Getting a monitor or a TV for grading

Yes before I decided to jump over to a higher end monitor and decklink for color work, I was just using regular monitors in conjunction with the DataColor spyder color calibration system which creates a color profile managed by your computer operating system and applies it when your computer boots up. As you say, this uses the computer's video card system to apply the correction that results from the calibration.

Once you go to a separate card like the intensity or decklink it allows you to monitor the output as a 10-bit quality video signal and the color is not managed by the operating systems at all. It is a pure TV/video signal coming out of your machine - but the software (Final Cut, DaVinci, et.c.) must allow the option of being able to select that monitor as a monitor output but most do nowadays.

The color calibration in this setup is usually managed through a 3D LUT loaded into the monitor itself, or in a LUT box like eeColor that goes in-between your computer and monitor. You'd use software like lightspace or color navigator to calibrate your monitor with something like an X-rite i1 to create your LUT for you.

This stuff takes a bit of time to wrap your head around, that's for sure.
 
BT.709 and sRGB are not the same. They're not even the same types of things.

BT.709 is a display rendering transform and encoding. It tells you how to take an image from a camera and turn it into a signal that you can feed to a monitor (or recorder or whatever). The standard was first published way back in 1990. Back then the best displays were CRTs, and so BT.709 was designed for how CRTs behaved. You can't calibrate a display to BT.709 because BT.709 is not a display color space, or at least not a fully specified one. BT.709 defines the primary chromaticities and white point, but not the display's EOTF or the viewing conditions.

sRGB is a display color space and encoding. sRGB defines how a display should behave, how you should encode an image if you want it to be displayed a certain way, and the viewing conditions. sRGB came after BT.709 and was designed to be compatible with BT.709, at least in terms of the color space (but not the digital encoding, which is different). An image generated with BT.709 should look correct on an sRGB display. sRGB and BT.709 have the same primary chromaticities and white point. sRGB was also created back in the days of CRTs, and was supposed to represent a typical display of the day.

These days most displays are LCDs or OLEDs, and they don't actually comply with the sRGB standard. They use the BT.709/sRGB primary chromaticities and white point, but a constant gamma of 2.2 (usually) instead of the EOTF defined in the sRGB standard. BT.709 remains a good way to render images for today's displays.
 
Also buy an XRITE or SPIDER monitor calibration tool. Color shift over age
all those expensive monitors you still need to calibrate
 
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