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1. Re: Reference Monitor help - Urgent Requirement
Dominic Witherow Jan 28, 2014 3:16 AM (in response to sankoor2012)Sankoor, I'm afraid that your TV alone can not be relied upon for a colour critical grade. It's a consumer TV, without any of the colour critical setup requirements of a professional monitor. That means that you will not be able to guarantee that the colours are accurate.
It is possible that you may be able to use it with the addition of an appropriate bit of monitoring hardware, like a Matrox MXO2, or if you have dedicated scopes to grade to, but other than that it's not really worth trying on that machine. One other option may be to have the TV professionally set by a colour technician with the appropriate third-party tools, but that is not usually practical, nor can it be relied upon to last any time, due to changing lighting conditions etc.
I strongly recommend checking out Matrox or Blackmagic solutions, but you may find that your TV does not meet their requirements either, but still worth investigating.
Sorry to have been so apparently negative, but there really aren't any shortcuts to grading monitors.
Regards
Dominic
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2. Re: Reference Monitor help - Urgent Requirement
sankoor2012 Jan 28, 2014 4:13 AM (in response to Dominic Witherow)i am searching budget monitors,What about dell ultrasharp Monitors?
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3. Re: Reference Monitor help - Urgent Requirement
Dominic Witherow Jan 28, 2014 4:24 AM (in response to sankoor2012)Budget monitors won't work.
You need either a dedicated reference monitor with hardware colour controls (cost $000s) or a breakout box with true colour controls (like Matrox MXO2) attached to a decent monitor with 1:1 pixel mapping and no processing.
The second option will be cheaper but expect to spend at least $1,000.
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4. Re: Reference Monitor help - Urgent Requirement
R Neil Haugen Jan 28, 2014 1:52 PM (in response to sankoor2012)Note, Dominic has a solid answer. IF you are doing critical high-end work, that's what you need to do. Period. If you are currently delivering to TV stations, or dealing with professionally edited footage of any kind for broadcast/theatrical release, you need to just do what he says. It's as good as and actually cheaper than some other "experts" say one must do.
Now, from experience dealing with still photography mentors (and being one myself) over the last few decades, and having noted that calibration-use in video is very similar to that in stills ... I know what I'll say next will make Dominic cringe. Sorry about it ... but the real world of cold hard available cash does interfere with even professional workflows at times. so here goes.
If your work is a little less critical or simply you do not have ANY cash for the better tv/monitors/interface-boxes, the Dell Ultrasharps when calibrated by a decent device can get you by, mostly. Sort of. For a while. You're going to be buying a $200 to $500 monitor, AND buying a roughly $200 to $500 calibration device/software. So ... you'll be out at least $400 just to get mostly by sort of. Compared to $1000 for a very fine monitoring setup. (You can later on migrate to a two-screen "suite", with your controls then on the Dell and your source/program monitor sent to the REAL monitor.)
I'm doing the cheap route here until I can get the cash inflow to show my business (and I own it, a 30+ year photography studio, so it's me I need to prove myself to ... ) that I can justify the cost. Using the i1-Pro set for video processing on rec709 for calibration. It is getting me by, but when the income from actual clients goes up the least, I will be following Dominic's advice. The stuff I put out from my PC seems to currently look decent on other systems & the web. Though ... as with any purveyor of video material ... my oh my, do things look different between web browsers and monitors and net "channels" and all. But again my projects are small and easily controlled from the start for ease of production. And they AREN'T going to tv stations or theatrical use. Web and computers and dvd's for home use ... only.
Of course, when I can justify it financially, the whole system will be upgraded ... so the cash is gonna be to the chunky side.
Neil
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5. Re: Reference Monitor help - Urgent Requirement
yadnom1973 Jul 22, 2014 4:27 AM (in response to Dominic Witherow)I am an old film student who is looking to put together a budget set up for making shorts with an eye to film comps and festivals. I have sound kit and recently built a PC for the edit, I'll go with the BMPC or BMCC to film. If something is good and I have the faith to try for short film comps or festivals where it'll be on the big screen I will try to beg steel or borrow time somewhere for a final clean up but this is far from guaranteed and even if it was I'd want it as far down the road as I can possibly get it. I am quite new to the whole technical side of this so I have been making my way through the huge amount of posting on this subject.
I am very interested in your post Dominic on the Matrox MXO2. The standard set up folk seem to advise me is a 10bit signal out from a card to a budget 10bit ready monitor calibrated with one of these third party devices. I'm a little shaky on the set up you are pointing to. If you see this post, I know I'm a little late to the party, and you have a moment could you expand on what you suggested? What's a decent monitor and what do you mean by no processing? What dose the Matrox box do? If you had a budget of $1500 how would you go about it?
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6. Re: Reference Monitor help - Urgent Requirement
Dominic Witherow Jul 22, 2014 5:19 AM (in response to yadnom1973)Yadnom,
$1500 should be easily enough to equip you to see accurate colours.
The MXO2 mini is the best choice for you, as it does a great job, works with all the Adobe tools very nicely and is about as cheap as it gets (you can find them brand new for under $400 on the web). It is an external box that connects via PCIe card (desktop), Express Card (laptop) or Thunderbolt, where available - so plenty of choice there. I would warn against installing ANY Blackmagic codecs etc (or Resolve) if you are using an MXO, as they tend not to play nicely at all (this may have changed since I last had the pleasure of my whole system throwing its teddy in the corner and sulking until I had gutted it of any trace of BM software, but do check before hand, as BM provide some fabulous tools with their kit but it can make a mess too).
It is critical that the MXO is plugged into a monitor that displays an unprocessed feed from the MXO (i.e. unscaled and mapping pixels 1:1). However, it is often hard to identify such machines, and they usually only exist at the more refined end of the market. That said, they are still massively cheaper than dedicated broadcast monitors, by factors of ten and up!
I would start looking at the best that HP have to offer. My personal view is that HP make the very best monitor in this category, which is the HP LP2480zx, which is the successor to the HP LP2475w (which was the previous best-in-class). This monitor is nominally much more expensive than most of its direct competition, but can be found for under $1,000 if you hunt around.
I know that Sony and Dell make appropriate monitors and I suspect the Apple thunderbolt monitor meets the spec, though I can't find the specific specs to confirm that.
My setup is: MacPro (old style) with MXO2 mini to HP LP2475w as a third monitor (the other two being fed by a GTX680 Mac) and I use Speedgrade for UK broadcast and features.
I hope that helps?
Kind regards
Dominic
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7. Re: Reference Monitor help - Urgent Requirement
yadnom1973 Jul 22, 2014 9:23 AM (in response to Dominic Witherow)Thanks for getting back to me I really appreciate it. As I understand the MXO2 box or card allows me to put out a 10bit signal making it very similar to the BM decklink card but when I'm reading the information on their web site there is talk of the Matrox calibration utility. I have never used a dedicated calibrating tool and the ones I have seen are the Spider devices and such. I don't quite understand how but I'm under the impression that the MXO2 puts out a scaled one to one calibrated 10bit signal is this correct? They talk about it being rec709, adjusted to the ambient lighting of the room you work it!
" The Matrox HDMI Calibration Utility characterizes how your particular HDMI monitor's gamma response deviates from that defined by Rec 709 and creates a set of gamma correction curves (compensation equations). These corrections are then applied to the HDMI signal so that the colors displayed on the monitor will match the Rec 709 specification"
When it comes to this the technical side of calibration, bit depth and such I'm obviously not understanding the full picture and have found some reading materiel on this but if you know of anything I'd appreciate being pointed in the right direction I need to get this down.
The HP LP2480zx looks like a good monitor and I can pick them up here for a good price second hand, I'm in the UK so prices are different. I'm also PAL but I presume that's not a problem. There are two other 10bit monitors here one from Asus the ProArt PA279Q 2560X1440 and the Dell Ultrasharp U3014 2560X1600. The higher resolution may be nice with the cameras shooting in higher definitions but I'm not sure if they will course problems with the scaling? Do you think these monitors are an option as they are a similar price or do they fall short in some way I've not seen?
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8. Re: Reference Monitor help - Urgent Requirement
Dominic Witherow Jul 22, 2014 10:40 AM (in response to yadnom1973)Yadnom - we speak the same language (hence my reference to colours and not colors), so no more messing around with Dollars!
The whole difference with Decklink cards (and just about everything else) is that they still rely on an independently calibrated monitor and that means a real, broadcast monitor for colour accuracy. They will play back beautifully on any monitor with the appropriate connections, but the colour rendition can not be relied upon without true calibration. Where the Matrox boxes differ to everything else, is that the calibration is done by the machine, which uses simple tools, based on your eyeball's view, which then calculate a compensation for the monitor you are using and give you a true rendition. It's very simple and you certainly don't need to get bogged down in the technical explanations - that tends to just make one cross-eyed! You also don't need to worry about Spyders and the like, though they are a very useful addition to the arsenal if you feel comfortable with them.
Virtually all monitors work at 60Hz, which is not ideal for PAL, but as you are intending to use HD anyway it is a moot point when it comes to colouring. HD colours are consistent across frequency standards as the resolutions are the same (i.e. 720 or 1080) and there is no discernible flicker in playback of 50Hz material. Interlaced footage on freeze frame with movement in the shot does flicker, but that can be easily mitigated by moving a few frames.
I use the setup for colour correction to BBC technical spec for broadcast.
With regard to the monitors you mention, I think the Asus looks like it should work - it mentions 1:1 aspect ratio mode in the manual, which is probably the same as 1:1 pixel mapping. I couldn't find the necessary information on the Dell, but if you enquire, I'm sure they will be able to tell you - it's a fairly standard professional requirement.
I swear by my HP LP2475 and have read very good things about its successor. £1,000 should see you very well set up with MXO and monitor.
Dominic
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9. Re: Reference Monitor help - Urgent Requirement
yadnom1973 Jul 23, 2014 1:18 AM (in response to Dominic Witherow)I'm sorry about the delayed response, I've been dashing about and grabbing time at the PC when I can. I seems we do speak the same language, but I do it dyslexically so please don't think the worse of me if the spell check dose me wrong.
I understand now how the calibration is done and the difference it makes and can see clearly where to go for finding a solution to reference monitoring on the cheap. It has taken a lot of trawling across the forums to find this little bit of information and you have saved me an awful lot of trouble had I followed one of the many more popular budget solutions.
Thanks you once again for taking the time and all the best, Neil.

