief, infrared light is not "heat." Or rather, any type of light, from radio to gamma rays, can carry radiant heat, so there's nothing special about infrared in this respect. For example, we cook with everything from microwaves to visible light. (Look up Flashbake Ovens, often used in restaurants.) The notion that infrared light is particularly associated with heat comes from the fact that a blackbody radiator at room temperature (around 300 kelvins) peaks at a wavelength of around 10 micrometers, which of course is in the infrared range.
Best explanation ever. Showing to my staff who do not understand why I often counsel yellow. You are a very good storyteller of technical ideas.
I really like the "cable yellow" color, that kind of golden yellow. Looks really good and pleasing. I HATE, however, that super-bright canary yellow or neon yellow. I had a client insist on that for a background, and while I can see that kind of thing being used for either children's programming or some hip music show or video or something, it was totally inappropriate for the project I was working on. Those are the kinds of things that almost make me want to quit the industry, when you have clients make you make something that looks like crap. Thankfully, the client toned it down and had me use blurred photos of the building where the subject matter takes place. Still kind of cheesy, but far better than what the client originally wanted.
Once I saw the title of this video I knew or at least could quite confidently assume almost everything you said; but I still watched the whole thing and loved it!
FYI, the origin of the name of 'The Matrix' is well-known. The concept of the movie is largely borrowed from a 70s Doctor Who story called The Deadly Assassin. In it the Doctor enters 'the Matrix' which is a matrix of dead Timelord's minds. It's really stunning to see how much was borrowed, such as the lying on a bench to get pugged in to the Matrix, an Agent Smith-like villain, a "There is no spoon" moment (the Doctor saying "I deny this reality") and the eventual learning to see the underlying structure of the Matrix at the end (Neo sees the falling code, the Doctor sees fractal-like patterns). It's amazing how much was just blatantly copied from Doctor Who. Still I love both versions.
FYI, I know you were kidding, but I figured it was an opportunity to drop some trivia.
It's not a new idea, in the P K Dick book 'do androids dream of electric sheep' (aka blade runner), a good part of the book talks about a recreation device that was a vary much like the matrix.
A kind of device that lets you plug in and share a collective consensuses, it was used to unfy the population or pacify them.
Then we get william gibson's books with a cyber punk version, a more expanded version of the same idea, plugging in to the computers.
Also the AI stuff is mostly from william gibson, P K Dick was more in to aliens than AI (well mostly it was the state over aliens), it was a different time.
Later anime kind of coped a lot from SIFI books, we got ghost in a shell that seems to follow P K Dick and william gibson's ideas with a few twists from European thinkers and maybe some blade runner tossed in to with some of japans culture (maybe some Americana 40/50/60's stuff from post war influence as well).
Im sure there's some older SIFI books that cover it to.
the story is that the pitch for the film was just showing Ghost in a Shell to the suites and saying 'lets make this', a bunch of sequences in the film are direct copies from the anime.
Also im ignoring the samurai to cowboy to anime stuff in film history & HK cinema to Holywood migration of the early 90's? or so, the links are there too.
Do want to point out that im sure your right too, the matrix relay did just copy everything and re package it.
But relay films have been doing that for a long time so ..
Physics, optics, analog television chroma encoding, and Doctor Who! You can't beat this with a stick.
@@liaminwales I'm not saying the Matrix is bad or wrong. I love that film, it's iconic. But The Deadly Assassin pre-dates all the other references people have pointed out. And to be clear, this is not a passing resemblance to virtual reality in general. This is literally a virtual reality environment called 'The Matrix' and there are some iconic moments that are shockingly identical (see my post above). If you watch the episode you will see what I mean, it's uncanny.
@@TheHandOfFear O im sure your right
I just wanted to point out that there's older stuff in books that was clearly stolen and maybe add some extra history context.
Im in the UK and B&W Dr who is a soft spot for me, used to watch it as a kid on Tv.
The fights where choreographed by people who left HK cinema. (Yuen Woo-ping - he has a wiki page)
A lot of the main ideas and story is from Books (im sure there's more than i listed)
A lot of the shots where taken from Ghost in a shell. lots of stuff about that online czcams.com/video/7q4L4PCo6kA/video.html nice comparison video
And im sure a lot was taken from that Dr who epp, ill give it a go.
I do suspect Dr who may have coped the old SIFI books that covered the subject, that is normal that idea are covered in books and later taken in to media like TV/Film.
& im not making any judgment calls on if it's good or bad, it's fairly normal than people re use ideas.
just looked it up and in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? there's something called a 'empathy boxe' that's a lot like the shared connection of the matrix, in different books the same idea is used a few times in new ways.
'Time Out of Joint' also cover's a lot of the same ideas
I recently read on kickassfacts that school buses are painted yellow because human brain recognizes that the fastest
Man I love this channel. This guy has some of the best information.
My thanks to you Alice, for going down the rabbit hole, and taking us along for the ride!
I remember thinking that colour temperature might have something to do with Blackbody radiation but I never managed to look it up. Thanks for showing (at least some of) the science behind it!
I do enjoy the chatty streams. But these are the videos I love just random information that's not really useful but not useless either
The best color that Gibson Les Paul Jr.'s come in is called 'TV Yellow' and it's that lovely 'off' yellow at 7:34. Now I know the etymology.
I love this channel haha
I ran across this doing the research - it was called TV yellow because white was too bright for televisions :)
I swear I've made my credits all yellow for years based on my broadcaster sitting right by the editing comp.
Got me nostalgic for some of those classic, yellow-worded sitcoms :)
In CMYK, yellow against black provides even better contrast than white against black. This is why yellow highlighters make black text pop more than unhighlighted text.
One thing I want to know is why so many game shows lately, from Jeopardy! to Millionaire to The Chase to The Weakest Link to Master Minds to University Challenge, have blue sets.
When the Alex Trebek version of Jeopardy! debuted, the set was red. XD
@@fnjesusfreak Yes, this is why I said "lately".
@@dogvom Still, it has been blue for decades. It was only red, iirc, for a few years.
I would have to respectfully disagree. Yellow against black can't have more contrast than white against black, as white has more luminance obviously. It's just that, to stand out when you have all that black text on white paper, if you had white highlighter it wouldn't show. Yellow highlighter just makes a way to stand out *against the white paper* while still providing contrast with the black text to be readable.
I used to use this colour for subtitles because I found it much more legible than white. I'd never heard it called 'cable yellow' before. Great video.
Oh man... When I was young the yellow Simpsons used to annoy me. 30 years ago... Finally an answer... Thanks to butterfinger I now love the yellow. Not to mention it's a great show.
Before watching the video I just thought that was because most footage tend towards blue (not only the sky, but maybe even the way cameras work) therefore you'd go for the opposite color. While your explanation makes much more sense, I still think it may have to do with that too. Great vid!
I depends on what you're shooting - outdoors with blue sky most definitely. But indoors and on set there is a tendency to shoot "warm" which will tend towards more yellow and orange.
"Sometimes a boy just wants to look his yellowest." -Bart Simpson
Great line!
I can confirm that yellow is one if the easiest colors to see with the human eye. I know someone who works in authorizing anime DVDs/Blu-rays. And being a product of Japan, there's going to be subtitles, before blu-ray, yellow was the easier color to not only see, but when compressed to a digital format, it was easier to see them any other color with a moving background.
it's been some years that, for reasons that I don't know, Brazil started adopting white subs for movies on theaters and I always hated it. When there was a white background, like a snowy scene, it was impossible to read. Fortunately I became fluent on english and don't need to worry anymore, but I imagine that people who like subbed movies still suffer. Yellow subs were far better.
@@bruno_jordani I think here in the US, Das Boot had a VHS release with terrible tiny blue subtitles.
In Australia there's a TV station called SBS that is renowned for showing foreign films and TV shows and anime. Growing up with the golden subtitles of SBS was something I didn't appreciate until the time of streaming. White subtitles are fine, but they are not 'warm', they don't feel like part of the movie. For whatever reason (nostalgia bias for sure is a factor) yellow subtitles in that golden 'cable yellow' just feel less intrusive than black and white subtitles. Maybe it's because black and white subtitles are the standard and some streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime clearly don't have a proofreader, so they seem subpar to the always immaculate SBS golden subtitles/translations. This video was great for explaining why that SBS channel had its distinct yellow subtitles, but it makes me yearn for that textual warmth again. I just know watching something like Parasite with yellow subtitles would feel less 'translated' than with white subtitles. I totally get all the points this video makes as to why yellow is a solid choice, but for me it absolutely could be a cultural thing as all Australians know yellow subtitles = SBS and SBS = quality weirdo shit.
I think I gonna use more yellow in thumbnails! Thanks John! :)
Yellow and red are are the frequency used alarm colours in nature. Always nice if a critter advertises it is poisonous or venomous.
When I was a producer, editors always wanted to use Yelllow. I demanded white. They looked confused, but my graphics looked so much better than standard,Yellow type with Blue background. Yellow always sucked, and tended to have more color crawl. Especially when dubbed.
Yellow and magenta pushes were pretty common all the way to the 2000s. In the Full HD era though, it seems that teal and orange became the new "plague", affecting not only color grading choices in New films, but also imposing those choices in restorations of many classic films! It's not hard to find many people online in video forums complaining about how horrible modern color grading often is in Hollywood blockbusters, and that the teal push is one of the major problems, like what they also call the piss-yellow. There's a funny article from 2010 called "Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness", but the issue is still not gone, see what Cameron did to The Abyss in the new remaster, bathing it in teal (though that's the least of the problems in Cameron's remasters...)
As an editor, when struggling to figure out what color scheme to go with (and not having an art department to help me, as I work in a small shop), I tried many different color fonts and I would always go "ewww" without knowing why. So I would almost always gravitate to yellow or white fonts. And yet it was never boring (to me at least). There's maybe one exception where I had a brownish-yellow mix of motion graphics for a background, and I chose a dark red serif font, and it totally worked for that instance.
I love this! One of my new favorite music video directors Orie Mcginuess uses this yellow style text in his editing. I noticed it had a good feel to it, but this breaks it down so wonderfully! 🤘
Great video, as always. Your conclusions seem logical!
I still use bright golden yellow for web page designing as well as video editing, both for showing the very important texts. It is just catchy.
But to make it modern I use cyan, with red, as red on modern devices will not bleed. Hey... look at my profile photo! Its color palette now makes sense for y'all. :)
Good stuff. Any Broadcast engineers can probably explain the science but all the US Shows I worked on (Mostly networks) had a specific yellow for titles. I do know that Red was not liked as peak red caused distortion when material was played out by Satellite to the network. As a poster already stated Chyron brought about a lot more refinement. It became much easier to use different fonts and drop shadows for increased legibility. I always thought it was yellow as you could have quite a significant phase error and it did not look too bad subjectively but that is probably just a vain hope to find artistic justification for technical requirements....
Today when I'm editing a video with quick informational text titles that pop up and disappear, I often try a range of colors because I want to be interesting and creative... But invariably I will come back to either white or yellow, usually with a shadow or black stroke. Because legibility. If I do go with a red or blue I'll try keeping it on the screen longer to allow time to read it... It's interesting to think of all the reasons why. It's one thing to think "it was just a technical limitation to begin with" but then to ask why, at the beginning, were those technical limitations chosen or allowed. Thanks for providing the answers to these!
IMHO, red is a terrible color for text. Some people with red/green color blindness (no matter how mild) have a very hard time reading red on top of many backgrounds, even if they actually see red on black quite well. Yellow is a MUCH better text color.
Yellow is more visible than white against many backdrops. I remember seeing the film Tora Tora Tora during its initial theatrical run. The Japanese dialog was subtitled in English in white lettering, often across the bright white naval uniforms. It was essentially invisible except at the margins where it would be against the ship gray, and I had no idea what they were saying. A couple decades later, I see it on video and the subtitles were yellow and legible. Much better.
IN the mid1970's a school group project showed that yellow chalk was clearer than white and the UK changed all schools to yellow chalk
Been subbed for years now, love your videos still just as much when I first discovered your channel John.
I remember the red bleed problem on old CRT TVs, I remember watching Star Trek TNG in the '90s and sometimes Picard's nice red uniform was just a blurry mess!
I always wondered why I would subconsciously gravitate towards that exact shade off yellow when doing titles, so this is a great explanation. For an encore, why would you say did a lot of older commercials ending with contact info and 1-800 numbers, along with that big booming voice encouraging you to send check or money order for rush delivery, use blue backgrounds? Could it be that the bold yellow phone number was nicely complimentary to the blue background?
I also noticed some British TV idents from the 70s and early 80s used yellow text with a blue background (hence my other comment). I think blue was chosen because it looks darker to the eyes than other colors, a sort of "one step above black" which aligns with the video's explaination.
@@doctordothraki4378 Ah yes, didn't notice the comment so please excuse me. Those old British idents and that BBC school clock with the dots are so nostalgic, but I would imagine watching them in the dark would have be a bit scary if they were on black instead of blue.
Yep - Blue is a weak color and a direct complement of Yellow - very safe and easy color scheme that's easy on the eyes while also being colorful!
Heh. For a while, I thought it was a legal requirement that the "CALL NOW!" screen had to be blue. I think it just sort of got picked up into the visual language of television, and we've been conditioned to expect it, now.
Talking about it has made me sort of nostalgic for them, actually...
The one thing I wondered is why so many logos for British TV used yellow and/or white on blue. Most of the TV companies back then used blue backgrounds and I always wondered why.
Taxi had yellow titles because you know....NY cabs, but now the rest all make sense!
One thing I noticed when watching shows on the PC was that when I chose yellow subtitles they stood out better with any background color. While white is the least noticeable, which was great when I started depending less on the subtitles (my theory is that's why most movie theaters in Brazil use pure white without strokes, so it doesn't bother people who understand english).
Thank you for answering this question!
Funny, or maybe not so, but in watercolor, I put down a wash of Naples Yellow on the paper, first. Since watercolor is transparent, the next colors I put down are more "alive" because the warmth comes through. It's a pale yellow, not the saturated kind in TV graphics, yet there is a warm glow that comes through even dark colors.
Neat idea!
Red bleeding! I hated editing and making copies on 3/4" Umatic where by the time the video aired, the lips would be totally separate from the red in the lipstick!
Great stuff John, you even found time to mention thermodynamics! Now I’m In need for a @Filmmaker IQ video about the difficulties of blue as discussed on Rae Dizzel’s video or Christopher Moore’s Sacré Bleu
Really valuable and painless. Thanks!
I recall seeing an article about how to make presentation graphics during the days when the software was Harvard Graphics and the hardware was 35mm slides. They said, in short: Text is yellow, background is blue. That's it. That's the whole rule.
I wonder if this doesn't hold somewhat outside of the RGB CRT gamut, though. Is it any coincidence that Disney's "Go Away Green" is, well, green?
I think yellow also had good natural contrast against most of the footage shows used to use for intros.
There would be commonly be whites in the background, blues, reds, browns but rarely yellows that would clash.
Though they probably avoided yellows intentionally for all the reasons you described.
It's about 50/50 between white and yellow titles if you start going through them all one by one.
It's the best highlighter color, too!
I think it's interesting to consider the backgrounds that yellow contrasts so well with. We generally fill our screens with cooler, more somber tones, apparently, as they suit our popular culture. Or we don't make sitcoms set in the desert?
A lot of sitcoms I had watched were actually very warm palettes. But it's not really the color so much as it is the luminance.
Of course you're overthinking it, John. That's what people like us do. 😁
What do you mean by "overthink?"
@@tomforsythe7024 What do you mean by 'What do you mean by "overthink?"'?
Yellow also sends out as the coulour with the brightest saturation peak according to Itten. Making other coulour as bright as yellow will make it almost white.
I don't know if the psychological explanation here best explains why yellow is so much more common than lightened shades of cyan or pink. I think it's more to do that yellow is perceived to be at full saturation at that luminosity, while the others look pale or washed-out by comparison. This gives more "chroma contrast", for lack of a better term, and more importantly - yellow looks *strong.* And that's good for making bold announcements (like the title of your project).
Oh, and fantastic video as always.
Another great video, John.
Love nerdy colour-theory detail
That was oddly fascinating. 🧠✌️🎩🎩🎩 Thanks.
John, this was great. You did leave out one other technical item which might have influenced this, which is composite color. As you know, NTSC encoded the color using the chroma subcarrier on the luma signal. As result of this was the "chroma crawl" that could occur on the edges of saturated colors. Could it have contributed to the choice of yellow?
I'm a big fan of blue titles for my own doodles but now that you mention it I always end up with a yellow stroke to make it legible.
Great analysis!!
This was really great! definitely a rabbit hole I'll dive into
I always enjoy your in-depth videos, John. Question, have you ever had trouble with "Fair Use" of copyrighted material on CZcams? Like the movies and TV shows you routinely use as examples? Thanks and keep up the great work!
Yes occasionally but not in a long while... I've kind of figured out the limit to what you can use
@@FilmmakerIQ Thanks!
@@FilmmakerIQ they should thank you for publicizing them, for waking them up from a slumber of twenty to thirty years. They were important shows.
Very cool! Good episode! Thanks!
Old TV tubes can have a blurred picture. Nevertheless, the writing should be easy to recognize and catch the eye.
All you ever wanted to know about the color yellow, an then multiply by 10! I was drawn in immediately. 👍
Don't forget, beer is yellow!
@@FilmmakerIQ Not all beer is yellow.
That is true
So I too have a question:
What's the deal with a lot of these television shows and movies OVER -saturating their colour? Is this something that's "the new thing" and they push it in film school when they teach colour correction? Or is it just a fad in the sense that Cyan and Yellow were a fad for 8 plus years? If you watch HGTV for example, their colour saturation is way off the scale and it's as if any hard colours are enhanced to the point they look unnatural and anything that can get away with a pastel like colouration, is something they'll toss in there too. Another example of where you can really see the over saturation the most in movies are movies like Jurassic World.
I suppose one other question related to this one is why is it that a lot of shows and movies lately make it a point to enhance the colour blue the most?
Anyway, thanks for putting this video together and have a great day.
Excellent as always, John!
Maybe the way yellow flowers stand out in the sea of green (created by chlorophyll) is more relevant than fire since fire has only been around for a very short time in the scope of our evolution's history. We can perceive more different shades of green than we can any other color.
Another thing to consider is colorblindness.... I’m colorblind and some films, series and video games use red witch for us is a no-no.... and yes I did work as a colorist... don’t ask... the client liked it
@Mugen00 generally yes but this doesn’t consider other types of colorblindness or better described as colour deficiency ... there are 9. ... if you are a Mac user and iOS user , look up... SimDaltonism... it’s a free app for Mac and iOS that simulates the different colors based on the deficiencies... basically... it shows you how a colorblind person sees things.
Also, yellow is most stable color in PAL broadcasting and maybe in vcr.
0:24 "Too many cooks" is like falling down the rabbit hole inside a rabbit hole (also called "Babbitholeception")
Thanks for the vid, i enjoyed it so much!
This was cool, entertaining. Overthinking or not.
The gold phone gives a nice warm touch. In the 80s I recall a lot of items marketed with white lettering on black. For some reason it drove me crazy as everyone was copycatting. Do you have an RGB value for cable yellow? Thank you.
Potentially you could argue that green is our most attuned colour since being able to differentiate well between weeds and food may have an evolutionary advantage
I think that's why green is right in the middle of human vision.
Yellow is bright without being as glaring as plain white, or as garish as other colors you might care to try.
I adore overthinking
As always, thank you so much!
I'd been wondering why color is often mentioned in °K.
so this is why the simpsons are yellow
edit: lol I wrote this before hearing you mention it.
I haven't watched the video yet, but I'll make a prediction. Because CRT televisions created color with red, green, and blue pixels, and yellow was made with red and green, all that would be needed is to allocate energy to red and green to make the additional color yellow and would pop out more.
Well, I guess I got close...
Close enough ;)
I typed overthinking in my YT search, it brought me here
The name for "The Matrix" came from William Gibson's novel "Neuromancer".
Now if only we'd finally get a movie. Maybe animated would work better for all the weirdness of cyberspace.
Maybe that's where Gibson got "the Matrix" from - because in Math, it's just an array of numbers.
@@FilmmakerIQ that would be my guess, too.
Gibson probably got it from Doctor Who. Tom baker literally goes into the matrix in one episode.
@@FilmmakerIQ They also used the term "matrix" in Wrath of Khan (1982) during the video presentation where Dr. Marcus explains what Project Genesis is. So I think this term was floating around sci fi writing circles for some time.
Not so... in my Marketing Graphics and Psychology class in college they showed us how yellow is the color that most easily registers in our brain and makes a stronger impression... Years later I had a chance to revisit this theory. WHile living in FL my dear friends tried to sell their home... they were getting plenty of lookeeloos, but no contract... I had an advertising agency and they asked me for my advise - what could I do to make their home more memorable... I jokingly told them about what we had learned in college and told them to paint their home yellow... they did. It sold the following month. Now I’m not saying it was my strategy that worked... but it is one helluva coincidence.
As someone that holds a degree in Marketing, I can tell you most of what you learn in "Marketing Graphics and Psychology" class in college is bullshit.
I wonder if the yellow vs light blue comparison isn’t because of color temperature but because the yellow overlays often had to be placed over the sky or bodies of water.
Water is generally dark blue - so light blue would work fine over water. Sky tends to be light blue - so Yellow actually wouldn't work so well on sky by itself unless it has a black stroke. But then a light blue or white _could_ also work
I don't think our sensitivity to green is because of it being in the middle of the frequency range. That shouldn't really affect sensitivity. The range of frequencies is more important (the chart you used isn't the most accurate and doesn't really show the different shape of the green-sensitive cone frequency plot). But I've heard our sensitivity to green is more likely an evolutionary thing having to do with seeing detail in green foliage. Different animals have different wavelength sensitivities (and often more or less cone-types than us) and they always appear to be tuned to either hunting prey, or avoiding predators.
Being in the middle of the frequency range means there's more overlap. And it seems like the non-colored rods respond well to things in the green frequency. From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that The color that you're most sensitive to would be right in the middle of The range of visual frequencies you can see
An interesting thing I found is that certain gas space heaters produce a lime green harmonic.