Re: Highend tools - lower end budget

Joe,

To keep things in perspective:

In the real world, there isn't really such thing as accurate color. The color of objects depends on the light hitting it. You never get the same light hitting the object... it might be very warm during golden hour or very blue during overcast days. So accurate color is really a guess (and our brain seems to make pretty good guesses). (Metamerism is another reason why there isn't accurate color- you can google that.) So there is a certain degree of color inaccuracy you can get away with. Current video systems do that all the time (e.g. film, video cameras aren't perfectly color accurate).

2- QC reports I've seen are extremely nitpicky (title safe warnings/comments if anything touches 10%), but they don't ever comment on color accuracy issues.

3- Here are some things you can do for better monitoring:

A- Match the white point of all the light sources in your room. Your eye will kind of "auto white balance" to whatever you're looking at... you don't want that white balance to drift around (since a freeze frame will look different depending on what you've been looking at).

The test for this is easy... just display a black&white image on your monitors. Let your white balance settle in on one light source, and then flick your eyes at another light source (i.e. overhead lighting, other monitors). Does it appear white?

Block out sunlight, and get rid of incandescent lights. Fluorescent lights with a color temp of 6500 of reasonably high CRI should be close to your computer monitors. (And you can set their white point in colorsync somewhere.)

While you're at it, check that the black and white image truly appears black and white.

B- Don't grade in the dark. If the white balance is slowly drifting over the length of the entire program, you won't spot that. (Though some colorists do grade in a completely dark suite so that begs the question... how accurate does your monitoring really need to be).

C- Don't use a consumer TV. They tend to do wacky image processing, which can screw you up. Like crappy de-interlacing and scaling (any image scaling will cause artifacts).

D- The Rec. 601 and 709 standards were established when the CRT was the reference monitor and don't specify what the CRT's transfer curve is (gamma is an approximation of the transfer curve). Ideally they would specify what the ideal transfer curve is but this hasn't happened yet. Most broadcast-grade LCDs seem to use a gamma of 2.22, while a grade-1 CRT has a gamma of roughly 2.35. So hopefully this discrepancy works itself out. But it doesn't seem to matter too much.

E- Make sure contrast isn't increased (OS X unfortunately allows you to do this). Command, apple, cloverleaf, shift + < or > is the shortcut I think (this is likely wrong; just check the keyboard shortcuts under preferences).

F- Check that dark scenes and black levels won't be screwed up. Some users' systems will brighten up dark images. Power DVD on the PC does this (it can also do a split screen to show you original versus so-called ""enhanced"").