Q. What is the recommended NTSC colormap for film recording?

Q: I've been trying to get a color scheme that looks good for NTSC, but haven't hit on one as of yet. Is there a colormap that looks good and has values of saturation and brightness give good results?

A:

1. Stay away from highly saturated colors - red especially. That's why at the last Democratic National Convention, the stage was done up in salmon, ivory, and powder blue (as opposed to RED, WHITE, and BLUE) - they were conscious of the way it would look "Televised". Red, particularly, is to be avoided.
2. Stay away from repetitive vertical patterns. The way NTSC encodes signals is across a scan line and it only has so many "bits" of change that it can do within a single scan line. After that storage is used up, things start to fuzz out. That's why you never see newscasters (or backgrounds, etc.) wear vertical stripes.
3. Stay away from brightly colored backgrounds. Bright foregrounds on dark (black, blue, etc.) work more effectively in terms of having the foreground differentiated from the background.