I did some searches here but didn't find an answer.  I want to take some HD footage and apply an effect that will make it look like we're filming a video displayed on a TV and then fade it into the actual HD footage.  I've seen this effect used often in movies (actually just saw it used in "The Martian").  I'd like to be able to do this inside of Avid (MC 8.4).  Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks.

you could transfer your clip to a vhs and play it on an old crt tv (remember those? ;-)

then film the screen.

or, if you have bcc, you could use stylize/scanline.

FWIW this is not free but you can find a Damage TV dissolve in Boris's BCC transition package found here  

BorisFX also have BCC Scanline.

This is a convention which I heartily wish would die!  It's creating what you know to be there rather than what you would actually see.  On most CRT sets you would have to look very closely to see scan lines at all.  On Trinitron/linitron sets the most visble lines were vertical, and on shadow mask sets lines weren't visible at all.  Instead, if you looked really closely you would see a pattern of dots.

If you really want to create something that looks like an old TV set, experiment with a combination of grading, glow and vignette.  A slightly blown out flared look with a somewhat bluish color cast and a little fall off at the edges will look much more like the real thing.

not very scientiific, but just a very quick test:

frame grabs (1&3) plus magnified (2&4) of godard film "weekend" (1967)

dvd viewed on lcd computer monitor and on an old trinitron color monitor made in june 1991 (PVM-1342Q)

call it whatever you want, but i still see what i would call "lines" 

How did you capture those images?

On my recently retired Sony WEGA you could see clear vertical lines and very faint horizontal lines if you got extremely close to the screen.  On an earlier 26" Philips dot matrix you definitely couldn't see lines at all, even when close enough to clearly make out the RGB dot triads.

1) screen grab from the computer's monitor

3) nikon D750 photo of the old trinitron screen

2) and 4) computer's screen grab of 1) and 3) blown to about 100% in photoshop

touviere7:

nikon D750 photo of the old trinitron screen

The thing that you will notice is the noticeable flare, the fact that the picture is noticeably hot, and on the CRT image there is slight pincushioning and vignetting.  Depending on the resolution of your lens and how good your focus is you may also see slight moiré patterning.  What you're highly unlikely to see is a line structure - especially not the coarse line structure that the typical "old TV" plug in provides.

I have recently had a few jobs where I have had to do just this.  One that I will single out (the toughest) was a made for TV movie set in '70s.  We had a mixture of practical color and black and white TVs on set none of which were actually practical, i.e., they didn't work at all.  Each had to have simulated images from the time on them, in a few cases dissolving through to actual footage.  All were created by the techniques I outlined above, with the addition of being mapped onto tracked 3D models of the screens to provide the appropriate curvature.

We then overlayed a room lighting layer that was also a 3D sim, and finally a reflection layer that was derived from the actual on-set reflections.  We even simulated momentary loss of vertical lock and ghosting on one of the B&W sets that was supposed to be operating in a fringe reception area.  No-one has ever been aware that what they saw in the final production was anything other than practical TV sets.  And at no stage did we ever add visible lines.

Visible lines in a TV sim look like what they are - FAKE!!!

all i wanted to say is that i see lines on my old trinitron monitor.

very fine lines, indeed, but still what i do perceive as lines.

that simple!

obviously not easy to show on a photograph, especially, if as you insist, it doesn't exist...

anyway, thanks for the tech argument.

p.s.   the dots, with my nose on the screen, still become lines as i back-up to reasonable distance.

If you look closely at magnified frame grab #4, those lines are not perfectly horizontal--they are slightly diagonal downward to the right.  The highest-up four lines begin at equally-spaced points along the top boundary of the image.  Maybe what we are seeing here is a moiré pattern.

You do rralize that that is how tubes "write" lines of video, right?

Yes, but usually the scan lines are dithered on a shadowmask tube to ensure even coverage of all dots.  That dithering will blur adjacent lines.

On a Trinitron there may also be a degree of dithering applied, but for a different reason.  Large screen Trinitrons had one or more horizontal wires to help improve the stability of the Trinitron mask as it heated up.  These often did show up if you looked closely, but they were usually just one or two faint lines across the screen, depending on the tube model.  The dithering helped mask the effect of the stabiliser(s).  It also in the process blurred the boundary between adjacent scan lines as with the shadowmask.

I believe that less or no dithering was applied on precision Trinitron monitors, where stability and sharpness was more important than subjective image "smoothness".  I'm relying on an increasingly rusty memory, though, so I could be wrong about that.

Ken Lent:

If you look closely at magnified frame grab #4, those lines are not perfectly horizontal--they are slightly diagonal downward to the right.  The highest-up four lines begin at equally-spaced points along the top boundary of the image.  Maybe what we are seeing here is a moiré pattern.

It's been an interesting discussion, and I apologize.  I did find that of the few BCC effects that did come with my copy of Avid Media Composer there is one called Scanline- don't know how I missed that before. 

Now I've attempted to use this effect and it's many adjustable parameters and I'm starting to close in on what I need.  I'm still getting a lot of flickering when viewing an exported version of the sequence.  However I do not get a flicker when viewing it inside of MC on a computer monitor.  *note* When I am viewing the exported version I am watching it on a DVD player connected with an HDMI cable to the same computer monitor that I edited the sequence on.

And suggestions?