Calibrating for video accuracy

[Eric Olson]

Originally Posted by Josh Bass

We're goin' old school here, but I'm finding a lot of validation for the practically ancient Sony PVM 14L5 . . . These thing are a couple hundred dollars on ebay

That's a bargain! LOL, perhaps you should get one for your living room, too, so you eyes can get used to how commerically produced content looks with real SMPTE phosphor. Seriously, it would be great to hear how this works out. How do you plan to connect it to your computer?

[Josh Bass]

Well it's a true production monitor, so from what I've read you just need a card/ i/o box that has SDI or component out (I would also swear there exists an HDMI to Component adaptor cable, so that would work too, I would think). I haven't looked into the "which i/o box do I get" side of things yet. Just got a a mid-2011 Imac so that'll limit the options somewhat, and I've also read certain programs don't support certain boxes. . .so depending on whether I want to monitor from After Effects, Premiere, FCP, or Davinci Lite, might not be able to use the same box. Maybe I'm wrong on that. I'd like to be.

[Josh Bass]

Here's one:

Sony 14L5 PVM 14L5 14" SDI BKM 120D Card Multiformat DTV Monitor PAL NTSC | eBay

[Paul Cronin]

I would not want to try and CC on a 14" monitor.

[Josh Bass]

Theres a 20" version of that monitor too. Though a 20" crt is the size of a house in some neighborhoods.

[Ivan Castell]

Originally Posted by Sareesh Sudhakaran

You don't need an I/O card only for display. A 10-bit GPU is good enough, like Firepro and Quadro. Displayport is perfectly fine.

And by the way, the conversions from Y'CbCr to RGB and back are clearly defined mathematically, with interpretations left to the user (you). If a manufacturer cannot do it correctly, they've made a simple math mistake. I have yet to see this in reality. If you're having color problems, or have heard of problems by other people, then something else was wrong.

Most consumer grade monitors can display 90% or more of Rec. 709 (sRGB), but a broadcast monitor should be capable of 100% - otherwise what's the point of spending extra?

My problem is that on an imac you can't have a 10-bit GPU, you're left with the onboard graphic card. Mine it's a ATI Radeon HD 4850, which should (specs: ATI Radeon? HD 4850 Graphics Specifications) be able to handle 10-bit, but Mac os X doesn't support it.

Anyway, it seems that CS6 can deliver an accurate YUV to RGB and so do Avid MC6. If the Dreamcolor is well calibrated then it should be accurate connected directly via displayport.

For Color I've been pointed to these colorsync profiles:
Charbon-Studio profiles for Color

What I don't know (because I don't have received yet the monitor) it's that FCP, Premiere or Color will see the computer monitor connected via displayport as a video monitor or a computer monitor.

[Josh Bass]

That's neat. I have an Imac too. Unfortunately that monitor I'm looking at (the CRT) doesn't have any connection compatible with displayport/etc. So I'll need an i/o box.

[Josh Bass]

Ok. Research tells me the boxes I'm looking at right now (since getting the SDI connection option will cause me to spend way more than I want to), for component outputs into that CRT monitor (and HDMI down the line perhaps), are the Blackmagic Intensity extreme ($300) and the Matrox MXO2 mini/T ($500-ish). These will both connect to the thunderbolt port on the Imac.

Matrox is more money, but has calibration utilities. HOwever, I've read that calibration utility is useless (an opinion, maybe someone on here can chime in?) Blackmagic is cheaper but barebones as far as that kind of option goes.

Don't much care about h264 encoding, etc. etc. This is just for video monitoring.

[Shaun Roemich]

LOTS of reported compatibility issues with the BMD Thunderbolt line... your mileage may vary and it may be a problem free install... I had an issue hooking up my Matrox MXO2LE and called Matrox, got someone on the phone in less than 3 minutes midday and had the issue resolved in less than ten (their online documentation didn't specifically state which drivers I needed for my application).

I own a number of BMD devices but won't use them for I/O.

[Josh Bass]

sadly for my wallet that seems to be the consensus. upside is the included calibration software, provided it works.