HPA Reference Monitor Symposium - anyone else going?

[Bruce Allen]

Hey Guys

Anyone else going to the HPA event at Disney this Sat?

I'll be the scruffy-looking unshaven young man wandering around half-awake. My friend's 40th birthday party is tonight and is supposed to go "till dawn" - so being over at Disney at 8AM tomorrow may present some difficulties...

Seriously though - lots of interesting stuff: ACES grading workflow, previews of next-generation monitor systems, a high-frame rate demo from Lightstorm, etc.

I'll have BRUCE ALLEN - MOCEAN on my nametag and will be there in semi-official capacity. Finishing stuff for movie trailers definitely has gotten more difficult lately - you used to just be able to deliver a 2K file as a 709-space SGI sequence - and know it'd be softened down by the film print and that they would convert the colors to film space OK. Now they often want 4K - and even then, they blow the damn thing up and pixel-peep it saying "this is what it'll look like in IMAX" - and then there's the whole joy of LogC (and After Effects' lack of understanding thereof).

Will try to post a report here. Hopefully it'll be more than just a scribbled note saying... "COLOURS!"

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[MichaelP]

Have fun! Would love to attend myself...

Michael

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

See you there buddy.

Cheers - #19

 

[Michael Lindsay]

Any notes?

Thanks

Michael

 

[John Bellari]

Hey Guys

Anyone else going to the HPA event at Disney this Sat?

I'll be the scruffy-looking unshaven young man wandering around half-awake. My friend's 40th birthday party is tonight and is supposed to go "till dawn" - so being over at Disney at 8AM tomorrow may present some difficulties...

Seriously though - lots of interesting stuff: ACES grading workflow, previews of next-generation monitor systems, a high-frame rate demo from Lightstorm, etc.

I'll have BRUCE ALLEN - MOCEAN on my nametag and will be there in semi-official capacity. Finishing stuff for movie trailers definitely has gotten more difficult lately - you used to just be able to deliver a 2K file as a 709-space SGI sequence - and know it'd be softened down by the film print and that they would convert the colors to film space OK. Now they often want 4K - and even then, they blow the damn thing up and pixel-peep it saying "this is what it'll look like in IMAX" - and then there's the whole joy of LogC (and After Effects' lack of understanding thereof).

Will try to post a report here. Hopefully it'll be more than just a scribbled note saying... "COLOURS!"

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

Hi Bruce,

Would love for you to comment on my thread if there are any viable "budget" options you know of or will see.

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?64402-Best-Budget-Reference-Monitor-for-use-in-2012

Thanks and would love to hear your thoughts on the subject, look forward to your post here also!

 

[Bruce Allen]

OK OK here are me notes... sorry, was going till 3AM during the week on effects for Secret Biiiig Movie Teaser - which of course was all being done with two $500 desktop monitors that weren't even close to my Dreamcolor at home

Summary... The current line of shipping Dolby and Sony OLED displays are fantastic. If you can spare the cash, they're the way to go.
If you need a big display, get the Dolby. If you need a small display, get the Sony.
Everything else is a compromise but could work.

PART 1 - BROADCAST DISPLAY AREA

BROADCAST - SONY OLED VS SONY BVM:
Sony had their OLED displays right next to an old BVM CRT monitor.

Colors were identical, except for the blacks and the whites. Blacks were much deeper on the OLED monitor. White on the OLED seemed a little bluer and brighter to my eyes. Purer to my eyes (the BVM white just was just a little dirty brown - a color I know well from working with it .

Motion rendition was flawless to my eyes - the same as the CRT. The thing is... the OLED was resolving so much more detail than the CRT that it became difficult to exactly compare the feel of the motion.

What was amazing though was the amount of flicker the BVM had... you kinda forget about it. Also, it couldn't really resolve 1080p. They had charts, etc and the lines just mushed into a fuzzy grey color whereas the OLED was of course resolving black and white stripes down to the pixel.

Only real disadvantage of the OLED to me was that the off-axis viewing got a tad odd-looking. But you have to be very far off-axis to notice.

BROADCAST - DOLBY & ALEXA
Dolby's big 40" displays weren't right next to the BVM so it was more difficult to judge. They looked damn amazing though. You could kinda check out the BVM and then whip around 180 degrees to see the Dolby - and it looked very close.

It is a LCD monitor but does very clever things with the backlight (made up of a ton of little R,G,B LEDs which it can dim and brighten individually). The end result is a CRT-beater IMHO.

One thing in Dolby's favor: there was an Alexa set up filming live, outputting Loc-C. This was fed into a LUT box that converted it to a nice-looking Rec.709 feed. This was then fed into a dozen different displays.

The Alexa guys (very polite Germans) kept going back to the Dolby display to see how it looked, haha... their exact words were something like "I keep coming back to ze Dolby"... when German engineers say that, you know they're doing something right Yes, the Dolby monitor gave you a gigantic and accurate window into how the camera performed.

The only sad part was that I was really psyched about being able to look at the skintones on a real model, then check out how the digital sensor dealt with them, viewing this on the absolute top-end monitors available. Problem was: the lighting was done with some tiny Arri LED portable lights and was noticeably dim and yellow. They were having to expose the Alexa at 3200 and also had set it up to neutralize the yellow cast. So the skin on the monitor did not look like the real scene. In the shadows the skin would become kinda grey on the monitors... whereas in real life the shadows were much warmer and more lifelike. But then in real life the whole scene was a kind of sickly yellow color with sodium vapor light feel, the models were caked in makeup and the whole thing just wasn't that much fun. The MacBeth chart behind the model looked great though, as always...

BROADCAST - OTHER LCDS & PANASONIC PLASMA
There were some other LCDs there (TVLogic, etc). Some looked extremely poor off axis, as usual. I have nothing against LCD - I own a Dreamcolor... but that's like a $2000 display. If I were buying a "pro" display, I would consider Flanders Scientific but beyond that... I don't see the point of expensive LCDs unless they do something very clever like Dolby seems to be doing. Boland had a very fancy software solution with networked color calibration, etc. Marshall didn't have their monitors in the same room and weren't showing the same footage. They were very nice though.

Panasonic had their consumer and pro plasmas here - it was very interesting seeing them next to the Dolby monitor. They were veeery close... but when you look into the shadows there is that standard Plasma dithering and banding (Plasmas just can't reproduce the shades down there properly, so they dither over time... but sometimes the dithering doesn't work). Great for a client monitor... fine for creative grading even (if you KNOW your grading workflow is not introducing banding or noise, I could see even doing a full grade on this)... not so great if you're trying to QC something for theatrical distribution or final Blu Ray compression or something like that.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

HPA notes

HPA notes

The symposium started off with a lot of technical info including a section on terminology/acronyms.
There was a nice IIF/ACES workflow case study that included flow charts.

Some interesting notes on "wide" color nomenclature, gamut, implementation strategies. Bruce and I both felt that for mastering and distribution to the home at least P3 color space should be the default. Devices limited to rec 709 would do their best translation and devices able to reproduce P3 could take advantage of a significantly better color palette.

There was a demo in a theater with a Sony 24" OLED, the Dolby 42" HDR-ish LCD and calibrated projection all running the same uncompressed material from a Clipster. Getting great blacks and all the benefits that come with that is still an expensive proposition in 2011 but we are getting there. IMO the Dolby outperformed the projection in DR and it gave the image more life, the OLED was so small (and letterboxed 'scope besides) that its scale rendered comparative analysis almost impossible.

My belief that without proper viewing conditions no reliable evaluation is possible was reinforced.
The disparity in tonal characteristics between well calibrated monitors was greater than I expected, which I attribute to the inherent characteristics of the various technologies used (LCD, OLED, Plasma). On a side note, the issue of glossy vs matte finish glass on panels doesn't get much press but it can dramatically affect real world contrast ratios and can make some displays much better for on set work than others.

Perhaps some future screen material will change this, but in the near term, reflective displays (projection) and emissive displays (glass panels) with identical measurements do not look the same. There are also serious perceptual effects of scale (big image vs smaller) that further skew our view. I bring this up because one of my takeaways from the event was that you should use projection for everything from dailies to final color for theatrical release material and emissive displays for TV work. Yes, it is easier to spot flaws and notice level mismatches on a projected image in DI, but, IMO, you risk misjudging critical aspects.

Thanks to the HPA for a wonderful day.

Cheers - #19

 

[Bruce Allen]

OK - part 2!

THEATRICAL - TI DLP PROJECTOR VS DOLBY & SONY

This was a ton of fun, revolving around the question of whether you could possibly use the new Dolby and Sony displays to do QC or creative grading tasks that up till now have relied on a projector.

We got to wander around a large screening room with a Texas Instruments DLP-based projector... with the Dolby and Sony displays right below the screen, showing the same material. The footage was being fed in native XYZ space, which all 3 of the displays could handle.

If you sat on-axis, the colors looked pretty much identical. Impressively, Sony and Dolby had to calibrate their monitors without seeing what the projector was going to do. They calibrated the day before, then were not allowed to touch the settings once the projector started showing footage.

The most interesting thing to me was seeing that the black level on the projected footage was actually the worst. Everyone complains about LCD black levels... but it's still difficult to make a white projection screen black, even in a dark room. Kinda obvious - but sometimes gets forgotten! If I wanted to be more accurate, the one thing I would have done would be to actually boost the black levels on both the Sony and Dolby monitors, and take the brightness down a tiny bit, although maybe the TI projector was just a little below its brightness spec?

The only problem left is that even if the colors are the same... the same scene on a 40' screen looks different when viewed on a 40" or 25" screen. My impression was: for sure, you could use the Dolby or Sony monitors for color grading your feature. But you'd definitely want to do some final passes in a place with a nice big screen.

NEXT-GEN FUN STUFF - DOLBY AT P3 AND 600NITS, MARSHALL AUTOSTEREOSCOPIC
In another room, Dolby was doing some demos of what their monitor could really do if unchained: first they ran a short demo at 709 color space, 100 nits... then they changed it to P3 color space and 600 nits - and played the same demo content but mastered to take advantage of the color space and brightness possibilities. Insanely huge difference.

They had some stuff with cyclists running around indoors... indoors looked dim but visible and the cyclists looked like a nicely saturated film print. THEN the people started lighting things on fire - and there was just a whole new level of brightness. But you could still see details in the other brightness levels clearly.

As a filmmaker, it would be lovely if we had this creative palette to work with - rich nice wide-gamut colors, plus wide luma ranges as well.

If only one company was going to introduce a next-generation content playback and laser projector and they could allow for an option of P3 (or wider space) and amazing contrast levels... their content playback system could send a message to their laser projector saying "hey, I can give you wide-gamut 600 nit material - you want that?" and the projector could say "hell yeah!" and...

...ah... we can but dream. And bug RED

THEATRICAL - MORNING LECTURES
I haven't really gotten through all of the notes on this yet. Gimme a moment.

The main thing I learned was the importance of thinking about color spaces in a 3-dimensional way, not just a 2-d plot. The 2-d plot can hide HUGE DIFFERENCES in color space.

For example... digital projectors and displays are additive. Even a wide-gamut color space such as DCI-P3 cannot produce very saturated dark colors. What DCI-P3 excels at is making super-super saturated bright colors.

Whereas a film print is a subtractive medium, eg like CMYK print - so its very bright colors just can't get very saturated. But when you get into inky saturated colors, it excels and beats DCI-P3 in range by far.

So yeah, now I really really want something wider gamut than even DCI-P3 as a display standard. Something that can show every color film can, plus every color P3 can, with around 600 nits brightness... in 4K with 3D

That said, P3 on that Dolby did look pretty good...

Um, I will think if I have any more to say and add it here?

ADDENDUM - CALIBRATION (FACTOR THIS INTO YOUR BUYING DECISION)
One thing to note... consider the cost of calibration into your purchase. Also, not all calibration devices work with all displays. If you save $1K on a display, but it needs a $20K calibrator, that may not turn out so well.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Bruce Allen]

There was a demo in a theater with a Sony 24" OLED, the Dolby 42" HDR-ish LCD and calibrated projection all running the same uncompressed material from a Clipster. Getting great blacks and all the benefits that come with that is still an expensive proposition in 2011 but we are getting there. IMO the Dolby outperformed the projection in DR and it gave the image more life, the OLED was so small (and letterboxed 'scope besides) that its scale rendered comparative analysis almost impossible.

My belief that without proper viewing conditions no reliable evaluation is possible was reinforced.
The disparity in tonal characteristics between well calibrated monitors was greater than I expected, which I attribute to the inherent characteristics of the various technologies used (LCD, OLED, Plasma). On a side note, the issue of glossy vs matte finish glass on panels doesn't get much press but it can dramatically affect real world contrast ratios and can make some displays much better for on set work than others.

Perhaps some future screen material will change this, but in the near term, reflective displays (projection) and emissive displays (glass panels) with identical measurements do not look the same. There are also serious perceptual effects of scale (big image vs smaller) that further skew our view. I bring this up because one of my takeaways from the event was that you should use projection for everything from dailies to final color for theatrical release material and emissive displays for TV work. Yes, it is easier to spot flaws and notice level mismatches on a projected image in DI, but, IMO, you risk misjudging critical aspects.

Thanks to the HPA for a wonderful day.

Cheers - #19

Concur 100%.

Nice to see that Blair and I were separated into different groups for the theater demo (and didn't meet or compare notes afterwards), yet have similar conclusions

Yay!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com