Best affordable monitor options for colour grading / correction

[DigitalEmotion]

Hi,

I am looking to purchase a monitor for colour grading / correction based on a budget of around £1000. I know it's not a lot for a good colour broadcast monitor but I am looking for solutions at around this price. I do not do broadcast work, so actual critical balance and legals is not the main issue, but i want to represent my colour grading as accurate as possible when the work is complete. Has anybody used a cinema display for this or know anybody that does? It's just within my price range and was considering one, just thought i'd ask the professionals out there first ;)

All help feedback appreciated.

D.E

[RickyC]

Thats a tough one, I just spoke with a guy that does coloring who told me he spent a few thousand on a good monitor. Best bet may be getting a nice crisp and clear monitor and doing some proper calibrating of color(hue), brightness, contrast, etc
Check this out: http://www.wikihow.com/Calibrate-Your-Monitor

It may not come out completely perfect, but then again theres a reason why those broadcast monitors cost thousands

[Michael Carter]

The issue isn't the "quality" of the monitor - if you're doing color from your computer's monitor card - calibration is going to be what matters. But what the monitor it being calibrated for will affect things. My monitors need to be very different for print jobs vs. video, for instance. Many modern PC monitors should be OK... viewing angle and color consistency across the screen will be important.

For color grading, the optimal solution is extra computer hardware that takes your edit signal (like the canvas window from FCP) and sends it out through HDMI or SDI, bypassing any color calibration in your computer. Optimally that signal goes to a monitor with blue-only calibration, and is calibrated viewing color bars.

This can be surprisingly affordable - BlackMagic's external HDMI cards start at under $200. In my case, I already had a small on-camera Marshall with blue-only, and a 22" HDTV, both used on set. With a Matrox Mini and a powered HDMI splitter, I use them at my edit bay. The small monitor is my color-accuracy checker; the big screen is matched to that monitor as closely as possible with the consumer controls. If anything you do will be broadcast or viewed full-screen, it's great to see it at full size and full frame rate vs. a smaller edit window, and if you save a 1080 or 720 version of your final, at least you'll catch any artifacts or errors you miss in an edit window; this can be as valuable as color accuracy.

But any decent screen with blue-only (and I think even Lilliput is making these now) and a great viewing angle can be used for grading if you can find a way to get your edit window (and color bars) fed through it. I'd look at Marshall, SmallHD, some of the well known brands - you should be able to get a pro quality screen starting at $500 or less, purpose-made for video with 1/4-20 holes and such. Some of the cheaper car-class screens have bad viewing angles and you'll never know if you're seeing proper brightness.... even Marshall's little 5" "DSLR" monitor has a world-class LCD in it.

[Michael Carter]

Check this out: http://www.wikihow.com/Calibrate-Your-Monitor

It may not come out completely perfect, but then again theres a reason why those broadcast monitors cost thousands

I'd avoid those sort of on-line calibration schemes like the plague - this guy suggests using a photo print as a reference; yet if you took that same photo to ten different houses and printed it, you'd get ten drastically different color schemes.

This file is a good way to see if your screen is displaying the full range of white to black... but you're displaying the white/black levels of that particular image, not necessarily an image properly setup with levels from full black to full white.

If you're doing a print brochure or ad, say, you can have the printer run a calibrated proof of the the file, and then you adjust your screen until the file matches the printed proof. You have a print that's guaranteed to be close to the printed final output. For broadcast or web-use, the final output is "everyone's monitors or TVs", so the SMPTE color-bar is the standard used.

The better-than-nothing way is to display color bars in your NLE (not a JPEG of color bars in photoshop!) and use your monitor controls to adjust the brightness/contrast/black level - there's plenty of online tuts on what to look for. Some people suggest viewing your screen through a tri-blu wratten filter to simulate blue-only; I've tried it and wasn't impressed, but some swear by it.

[Bruce Watson]

... i want to represent my colour grading as accurate as possible when the work is complete.

Everyone wants this. Yet, no one has it. Hmmm.... I wonder why?

The problem is that the video color spaces are not the same as the computer monitor color spaces. It's all different -- from the colors of the phosphors to the gamut to the gamma. It's very difficult to represent something like the Rec.709 color space on a computer monitor, which is why the few computer monitors that can do this are quite pricey.

Much depends on your final output format however. If you are outputting for YouTube or Vimeo, then you can just use a nicely calibrated computer monitor and be done with it. Maybe something like an NEC Spectraview monitor. But if you are outputting for DVD, Blu-ray, or film, you're going to need a monitor that can show you the colorspaces of these non-computer sources. This typically means a broadcast monitor.

Not the answer you want, I know. But that's what the current market looks like.

[ggrantly]

My poor mans solution for this is a Matrox Mini and a good quality LCD TV. It is respectable for the price.

Grant

[Michael Carter]

My poor mans solution for this is a Matrox Mini and a good quality LCD TV. It is respectable for the price.

Grant

Grant's correct; but the Mini is around $400 (I use one myself); you can get a blackmagic card for under $200. This doesn't address getting accurate color on set of course, but I've found the combo of a (mini, blackmagic, there are USB solutions for laptops, etc) and your on-camera monitor (if it's a good one) to be very useable. Throw in a decent HDMI TV with a wall mount (you can get a great TV for $200-ish if you shop around) to be really nice - and powered HDMI splitters are about $12 on Amazon.

You can get a decent LCD TV pretty close with its screen controls and color bars. And it's really great to have if a client wants to look over your shoulder during an edit.

You can find a cheap VESA wall mount with a swing arm (under $20) and adapt it to a baby mount - then you'll have a big on-set monitor for clients, directors, whatever - clients really love that and it keeps them out of your way. I adapted one so between shoots, the big TV is on my wall for editing. I bought an iMac bag to transport the monitor.

A good on-camera monitor will range from "nice thing to have" for a DSLR to "Can't shoot without it" for cameras with terrible LCDs (HMC-150 anyone?). Shop around and research affordable 5" to 7" panels with blue-only, get a card or USB HDMI solution, and you'll never look back.

[connectivitygroup]

The issue isn't the "quality" of the monitor - if you're doing color from your computer's monitor card - calibration is going to be what matters.

This is simply not true. Just because you can "calibrate" a display does not mean that you can use it for grading.

But any decent screen with blue-only (and I think even Lilliput is making these now) and a great viewing angle can be used for grading if you can find a way to get your edit window (and color bars) fed through it. I'd look at Marshall, SmallHD, some of the well known brands - you should be able to get a pro quality screen starting at $500 or less, purpose-made for video with 1/4-20 holes and such. Some of the cheaper car-class screens have bad viewing angles and you'll never know if you're seeing proper brightness.... even Marshall's little 5" "DSLR" monitor has a world-class LCD in it.

Again just because a monitor has blue only does not mean it will be a good grading monitor.

And the 5" marshal lcds are NOT world class!

Like a previous poster said there is a reason that grading monitors cost so much.

But I also think that if you are only outputting for web you do not need a "grading" monitor, you need a good computer monitor. It all depends on what your output is and how demanding your clients are.

The cheapest real grading monitors are FSI and they start at $3000.

I think people need to be more realistic about what they need. If you REALLY need a true grading monitor you know that you can't get away with anything but a real monitor and you know that you will have to pay for it.

But if you are only coloring for lower output quality web videos than you don't need grading monitor you just need to find a monitor that doesn't wildly misrepresent colors, brightness and contrast (which bars and blue only WILL help you with)

Again just because you can "calibrate" to bars does not mean what you are seeing is accurate.

[ggrantly]

Like I said, it's a poor mans solution for the problem. Not sure about the BM products, but the matrox mxo2 series, including the mini, offer lots of extra functions including some hardware a acceleration for avchd encoding and recording options also. Playback of images during editing are real time with no jitter at all.

Grant

[vision4video]

I use Edius 6 with a Spark output device. I've bought a 22" LG TV as an output reference monitor as this has fairly sophisticated picture controls including blue only and with each colour able to be adjusted seperatley. I've set it up using SMPT bars
but I'm not convinced it's right. And what is 'right' for general commercial video output anyway? Will something like Spyder4Elite software help me set it up correctly?
Graham