Color Correction Monitor

Filmbuff28

Filmbuff28

Well-known member
What do you all use to monitor your color correction? Currently I can only hook up my video stream to a cheap tube television. I want a better solution but don't have a huge amount of cash. Is there any way to perfectly calibrate my computer screen? Does Color on FCP 6 let you calibrate your computer screen or does it also need an external monitor for that?
Thanks for any help or ideas.
 
"perfectly" is relative. You can tune it, but the nicer the monitor is to begin with, the more effective your tuning will be. The biggest difference is gamma, which is rough, especially on a Mac, since you're going to be working at 1.8 and NTSC is 2.5. Maybe a Mac user will have some advice on tweaking or fudging.
 
Here at work, they rented a few large Sony CRT monitors for us. They're really expensive and bulky, but they provide a more accurate image.
 
Filmbuff28 said:
What do you all use to monitor your color correction? Currently I can only hook up my video stream to a cheap tube television. I want a better solution but don't have a huge amount of cash. Is there any way to perfectly calibrate my computer screen? Does Color on FCP 6 let you calibrate your computer screen or does it also need an external monitor for that?
Thanks for any help or ideas.
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At this point tube televisions are still more accurate at rendering color and dynamic range than LCD monitors, even some HD. Just get a decent quality CRT TV, set it up with color bars and you'll be fine. I'm using a 5 year old Phillips TV to do color correction and it works great.

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If you had a "huge ammount" of money, id suggest you something like the Quato 240m.

Its a LCD but you can hardwarecalibrate it, and its giving you the right standarts to do so....the bad side is the fact that it costs more than 3000€, which schould be about 6000 US right now...just kidding, but still expensive...!
 
Thanks for the tips. I would like to learn more about any software/hardware that could work with my laptop monitor like the MXO mentioned above. Are there other items like this? I've heard of something called Spyder or something that Uses an optical tool to view and then calibrate any computer screen including laptops. Have you guys heard of anything like this?
 
The problem is, as long as you cant do a Hardware callibration(of the monitor itself) it wount give you a very accurate result, as you would just change the signal that the Graphic card sends to the monitor...this is the point here...i got no clue if this "software-callibration" can bring you anywhere close...
 
Derrick, i think you can help me with this question that i have, do you know or anyone knows if the BT-LH1700W could show the wave form from RGB inputs YPbPr?, or is it just composite? or SDI only?
 
Does anyone have a no BS solution to this? Everyone uses different things and I know you can't be 100000% sure what your doing is absolutely accurate but I can't seem to find a straight answer from everyone. Some are using Tube TV's, some 1000's of dollars worth of equipment. Someone has to be wrong here, or nobody would spend the money.

Right now I have an NTSC Prod. Monitor setup but its being used as a 2nd monitor right now, no way to really calibrate it b/c my graphic card uses gamma and such as is normal. I can't hook up that monitor to a DV cam because for some reason when I hit play, it plays only the audio and when I hit stop it plays the ending frame and its all jagged and ugly anyways. It might have something to do with the cheap DV cam not downrezing the HD project and outputting it all crappy like. I'm not sure.

My main concern is brightness and contrast especially...at least getting that somewhat right I care about. I got this monitor now, so what do I do with it to use it right???
 
You can get by using a CRT television monitor.

I calibrated it using color bars and it gives me pretty accurate color and luminosity. I'm good to go. What would be nice though, would be to gel it blue and do whatever that blue thing is to calibrate it even further.
 
My production monitor has bluegun on it. Thing is I can't figure out a way to use the monitor itself. I don't have a way to get my FCP feed to that prod. monitor without having the monitor hooked up as a computer monitor. That's a problem because then I introduce Gamma and all that crap.

If I just keep it as a computer monitor hooked up to my graphics card, should I just be using a NTSC color preset? Feed some bars to it in FCP and adjust it that way? I'm not sure.

Is my only option to buy a Matrox MXO to get a clean downconvert signal straight from the computer to that monitor?
 
KyleProhaska said:
Does anyone have a no BS solution to this? Everyone uses different things and I know you can't be 100000% sure what your doing is absolutely accurate but I can't seem to find a straight answer from everyone. Some are using Tube TV's, some 1000's of dollars worth of equipment. Someone has to be wrong here, or nobody would spend the money.
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I work in a post-production company that does special effects for feature films (can't say which one) and we're still trying to solve this problem. There's somewhat of a disjoint in the technology right now. So far, we're still using CRT's with Look Up Tables determined by our engineering department. Suffice it to say, there's a whole bunch of people a lot smarter than me trying to figure this out right now.

KyleProhaska said:
for some reason when I hit play, it plays only the audio and when I hit stop it plays the ending frame and its all jagged and ugly anyways. It might have something to do with the cheap DV cam not downrezing the HD project and outputting it all crappy like. I'm not sure.
?
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Is it HD or HDV? As far as I know, you can only output still frames from anything other the DV/HDV. This is how I'm currently grading HD projects on my home system. It's not ideal but a co-worker of mine put it this way:
My delivery format is probably going to be primarily DVD anyway so, even though I'm not correcting in HD colorspace, it's not a HUGE deal because in the end, it should look pretty close on the DVD to what I see on the monitor.
 
I can use just any CRT monitor and calibrate it? I just need something for SD an I want to avoid a $500 color correction monitor from B&H...
 
most CRTs don't have the controls to properly calibrate it for video work... that's what you are paying for when getting a broadcast monitor from B&H. check the used market for SD monitors, they're pretty easy to find.
 
bigbossbmb said:
most CRTs don't have the controls to properly calibrate it for video work... that's what you are paying for when getting a broadcast monitor from B&H. check the used market for SD monitors, they're pretty easy to find.
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anything in particular i should be looking for? One JVC has 750 lines of resolution, another has 320. I'm assuming 750 is better for color correction...
 
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yes 750 lines is better... what you need to have on the monitor is a "blue gun only" mode. this allows you to accurately calibrate the monitor to NTSC color bars.
 
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