Less expensive solution for editing, color correction and grading (4k)

[Chris Kenny]

I do though think you should invest in a spyder2 no matter what. The new quicktime upgrade has a fcp preference (fcp studio 2 only) to calibrate your monitor, but I wouldn't trust it. You can get a spyder off ebay as well.

Note that even if you calibrate to a Rec. 709 target, you still won't necessarily get accurate color everywhere. For instance, Final Cut Pro always assumes your monitor's gamma is 1.8 (even if it's not), and tries to display everything to correct for this. If you turn on FCP compatibility in QuickTime Player, it just adopts the same screwy behavior!

I'm pretty sure Color doesn't have this problem, though.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

VGA and component in. Pretty sure they don't have sdi inputs. Pretty old monitor.

I missed that the first time through. The GDM-F900 DOES NOT have SDI input. It has 4xBNC for RGB+sync in addition to VGA.

 

[Fredrik Callinggard]

So it doesn't have SDI input, good to know. My fault, I just assumed from looking at a bad internet pic. As I said before I'm a D.P and not an expert. I want to learn grading, since it's becoming more attainable. If we look at actual broadcast monitors it's expensive, so if were looking for most accurate color correction (not playback resolution) isn't a CRT a cheaper option? I know they graded (the post house I mentioned) parts of "Underworld" on that Sony monitor so I don't think it's all that bad?
As I said before my plan is to use the Sony monitor for as accurate color correction as possible displayed in 2K (which I've bought for around $350 on Ebay).


I will also down rez to a Sony BVM monitor (29") SD for seeing it on a broadcast monitor. This will of course not give the resolution but it'll give the color. I got that for $120 on Ebay, the bigger ones are usually cheaper because of less interest in them.

The down conversion will be done from a Blackmagic Decklink HD pro card. I know they're not up to scratch with the REDcode yet but hopefully they will be and if they don't, well then I have to get a AJA card. I got that for about $750 of Ebay.

Now what can I say I'm a ebay junkie

These monitors will be color calibriated with a Spyder2.

Anyway that will be my set up as a semi professional. I figured it will give me most for the buck, but I'm not the expert.

fred

 

[Mr. Paul White]

I just do not understand..

«Color calibration doesn’t have to be an expensive add-on for a monitor. Pantone’s hueyPRO ($129) includes an ambient light sensor to deliver a consistent reading under most lighting conditions. The company’s Eye-One Display 2 ($249) is designed to calibrate color over a mix of displays, including CRT, desktop LCD and laptop LCD. Datacolor’s Spyder2PRO ($249) includes calibration profiles for front projectors, as well as CRT and LCD displays. The Spyder2PRO’s Ambient Precise»

But you can find out other less or more expensive solutions exploring this link here:

http://www.studiodaily.com/studiomonthly/tools/ultimatekit/8158.html

Are these options true real choices? Replacing the need of a calibrated monitor?

 

[Chris Kenny]

I wonder how well grading on a GDM-F900 will work. It's not a native Rec. 709 monitor, and AFAIK it lacks the controls necessary to calibrate it according to color bars. You can calibrate it with a Spyder or other colorimeter like any other computer monitor, of course, and it should have better blacks than a commodity LCD... but all the GDM-F900 units out there have got to be pretty old by now, and CRTs degrade over time.

I wonder if buying a decent consumer plasma TV might not be a good option. Plasmas are bright, they have better blacks than LCD screens, and they have good color. Hook one up via DVI, stick the Spyder on it, and calibrate it to Rec. 709. Could work.

Another option that should be mentioned here is cineSpace, which can build custom display LUTs to match various film stocks and video standards. It uses the same LUT format as Color and a lot of other tools. Not sure what the pricing is like.

 

[Steve Sherrick]

You know, I'm really not sure I understand this notion that one absolutely has to have a studio-quality reference monitor to get useful color grading done. Would it be nice? Of course. But color in the desktop publishing world (which is actually more challenging, because print and on-screen display use completely different color models) is very often done entirely with low-cost commodity hardware.

At the very least I suspect one could put in the vast majority of hours required on a grade using commodity hardware, and then just rent a more serious monitor for a day for final checks and tweaks.

Kind of the same problem you have when mixing sound and using speakers that are coloring your audio. You think everything sounds good but then you take it to other playback systems and you don't hear what you thought you would hear. Better to have a good starting reference point.

But your point on renting a monitor for final checks is somewhat valid. The only problem with this is A.) You may not have it in the budget B.) If you have to make a lot of adjustments, you may have wasted a lot of time working on the inaccurate monitor. If you have tight deadlines, this could bite you.

I decided to go with multiple reference points in the studio. A Black Magic HD Link solution and a Sony CRT broadcast monitor.

Steve

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I wonder how well grading on a GDM-F900 will work.

I don't see where it will work any better than a 30" Apple or Dell LCD. With the LCD you don't have the low black levels and are limited to 24bits/pixel. With the F900 CRT, you'll be fighting with a VGA input and adapting SDI to that, introducing conversion in the process. If you stick with monitoring via VGA, you're limited to what's created by your software, OS and video output hardware -- VGA is typically limited to 24bits/pixel.

I wonder if buying a decent consumer plasma TV might not be a good option. Plasmas are bright, they have better blacks than LCD screens, and they have good color. Hook one up via DVI, stick the Spyder on it, and calibrate it to Rec. 709. Could work.

For color grading, this could be a very good option. I would definitely look into a nice 1080p plasma or DLP system. Stay away from LCD projection and LCOS (this includes D.ILA and SXRD displays), they have poor black levels compared to DLP and lack the range produced by the latest DLP systems.

For plasma, take a look at the Panasonic 9UK "pro" series displays. They have modular interface boards and do offer an HD-SDI input as an extra. These commercial panels have lots of adjustments for calibrating color and all the internal image processing functions can be dialed or even just shut off... They have either 14bit or 16bit internal color processing and display the equivalent of 12~13bits. So they're right on par with the best "studio" monitors once set up properly.

Even with that, many newer plasma and DLP systems have great range and 14bit or greater color processing. Especially the ones with HDMI 1.3 support. The trick is going to be getting SDI adapted to some of these consumer level displays and you also have to contend with noise reduction, edge enhancement and other image processing that can't always be turned off.

For people on a tight budget, I'm not so sure that buying into a high-end studio monitor would be a wise decision. First off, one has to ask themselves if they really want to "do everything". There's a lot to be said for taking your edited feature to a post house that has SCRATCH and sitting down with a colorist to get exactly what you want. On the flip side of this coin, no display out there, not even these high-end studio monitors, will show the entire range of colors. All of them have shortcomings and IMO, most offer very little improvement over conventional displays when considering the price. Expensive LCDs like the ones from eCinema are only marginally better than a good LCD from Samsung, NEC or Dell. In fact, those eCinema displays use the same Samsung and LG panels that most everyone else is using... They just modify them with different backlight systems (sometimes) and different screen top-coatings or treatments and layers between the panel and light system to achieve deeper blacks or better contrast.

A good colorist is not only someone with a good eye for color, but someone who knows how his tools work and what the limitations are. The most important aspect of a display used for color grading is that it's calibrated regularly and consistently. Second to that is that whoever is working on that display understands what they are seeing and how it relates to what is actually being created. A good display and proper interface to drive it will narrow that gap, but not close it... At least not with current products on the market.

 

[Joel Kaye]

A good display and proper interface to drive it will narrow that gap, but not close it... At least not with current products on the market.

That's an idea worth testing.

These are worth a read on the topic of CC:

http://www.theasc.com/magazine/jan05/conundrum/index.html
http://www.theasc.com/magazine/april05/conundrum2/index.html

This quote is too juicy to not post:

"Director of photography Sean Fairburn believes that waiting until post to decide on an image’s look — for example, when shooting in the raw format — will lead to a loss of image control for the cinematographer. “If we train a new generation of directors of photography who can’t decide whether to put a filter on the lens or on in post,” he asserts, “then maybe the colorist or the director might choose a different filter. I am the one on the set that looks at an actress’s dress and says, ‘This is what it is supposed to look like.’ The colorist doesn’t know that the teal dress was actually teal. If the film or the electronic medium slightly shifts, he is not going to know that it needs to be pulled back to teal. I am the guardian over this image. If I can capture an image that looks closer to where I want to be, then my colorist, my visual-effects producer and whoever else is down range already sees where I am going. Let’s defer very expensive decisions until later on? This isn’t that kind of job.”

----
Well, it wasn't that kind of job. RED DP as Colorist is where it's gotta go if you want to control your look.

 

[M Most]

Well, it wasn't that kind of job. RED DP as Colorist is where it's gotta go if you want to control your look.

Sean is talking about HD cameras, primarily (almost exclusively) the F900. With HD video cameras, what he says is very valid. Personally, I think he's quite a bit over the top in the notion (or paranoia, call it what you will) that colorists and producers are out to destroy images, or make them less than their best. A bit of communication goes a very long way, as does a bit of supervision. Truth is a good colorist can and almost always will make images look better - creatively and technically - and have better continuity than a DP attempting to be a colorist. You don't always know what something can become until it's explored, regardless of what you saw when you were shooting. That's what professional colorists bring to the table.

 

[Joel Kaye]

Sean is talking about HD cameras, primarily (almost exclusively) the F900.

"Director of photography Sean Fairburn believes that waiting until post to decide on an image’s look — for example, when shooting in the raw format — will lead to a loss of image control for the cinematographer."

Which F900 shoots raw?

You may be right about the rest of it. Certainly some DP's will become good colorists too.

 

[Gopher77]

Lets talk monitors, as far as I know LCDS are NOT adjustable. I know sypder claims to adjust to true color but someone needs to explain to me how an LCD is adjustable before I believe it. CRTs are adjustable thats why most pros still have them. The problem is they only have a limited life span, buying a used on for CC work probably isn't the best idea. Plasmas, don't know much about them but I can't believe that there is any capability for calibrating one. So back to the issue, a production caliber LCD will have close enough to true color for government work.

 

[Chris Kenny]

Lets talk monitors, as far as I know LCDS are NOT adjustable. I know sypder claims to adjust to true color but someone needs to explain to me how an LCD is adjustable before I believe it.

In software. Let's say the screen's native color is such that if you light up a pixel to full white (RGB values 255, 255, 255), it has a slight green cast. A Spyder can see that green cast, and your calibration software can figure out that instead of lighting white pixels up to 255, 255, 255, it should light them up to 255, 253, 255 (in other words, get rid of a bit of green).

The calibration software makes these sorts of determinations across a range of color and brightness values and builds an ICC profile that represents how your screen reproduces color. Ultimately, when you tell your operating system to use that profile for that screen, you end up with an appropriate LUT loaded into your graphics card which applies these corrections to everything displayed on the screen.

Of course, this does come at some cost. Continuing with the simplistic example given above, if white is always displayed as 255, 253, 255, it's not going to be quite as bright as it was before. More generally, a software calibrated display will always have a more limited color space than an uncalibrated one. But it's a more useful color space, because it more closely matches whatever color space it is you're trying to match.

 

[GlennChan]

Lets talk monitors, as far as I know LCDS are NOT adjustable.

1- Calibration can't make a monitor do something it can't and doesn't necessarily make a monitor suitable for critical monitoring.

2- There are different types of calibration. Many CRTs only have simplistic controls... black level, white level, color temp, and perhaps(hopefully) bias controls for each channel. Old CRTs will have grayscale that doesn't track perfectly... black and white images don't appear perfectly black and white. On CRTs there isn't really a way to calibrate that off. (Unless you use look-up tables elsewhere.)

High-end CRTs have controls not available on lower end models... e.g. the Sony BVM-Ds give you a lot more control over geometry.

3- An ideal monitor wouldn't need to be adjusted/calibrated every once in a while. CRTs have analog circuits that drift over time... they need to be re-calibrated every once in a while.
The same thing might happen with LCDs to a smaller degree; eCinemasys claims that their monitors are designed not to drift (in their case, there aren't really any adjustments you can do to the monitor other than setting it up for your target format... e.g. D65 vs 9300k, or LUTs if dealing with filmout; AFAIK anyways).

4- There are different tricks you can use to deal with LCD's deficiencies.

Color-wise, they naturally have a s-shaped transfer curve. The primaries (exact shade/chromaticity of red, green, and blue) may not be the same shade as the standard colors (e.g. Rec. 709, SMPTE C, EBU). You can use a 3-D LUT to compensate for that. However, this will effectively reduce your bit depth / can create banding issues. A 8-bit LCD panel will have sub-8-bit performance after calibration.
Higher-end monitors may use 10-bit panels and/or secret sauce to deal with this.

The backlight for the LCD may not be the same as the standard white point that you're monitoring for (D65, 9300K, etc.). You could use the 3-D LUT to get the white point correct, but you lose precision / effectively reduce your bit depth. The newer LCDs now have LED backlighting, where the LEDs are different colors. The white point can be adjusted by varying the intensity of each color of LED.

LCDs also have some problems with pixel response time... you can see this on computer LCDs when you scroll text. Higher-end LCDs will implement tricks to lessen this (e.g. LED-backlit displays will do black frame insertion).

And so on and so forth.

 

[Mr. Paul White]

My goodness! What a mess! Can you advice the less expensive solution at least? With calibration for finishing (color correction and grading)? Thanks.

 

[Fredrik Callinggard]

Hi again,

As a D.P but on the film side I still agree with Sean (even though he's talking about the FW900 etc). By shooting RAW your in the same territory as shooting film that's the beauty of it. I think that Kodak proved that with their Look managment software, which I've used a lot on set together with my SLR. Ironically (for Kodak) that was the program that got me sold on RAW so when RED came up I jumped on the wagon immediately.
By shooting RAW we look for latitude but in saying that we shouldn't strive for achieving as much in cam as possible. By waiting with some filters for post you will actually loose what they create in front of the lens. An example is black promist on the lens will soften the whites but keep the blacks. On the telecine lens projected onto a negative it will have the opposite effect (simply because it's a negative). It will soften the blacks instead of the whites.
You have similar things happening by tinting the image to different colors. There is a difference in doing it on the lens.
In saying that as D.P's we need to learn the processes that is used, just as we had to learn the lab process. So we need to look into this and learn the "LUT" process . That will bring us greater freedom in creating for the grader.
I still stand firmly in saying that the cheapest color grade suite would be a cheap but decent CRT (because it the closest in color accuracy of monitors with HD or above resolution) and that you down convert an image to a SD Sony BVM monitor for true broadcast color.
I would strongly not recommend as Jeff says a plasma screen. Simply because they're crap really. They're great client screens for seeing the image form a far, but as instruments they will suck. I have yet to see a plasma that will deliver true color mode (not sying there not great these days, but their not broadcast) and I've spent enough time in grading suites to state that.

Cheers,

fred

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Hi Fred,

Learning "LUT" process:

I wonder if you know about Speedgrade OnSet. It's designed for DPs and directors in mind. On a laptop you can grade stills directly on set with all the tools available you are used to in a grading suite. It does create .look files which can be used directly in Iridas and other systems and additionally .jpegs so every one in the pipline knows what the DP thought when he shot the particular scene.
Gives the power back to the DP, also a great learning tool.

Monitors:

I totally agree: Plasmas are no good as an instrument, although eye candy for the clients. I use an EIZO 24 LCD that you can calibrate. It has much deeper blacks than Dell and Apple and is hardly more expensive.

Hans

 

[M Most]

I still stand firmly in saying that the cheapest color grade suite would be a cheap but decent CRT ....

Maybe it's just me, but why would one want to shoot "the best quality images" only to evaluate and prepare them for distribution in "the cheapest color grade suite?"

 

[Gopher77]

Maybe it's just me, but why would one want to shoot "the best quality images" only to evaluate and prepare them for distribution in "the cheapest color grade suite?"

Because money is a finite resource, at least in my world. So you have to pick where you can do with a little less and still create quality images. I think that you can stand firmly saying the color grade suite would contain a CRT, at least until LCDs are truly calibratable, is that a word, which is on the horizon I hear.

 

[Fredrik Callinggard]

The thread here is about figuring out the cheapest but most sufficient solution. Personally this will only be for my own amusement and learning, but I do want it to be possible to use if I needed to. Most of the time I will be grading in Scratch with a proffesional grader but I also want the possibility to sit in my own studio and do so as well. Don't forget this is an indie studio, I'm not a grader, I'm a D.O.P.
I don't want to spend more than $20-30K on an full editing suite since it's mostly for off-line, but also for some smaller on-line stuff.
So with FCP, LCD monitors for editing and capture cards, raids etc to actually start buying monitors for above $5K and Scratch for $50K, well let's just say that I leave that for the proffesionals.

No I say, let's concentrate this thread in finding the cheapest but really functionable solution, for all the indie film makers out there which has a limited budget. Let's make sure that we find a solution that hold up (with restrains, of course) and that can deliver high end at the end, if needed.

cheers,

fred

 

[Fredrik Callinggard]

Ohh sorry yes I have checked Speedgrade On set out. It looks great and is similar to look management. I'm very keen on getting that + the Speedgrade HD for the studio. As far as I know (and please correct me if I'm wrong) the HD version can actually deliver 4K but only playback HD (which is great 4 an indie film maker). There's one thing though and it's that Iridas (speedgrade) don't have access to the redcode RAW. That Assimilate Scratch and RED are working very closely. If Iridas don't get access to the redcode well then it's not a good way to go (anyone who knows anything about this?)

fred