NTSC Signal Emulator

BERRRY™

COLOR

00:00 / 00:00

Waveform Monitor

Vectorscope

YUV Channels

Y (4.2 MHz)

U / B-Y (1.3 MHz)

V / R-Y (0.4 MHz)

RGB Reconstructed

Red

Green

Blue

Signal Controls

Brightness 0 Contrast 1.0 Saturation 1.0 Hue 0° Sharpness 1.0

Artifact Controls

Scanline Intensity 50% Dot Crawl Color Bleeding 5 Ghosting 0 Snow/Static 0 Vertical Rolling Interlace

Display Mode

Demodulator

How NTSC Works

📹 Camera → RGB → YUV → QAM Mod → Composite → Demod → YUV → RGB → 📺 CRT

NTSC encodes color by converting RGB to YUV, then modulating U and V onto a 3.579545 MHz subcarrier using Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. The luminance (Y) carries brightness at full bandwidth (~4.2 MHz), while chrominance (color) is bandwidth-limited (~1.3 MHz for I, ~0.4 MHz for Q). This allows color TV signals to be backward-compatible with black & white receivers.

Signal Anatomy

Horizontal Sync Pulse: A -40 IRE pulse that tells the TV to start a new scanline.
Front Porch: ~1.5μs blanking before sync, allowing voltage to stabilize.
Back Porch: After sync, restores black level reference (0 IRE).
Colorburst: 8-10 cycles of 3.58 MHz reference on the back porch for phase-locking the chroma demodulator.
Active Video: Luminance (0-100 IRE) with chrominance modulated on top.

Why Colors Go Wrong

NTSC is famously nicknamed "Never The Same Color" because the color information is encoded as the phase of the 3.58 MHz subcarrier. Any phase error — from multipath reflections, cable impedance mismatches, or poor studio equipment — shifts the hue of the entire image. Try the Hue slider above to see this in action! PAL solved this by alternating the phase on each line and averaging, but at the cost of vertical color resolution.