The 6500 Kelvin standard?

[Alexander Mejia]

We fight this issue at our office as well. Here is what we do

1) Educate everybody that calibration is not so that your colors look correct, it's so that when multiple artists look at the same asset across multiple monitors they are seeing the same thing.

2) Time is saved because we aren't chasing our tails saying "this is too [color]" when in actuality it's not. All artists are seeing the same asset within ^E of 1 or less.

3) At the end of the project we make adjustments for consumer sets, we do have our own "best buy" wall with a bunch of different displays set to their stock settings. We'll do small tweaks with a final LUT for scenes that look really bad on certain TV sets, sometimes negating what our artist's final intention was. The idea is to make sure the information that needs to be visible, or a certain color is that.

The result is that we don't make images that are too contrasty, or too over saturated and it's all good at the end. While it's not the best way to view it on a totally calibrated REC.709 display, we realize that nobody is actually viewing our content at rec.709.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

Finally there seem to be some thinking in the industry...
http://gizmodo.com/dolby-vision-will-make-sure-your-tvs-colors-and-bright-1495379307

This is what I have been talking about all along.

 

[Marc Wielage]

What is really the standard? If content should be outputted to a calibration of 7500K then most calibration standards are wrong, certainly the D65 709 standard.

Content should be output to a standard of 6500K.

Read the SMPTE standards:

SMPTE RP-166-1995
http://journal.smpte.org/search?fulltext=RP166&submit=yes&x=19&y=13

The calibration standards are right; consumer monitors are wrong.

Note that the RP166 standard was developed at a time in the 1990s when CRT monitors were standard. The standards have been in a state of flux since flat screen monitors took over the marketplace, and SMPTE is developing new standards for LCD, Plasma, and other technologies. It's such a moving target, nailing down hard standards is a tough battle. The DCI standard for movie theaters was done independently of SMPTE, by a committee made up of reps from the major studios, and those standards are published (and free):

http://www.dcimovies.com/specification/index.html

At the end of the project we make adjustments for consumer sets, we do have our own "best buy" wall with a bunch of different displays set to their stock settings. We'll do small tweaks with a final LUT for scenes that look really bad on certain TV sets, sometimes negating what our artist's final intention was.

You're fighting a losing battle, because every consumer monitor looks different. I'm not convinced that a set made on Tuesday will look the same as the exact same set made on a Friday, using the exact same settings. The only thing that makes sense is to calibrate to a known industry standard and hope that people with decent home TV sets will do the same thing. Otherwise, you will chase your tail simply because there is no consumer display standard used by all manufacturers. It's all chaos, and always has been. It might actually be worse today than it was 10 years ago.

But it's no worse than things are in the audio industry. You spend $100,000 doing a perfect mix in a Dolby-certified mixing stage, and then somebody listens to it with Beats headphones and says it sounds bad, or they listen to it in a car and they say they can't understand the dialogue, or they listen to it with Apple earbuds and they say it doesn't have enough bass. So finding a happy medium that will translate to all these different venues has always been a problem.

 

[Alexander Mejia]

If we were outputting to DCI, yes I would make our artists adhere to the standard strictly, but since we make Video games and Videos that get viewed on YouTube, we approach things differently becuase almost none of our customers are viewing our product on perfectly Calibrated sRGB,Rec.709 displays.

In our studio, calibration is only done so that all artists are authoring towards the same target. We do know that you can't ultimately dictate how good it's going to look at the consumer's end, but we can try to avoid things that look glaringly bad with our final LUT pass.

It's just a reality when your primary viewing happens on a consumer TV set.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

C
The calibration standards are right; consumer monitors are wrong.

I know what the standard is, but this is my point, if content creators use a standard while the viewers are not, then what is the point of having that standard if it is so different? I understand the fact that everyone in post needs to work according to the same standard, but the final output is not for them, it is for the TV audience. A standard should exist, but the whole film and TV industry need to force the TV and screen manufacturers to implement this standard as factory defaults.
In my personal view they should brutally force them to do this, because it's the single most widespread idiotic thing I know about the industry. Content creators, content technology and content viewers need to be on the same page.

That's why I applaud the Dolby Vision initiative and hope that the coming consumer OLED screens will all have the CORRECT standard and no manufacturer-bullcrap.

 

[Stacey Spears]

but since we make Video games and Videos that get viewed on YouTube, we approach things differently becuase almost none of our customers are viewing our product on perfectly Calibrated sRGB,Rec.709 displays.

And which display do you then use since no two displays are the same? One display might be 7000 and another 12000. Two of the same make and model might not even match. You should always adhere to a standard. The people, viewing customers, who care about the quality will calibrate their display to get as close to the standard as possible. The ones who don't, won't care, so why bother catering to them?

I know a number of game companies that hire professional calibrators to come in and make sure their displays meet system standards.

I know what the standard is, but this is my point, if content creators use a standard while the viewers are not, then what is the point of having that standard if it is so different? I understand the fact that everyone in post needs to work according to the same standard, but the final output is not for them, it is for the TV audience.

As I said above, home theater enthusiasts go to great lengths to calibrate their displays to meet system standards. Those should be your target audience. Otherwise you are targeting a single make and model of a display. Next year the replacement model will be different anyway.

Keep in mind that the people who review content for a living are using a calibrated display.

 

[Alexander Mejia]

We do calibrate all of our monitors to sRGB, since game consoles render internally at sRGB. The output chips will convert to rec.601, Rec.709 and sRGB depending on the display they are plugged into.

We have one lighting artist make final tweaks to the in-game LUTs on our "best buy wall" which contains several types of displays. The tweaks here are not to create any kind of artistic vision, but to look for problems that certain consumers might run into when our game content is projected across factory settings.

These tweaks usually include us not being too dark in areas that are critical to be seen, and not going too hot with our whites. Sometimes it's about desaturating certain ranged of colors as reds can get really hot when we dont want them to.

We still compare the LUT we create on an artist calibrated monitor to make sure we aren't destroying our original intent either. It just means it's harder to go too bright, too dark, or too saturated for the final product, and all viewers benefit from it.


We've found that we no longer receive feedback about "the game's too dark" anymore since we started this process. The customer isn't so savvy about what is good color since they just crank up the saturation anyway if they think there isn't enough color in the picture.

You can't control what happens in the end, but you can shape it to reduce problems.

 

[Stacey Spears]

We put a simple calibration wizard into the Xbox One to help customers. It is pretty basic, but helps them get brightness set better. It assume BT.1886 as the gamma curve.

 

[Michael Ou]

The techs and experts all want to grab this bull by the horns (understandably) and declare "This is the standard!" But really they're just base guides to not only a moving target but also a running shooter (no pun intended). As far as cinema is concerned, not too long ago proj. lamps all used tungsten filaments, then arc-discharge, now shifting to LED and lasers, but even through each lamp life cycle there is decay/shifting of light intensities and color temp, regardless of the tech. Hopefully future light engine technology is being refined so that this shift is diminishing. But in the end, the standards reflect a beacon for us to zero in on, so we can less worry about the wild array of colors in the wild. Choose your beacon based on what type of display you believe your audience will be looking at, and as you pointed out that has also changed already. Fun times! lol

 

[Björn Benckert]

If you use a descent color probe and create a correction lut for your screen ( no matter what brand) you will see that the color curves of the lut looks more like a saw with teeth than linear curves... In other words setting your screens just using the knobs for brightness, contrast, color temp and so on will not really cut it. You can get close but no it's not calibrated. kind of like grading footage only using those parameters. each color red green blue needs to be altered differently trough out the Range of pretty much every screen. If you have a 40k USD dolby screen or such well then thats probably not really true but if you use any kind of "normal broadast monitor" then a lut is simply needed and need to be updated like once a month or so.

Personally I do not care that much screens are different and I bounce things around so much in between different screens before they leave the house so I think I have a pretty good idea what they will look like in the wild. To me the screen is not the big issue I find more problems with Quicktime and their habit to alter colors differently on different setups depending what qt plugins and program is installed on that particular setup and also whats worse is the fact that they actually renders those corrections into the files when jumping from one quicktime render to the next...

So basically I stay as far away from quicktime as possible to remain colors trough renders.

 

[Marc Wielage]

We've found that we no longer receive feedback about "the game's too dark" anymore since we started this process. The customer isn't so savvy about what is good color since they just crank up the saturation anyway if they think there isn't enough color in the picture.

Then why align your monitors to 7500 degrees K, when it's no standard at all? You're making up a number, which means it's an internal standard that doesn't relate the real world. And this has no effect on brightness. Do you at least set up for 30fL, or are you making the brightness standard up as well?

Aligning monitors for video games has nothing at all to do with shooting features and TV shows on Red (or any other digital standard), which is what RP166 is all about. Did you bother to actually read the SMPTE standard? Have you ever spoken to any high-end visual effects company and found out how they calibrate all their monitors to a known standard, so if there's 700 VFX artists working on a single project, every one of them will see essentially the same thing?

Listen to what Mr. Spears has to say above. His company makes one of the very best Blu-ray home theater alignment discs out there, and he knows what he's talking about. Steve Shaw of Light Illusion also knows quite a bit about color space, color management, and monitor calibration. Both of them will tell you that if you make up your own standard, it's kind of like being the one guy in a marching band who's out of step... and then claims the rest of the band is out of step.

 

[Ketch Rossi]

I only shoot 5600k, nothing else, and absolutely NEVER make use or allow use of any CTO on my jobs... Even when I end up moving the Kelvin to 3200k in post, I simply prefer it this way.

And even if they were to standardize it to 6500k or any other k, I would still do as I have been doing... 5600k is were is @ for me...

 

[Elsie N]

I only shoot 5600k, nothing else, and absolutely NEVER make use or allow use of any CTO on my jobs... Even when I end up moving the Kelvin to 3200k in post, I simply prefer it this way.

And even if they were to standardize it to 6500k or any other k, I would still do as I have been doing... 5600k is were is @ for me...

Same here Ketch. And I also leave the iso @ 800 and expose to the right. In my case, I do this in the belief that if I leave the camera setup at RED default sweet spots, the camera will keep me from making a fool of myself. I am still free to do that in post, however. '-)

 

[Stacey Spears]

Alexander Mejia[/B]]We do calibrate all of our monitors to sRGB, since game consoles render internally at sRGB.

sRGB has the same color gamut and white point (D65) as BT.709. Only difference is gamma curve.

Not all game consoles render in sRGB. Xbox One was targeted at the consumer space so you tell it, through an API, what you are and it will twist if necessary. 709 is passed through while sRGB gets twisted. Turn 10 included a simple test pattern at the start of Forza 5 so the user can tweak brightness for the game. They also look a lot of consumer displays, but they do target 709.

BT.2020 is going to a great big cluster f*** with its larger gamut. There will be UltraHD content graded for 709, P3, 2020, and who knows what. I don't believe any current UltraHD TVs even have a 2020 gamut. Vizio claims their new reference line will. Can't wait to get one. It also has 384 dimming zones. I think they are using the same tech that Dolby does in their reference monitor.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

REC2020 is going to cause a lot of the same issues that we already see with wide-gamut displays like the DreamColor. But on a larger scale and these problems will be invading consumer space this time. Of everything announced at CES, the only displays I know of that support 2020 are the Vizio Ref Series, Doly's reference display, a couple of the higher-end Samsung models and Sony models as well as the Sony 1100ES projector. FWIW, I think only the Dolby, Vizios and the Samusng (X9000?) displays actually provide increased gamut space to work in. The others are just talking 2020 because they can and they don't have the gamut coverage anyway. 2011 and newer model DreamColor displays should be able to cover 2020 gamut or very close, but I don't know if they will add support or not. Or I probably don't expect them to do so until a 4K DreamColor display hits the market…. That's probably still a year away, at least and will probably not arrive until we see DisplayPort 1.3.

 

[Alexander Mejia]

Aligning monitors for video games has nothing at all to do with shooting features and TV shows on Red (or any other digital standard), which is what RP166 is all about.

Which is why we do this approach instead. We use to be a completely sRGB studio and found out a lot of our customers do really dumb things at home, but still find fault in us to fix it.

I'm not so familiar with the XBOX One as I'm still working on Saints Row IV which is a 360/PS3/PC title.

 

[Alexander Mejia]

I think the real issue is that TV manufacturers are bending the standard to sell TVs. I see REC.2020 being helpful as TV manufacturers will be trying hard to hit that standard, and the TV with more colors, and brighter image will actually be more correct, which is what consumers want when they buy a TV. (The brighter, more colorful image. They could care less about standards)