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Laptop screen vs Regular TV

Is it ok to do color correction judging by what you see on a Laptop Screen?
My color corrected footage looks ok on my Laptop but is ugly (too dark) on a regular TV (not LCD or plasma)

Is there any software that can help to preview what my footage would probably look like on most TV sets?
 
Is it ok to do color correction judging by what you see on a Laptop Screen?
My color corrected footage looks ok on my Laptop but is ugly (too dark) on a regular TV (not LCD or plasma)

Is there any software that can help to preview what my footage would probably look like on most TV sets?

What are you colour correcting for? If it's going to be broadcast, the only way you can do it accurately is with an external broadcast television monitor - computer monitors and TVs handle colour in different ways, so you can't rely on your computer monitor being completely accurate. Unless you're editing/colour correcting as a job, this may not be worth the investment.

On the other hand, if it's only going to be streamed/downloaded online, there's not really much you can do - you've no idea what devices people are going to watch your film on and how they'll be calibrated, so your laptop screen will be perfectly adequate.

I don't know how you're watching the film on your TV, but there could be any number of things going wrong - I'm going to take a wild guess that you need to adjust the gamma on your computer (should be in Control Panel in Windows, System Preferences on a Mac). Whether that will make it look any better for other people watching it, I don't know.
 
Every single TV and computer monitor you view it on is going to look a little bit different. My computer monitor is brighter than my small TV, which is brighter than my large TV, which looks diffferent than my friend's HD TV. That's why people doing color correction use a carefully calibrtaed monitor as a baseline. What they produce is going to look different on every screen that shows it though.
 
something that might help. Find a popular video clip. Download it to your editing system. Use as a reference for your own movies.. is your video about as bright? As contrasty? do the colors look as you want them to look (relative of course) etc..
 
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