Cost effective options for HD Color Monitoring

djkarn105

Well-known member
What are some options for doing a decent color grade on HD footage? My current setup has a cheapo panasonic minidv camera hooked to an old NTSC color monitor I got off craigslist for $50.

For SD video this wasn't a problem, but now that the majority of stuff I'm doing is in HD, I can only look at still frames this way because the dinky little camera can't convert the frames fast enough.

I'm thinking of getting an HF11 and I was thinking that it might work to switch this out with the cheapo panasonic but it occured to me that a) the HD colorspace is different, b) the HF11may not be controllable as an HD deck and c) the HF11 is using the AVCHD codec so it's still doing a conversion if I'm editing say DVCPro HD.

Any suggestions under $1k?
 
If you have Dual DVI outputs on your monitor, you can use a second monitor in both Final Cut and Premiere Pro.

I'd say to buy a 24" 1920x1200 monitor. Do some reasearch in which ones calibrate the best and most accurate.

then buy either a Huey Pro or a Spyder 3

http://spyder.datacolor.com/product-mc-s3elite.php

http://www.pantone.com/Pages/products/product.aspx?pid=562&ca=2&s=1

From there, Calibrate both monitors, and work from that. You should have a base sRGB colorspace to work from.

Always get a crappy monitor as well to see what your worse case scenario is.

Color grading has changed recently in the past few years. First it was about calibrating your monitor so that you'd get accurate results. However you'll find that its about making sure the content looks good across many devices, since consumers have a varied ammount of display devices, that do weird things (like 120hz inerpolation, or dynamic contrast)
 
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