Re: Diplomatic approach to clients with badly set-up monitors

I'm confused. You want to offer your clients a monitor set-up utility so that your videos look consistently good/correct on their PC monitors but you admit that between your own PC monitors the videos can look "too-light, perfect, and muddy."

If you can't adjust your own PC monitors to get a consistent, correct look for your videos how can you expects or complain that your clients PC monitors aren't setup correctly?

I've adjusted a couple of clients video/TV monitors using a pen-size NewTek Calibar test pattern generator and they've never had a problem with it and enjoyed watching me go through/explain the process. I've never adjusted their computer monitors but I have told a couple clients that it won't look like that once it airs on TV or is played on a video monitor. I even told one client that I would adjust the video to make it look good on their specific monitor but would make no guarantees that it would look good on anyone else's. They decided not to have me do that.

For a recent TV commercial I did, the client saw all the revisions during the editing process on their computer monitors via a client web page and they also had a very washed out video projector and projection screen setup in their meeting room that I had to use when I showed them a demo. I knew I didn't want to show them the final commercial on that video projector again so I brought my Sony PVM 13" broadcast video monitor (only two people were going to be watching it) and a nice Pioneer DVD recorder that has the correct 7.5 IRE black output and showed it to them on that. I also had some Klipsch powered speakers for the sound.

After viewing the TV commercial the marketing guy immediately said how much better that looked than on their monitors during the revision process. They were happy and I left with a check in my hands.

Randy