In the past...

Traditionally, logo artwork for video arrived as black and white artwork, sometimes referred to as camera ready art. Sometimes it arrived in some unacceptable form, like bumper-stickers or a pack of matches, or on a teeny-tiny letterhead. This artwork was then put under a camera, digitized, and then captured into a digital paint system. Then the logo was cleaned up, straightened out, and turned into a series of stencils so that it could be rendered into a painted video logo.

The main weakness of this process was in the camera capture phase. A camera on any given day can be out of alignment, the artwork may be too small, or fuzzy, or the lens of the camera may actually bend the image due to faulty optics. All of these problems could distort a clients logo, and would be best avoided.

Digital artwork

In this day of increasingly computerized design, client’s logos frequently have been designed for output to a number of digital image setters, generally for print. One of the common formats for this artwork is referred to as Postscript, a standard created by Adobe Systems, Inc. The great thing about Postscript logos is that they are said to be resolution independent.

This means that the logo is described as geometry, that is, as lines, circles, curved shapes, and fills. If you print these files on a 600dpi printer, they print at 600dpi. If you print them at 1200dpi, yes, they print at 1200dpi.

This is good for print, and more importantly to us, can be used for video.

If your Macintosh (or that other kind of computer...) is being used to render the logo for video, you can use those digital representations to directly convert those logos to a painted image, saving you time and frustration, as well as maintaining the integrity of the original artwork.

Here’s how you do it. First open the file in Adobe Illustrator. If the logo is a simple one in black and white, then you can proceed with the next step (after heeding the warnings below...). If, however, the logo is in multiple colors, I recommend breaking the image into its component colors, setting all the fills and lines to black and white, and then saving the components as individual files, or at least separate layers. Name them something like "Logo_Red, Logo_Blue, etc. for organizational purposes.

After this preparation, you can use Adobe PhotoShop to either open or place the Postscript file into a new document. The size of the document should be of an appropriate size for your application. Video generally uses either 640 X 480 pixels for non-D1 applications, 740 X 486 for D1. Ask your client or post house what size they’d like the final product to be.

What happens next is called a vector to raster conversion, that is, the program takes the geometric information (vectors) and turns them into a nice, anti-aliased bitmap (raster). What this leaves you with is clean, accurate black and white artwork to use for rendering in a paint system.

Caveats:

1. The postscript file should ideally created in Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand. You might try using other programs, but I’ve had the most success with these.

2. All text in the file should have been either converted to paths in the programs, or the fonts used in the document (both screen and printer fonts) should be included.

3. Placed artwork will not work with this process. Please open them in the application to include them, rather than using the place command.

4. Outlined text will not reproduce correctly. Please convert text to outlines. This is done easily in Illustrator.

5. Gradients don’t always image smoothly. This is another reason to work in black and white, and apply color in a paint program of your choice.

6. I’ve found that colors cannot be guaranteed to always reproduce correctly. This is due to the difference between printing ink colors and video colors. PhotoShop will do it’s best to rasterize the image, colors and all, but sometimes the result is unacceptable. I find that it’s better to create the artwork in black and white, and then use a color sample (printed piece, Pantone chip...) for reference when rendering.