Good advice from all... I will throw in my late two cents here...
In each of our edits suites we have a reasonably big (not gigantic, 42") plasma monitor for clients. However the editor has LCD monitors for computer and HD, and good old-fashioned CRT for NTSC monitoring.
I find the CRT critical for NTSC, for reasons including the one that you mentioned... sometimes stuff can knock your socks off on the plasmas or LCDs, but definitely reveal problems on the CRT. But if it looks good on the CRT, it's almost
always going to look good on the others. And since we mostly do broadcast commercials, they have to look good the way that
most people are going to see them... which at this point is still CRTs.
I'm reminded of a story I've told before... years ago I was visiting a zillion-dollar recording studio in Nashville. The audio wiz was mixing an album for some group (I don't remember who, but somone well known). He was sitting there behind a million-dollar board probably twelve feet long, surrounded by banks of huge monitors that would make any audiophile drool. He would make countless tiny tweaks with the sliders, diffferences he could hear, but I of course couldn't. Then every so often he would kill the room audio and reach arond to turn up the sound on a little crappy 12" black and white TV set from Wal-Mart. I'm sure I had a puzzled look... but he quickly explained that the song had to sound just as good as possible on the TV's little 3" speaker, that a lot
more people would be hearing it
that way from the song's video on MTV or VH1 than would be hearing it from monitors like he had. He had to make sure it was adequate for the
weakest link, as well as the best one.
Sometimes CRTs are a bit like that.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
