Production monitor vs. computer monitor - any thoughts from post experts?

Michael Carter

Michael Carter

Veteran
I'm curious - here's my setup:

Apple Mac Pro (previous tower version with PCI, etc);

Various monitors over the years, Samsung, Viewsonic, etc...

BlackMagic or Matrox cards over the years - so my NLE and After Effects work goes out via HDMI, without internal monitor adjustments or menus.

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SO - I have dual computer monitors for editing, windows, pallets, control panels; and my footage goes to a splitter and into my 5" production monitor and a 22" HDTV.

The 5" is setup with color bars and blue-only - I know it's not perfect like a $10k grading setup, but fairly accurate. The HDTV has been adjusted as close as possible (it has blue-only) with the more consumer-oriented menu controls.

The computer monitors have been setup with Apple's built in monitor calibration.

Giving me a small monitor to judge color and brightness, a big edit screen to really look for errors in keying and so on (nice to see the footage really big) or let clients see the edit.

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Here's the rub: NOTHING matches. My computer edit seems brighter, the Marshall production screen is more saturated, the HDTV is cool and a little washed-out looking.

Movie trailers and such look fine on my computer screen; it's just when looking at a "fairly" calibrated screen that I see differences.

SHOULD A COMPUTER MONITOR MATCH A PRODUCTION MONITOR or are there different standards for broadcast vs. PCs?

Generally, for web delivery I know devices out in the wild are all over the place, so I go for a look that's good on the production monitor and the computer screen; if I'm delivering for broadcast, I judge by the production monitor.

I guess I'm looking for general thoughts - if I get a Spyder/et al, can I expect my computer screen to match my production monitor more closely? Or are those very different standards?

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EXPERIENCE SHOWS that this sort of post will attract several level of answers, from a lurker who has yet to buy a camera ("I have XX monitor and it's real pretty") to someone in my boat taking a guess ("I tune my monitor with one eye and a sheet of Tri-Blue filter")(yeah, I've tried that) to someone who has actually dealt with this at a post-house level.

So I'll humbly ask the wild-guessers to abstain - I'd like to know how this is handled at a level closer to the post-house level (though I won't be spending thousands on a monitor). How does a pro address this for their home setup, what's the best value or approach for web delivery and clients who always say "wow, that's beautiful" but you'd like to be closer than horseshoes and hand grenades?

I've had numerous on-set discussion about this and there seems to be little consensus for reasonable color accuracy at the small-shop/one-man-band level.
 
i am a pro colorist, and my home set-up monitoring is a Sony LMD2450W fed from an AJA lutbox, that in turn is fed from a BMD output card, with a IdealLume biaslight and 18% grey wall behind the mon, dim room lighting

i use a probe and callibration software at work for the lutbox that feeds the Sony mon, it came out of front line use a year or two ago, but is still good enough for me to use in non critical work, like testing idea's and software out, or for jobs that wil be moved on to a real suite, i would never, and have never sent out a master from the Sony without checking and tweaking the show on another mon, in 2014 it's just not good enough anymore.... let alone 2016...

That is the minimum is would consider for real world use, asin when people pay you for gradeing accuratly and without delivery issues... at work i bounce between a Panasonic 60 series plasma, 1st gen Dreamcolor, Dolby PR4200 and a Christe2200 projector depending on what i'm working on, or what stage the project is at, a film often goes between several rooms and therfore monitors before mastering, and aside from the underlying differing tech, they all match very well... callibration is the key...
 
Dermot said:
... callibration is the key...
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Yes. And quality monitors.

If it's worth doing(And getting paid for especially), it's worth doing right.

My my two primary field monitors have both been professionally calibrated. And calibration is not feeding a monitor color bars, switching to blue-only and tweaking by eye. If you're talking about adjusting a consumer monitor to improve performance out of the box, yes, that will make a huge difference, but in the professional realm, you should be doing more.
 
This is a complex topic with internet video taking more of a role in delivery. In the past, all you had to worry about was TV or big screen. Each had professional, defined specs that you could aim for. Throw in YouTube and computer based imaging and the specs change.

The previous posters surely know more than me but I do know that traditional TV and computer color spaces are different. This shows more on certain hues like red but I see a difference between the computer monitor preview window and my broadcast monitor. Which do you trust? Both depending upon your delivery vehicle. I will generally do all of my color correcting and primary CC work looking at the broadcast monitor. I will then make separate output of the finished product looking at the computer preview window for internet purposes.

The short answer is there is no answer. Buy the best monitors you can afford and test, test and test your footage on multiple screens to dial them in. I painted the walls in my office 18% gray and lower the lights when focusing on color as well. I am just a micro business but I do the best I can with my resources.
 
Michael Carter said:
SHOULD A COMPUTER MONITOR MATCH A PRODUCTION MONITOR or are there different standards for broadcast vs. PCs?
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Different colorspaces. Web use is sRGB. HDTV is REC.709. QHD is REC.2020. A DCP wants the CIE XYZ colorspace. Etc. If your monitor can't show you the correct target colorspace, you can't do WYSIWYG.

That said, these colorspaces aren't all that different. You can generally get away with using anything you want for editing. But colorgrading generally wants the right colorspace. Or a lot of iteration.

EDIT: Seems there's a newish colorspace for projection called DCI-P3. An up and coming SMPTE standard from 2007.
 
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Best thing my (small) company did was to buy a Flanders Scientific monitor. Simply runs out of the mac via blackmagic mini monitor. It helps a great deal with getting consistent results across different mediums.

Calibrating computer monitors never worked for us.
 
Have to agree with the above.

I didn't have the cash at the time so like I usually do, I purchased used higher end broadcast monitors, and had a local tech calibrate them. But then almost all of my video work is for television. I also keep a waveform/vectorscope pulled up on my secondary 27" computer monitor to keep things legal.
 
As a side note, 2016 is a Olympics year.

In the past I have purchased 2 Panasonic broadcast monitors which were only used during the Olympics, for a substantial savings along with full new unit warranty.

Just something to think about.

Dave
 
Thanks guys -

And to be clear, most of my stuff is web delivery, corporate interview stuff, explainer videos, animation/motion graphics with footage, marketing things. It's more of a "this bugs me" deal. I haven't done a broadcast spot in some time, and my push is really more web videos.

On top of that, I still do some print gigs and sometimes those need accurate color - fashion/cosmetics. My workflow for that is based on press proofs and tweaking my monitor to match the proofs from a specific printer (most of which are digital presses now, so your "proof" is actually an extremely low quantity press run, like a couple sheets…)
 
Regarding a Spyder - this only applies to a computer monitor attached to your internal graphics card. So if your delivery is mainly for internet consumption, I would say a Spyder is very important to calibrate your computer screens.
 
When i do CC my colorists uses Flanders Scientific and i have 2 extra monitors behind him (one is Panasonic CC monitor another is some whatever crap monitor). That way colorists uses his skills and eyes and scopes to deliver the image and i'm the "average guy" on the street who confronts his assumptions.
In reality if you connect 3 different CC monitors and feed the same signal they ALL will look differently. So the name of the game is develop certain "average" eye so you know that when you are getting creative it might not look the way one intends on all monitors.
 
One big issue many Mac users miss is their display color space. Apple's default is 1.8 gamma, which doesn't match to any reference display standard. But you will find all kinds of options in the display settings menu. For web video you want to set it to SRGB. REC709 is an option too I think, been a while since I looked at the menu. We set Suzy's 2012 iMac to SRGB and use an SRGB ICC profile for her printer so her artwork photo prints pretty closely match the monitor. Though there are other issues with Quicktime, a lot of the video gamma shifts Mac users complain about come from the wrong monitor color space setting. SRGB and REC709 use the same color space but a slightly different gamma curve to compensate for the difference in legal data range. The differences compensate for YUV vs RGB encoding. Properly calibrated they should look pretty much identical. Most computer monitors come out of the box at least roughly calibrated for SRGB. Many like the LG 8-bit IPS monitor I use now have a fairly accurate SRGB factory calibration option in their setup menus. SRGB is the reference standard display color space for web video, computers, and mobile devices.
 
Bruce Watson said:
Different colorspaces. Web use is sRGB. HDTV is REC.709. QHD is REC.2020. A DCP wants the CIE XYZ colorspace. Etc. If your monitor can't show you the correct target colorspace, you can't do WYSIWYG.

That said, these colorspaces aren't all that different. You can generally get away with using anything you want for editing. But colorgrading generally wants the right colorspace. Or a lot of iteration.

EDIT: Seems there's a newish colorspace for projection called DCI-P3. An up and coming SMPTE standard from 2007.
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I don't have enough knowledge to contribute to this thread, but this reminded me of this.
 
If you are delivering for web Id stick with crappy monitors.. just like your viewers.

Just get a feel between using your scopes and checking the footage on a few devices.

Personally I have an Imac - which seems to correlate with my scopes - and a shitto dell which crushes the blacks.

S
 
Bruce Watson said:
Different colorspaces. Web use is sRGB. HDTV is REC.709. QHD is REC.2020. A DCP wants the CIE XYZ colorspace. Etc. If your monitor can't show you the correct target colorspace, you can't do WYSIWYG.

That said, these colorspaces aren't all that different. You can generally get away with using anything you want for editing. But colorgrading generally wants the right colorspace. Or a lot of iteration.

EDIT: Seems there's a newish colorspace for projection called DCI-P3. An up and coming SMPTE standard from 2007.
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P3 is the second most common viewing option after 709, has been for a long time.... XYZ is distrubution only, P3 defines the common working gamut and whitepoint to create a a show accuratly for XYZ delivery.

There is a massive diffrence between 709, P3 and XYZ... absolutly massive, 2020 is theirotial as there no monitor on earth in jan 2016 that can display it

but the diffrences between 709 and sRGB are minimal, fortunatly for me i'm not in a position to have to make such compromises, but if compromises have to be made, that seems like the least harmful

bear in mind that aside from a few codec's (ProRez444, DNxHR444) most / all the rest will be looking for 709 YUV as the input, not sRGB, and will be trying to display sRGB on decode if you are on a computer monitor, working in 709 for web delivery makes some sense when you consider that feeding an incorrect image to the Qt encoder is going to create a similarly incorect image when decoded
 
morgan_moore said:
If you are delivering for web Id stick with crappy monitors.. just like your viewers.

Just get a feel between using your scopes and checking the footage on a few devices.
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I like this because it gives a good reason for doing something that I do mainly because of $$$$.
 
A lot of broadcast work is completed on crappy monitors but no one likes to talk about it and there's a lot of crappy broadcast monitors. The new iMac wide gamut screen is stunning and I dare say a shed load better than a lot of broadcast monitors still in circulation.

The benefit of broadcast monitors comes into play when you're working with interlace sources for broadcast and having the ability to check field order especially when working with archive clips. Broadcast monitors with broadcast videocards are preferred due to working in > 8 bits which has tended to be the main limitation working with computer monitors for colour correction. OS X El Capitan now (finally) utilises 10 bits with supported Apps and hardware.

There will always be a need for high end anal attention to colour management and checking broadcast legality of the signal but the colour quality of "crappy" computer monitors is so good now and that the line will continue to blur much higher up the food chain until there will be absolutely no distinction between a broadcast monitor or computer monitor only what inputs it supports.
 
Nirv said:
A lot of broadcast work is completed on crappy monitors but no one likes to talk about it and there's a lot of crappy broadcast monitors. The new iMac wide gamut screen is stunning and I dare say a shed load better than a lot of broadcast monitors still in circulation.
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Nirv;

i have alot of respect for you, so it's a rare day i find grounds for disagreement with you, but this is one....

i do alot of broadcast work, in my own suite, and in other suites, i've just revised my CV for the year, and my headcount for gradeing / finishing is 18 feature fiims & 16 TV movies in the last decade, so that's one every 90 days more or less for the last 10 years... and that's not even looking at the series and comericals, that list goes for pages and pages more...

not one of those was done with a crappy mon, or an uncallibrated mon, or even on a mon with dodgey callibration... actualy i've not seen a crappy boradcast mon in years, since the last BVM32D was put to rest...

lately i've been working with;
Sony 4k 30" BVM-OLED
Christe 2200
Dolby PR4200
Sony25" HD BVM-OLED
55" broadacast series Pana Plasma with an AJA LUTbox

not a crappy mon in sight anywhere really, and we have the callibration reports to prove it

When you are delivering to networks the price of a crap mon is far far far too high, and a iMac's retnia screen fall into the "crap" list unfortuantly
 
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There is a misunderstanding going on here. You don't use quality calibrated monitor with an assumption that the image will look that great on all consumer monitors out there. You do it so you can make adjustments to the footage based on what's actually there in the first place and only when you have your master you can sleep peacefully knowing that if someone is seeing crappy image it's because of THEIR crappy gear or THEIR crappy settings. Imagine the other way around: make your master on a crappy monitor and then you can never know if your end client sees things the way they see because of their crappy gear or YOURS.
 
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