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Color correction- Video monitor vs LCD
Ok from what I understand there is a color difference in what LCD screens will display as opposed to standard tube tvs or monitors. In doing some color correction on a football highlight reel i noticed that the picture looks great on my preview video monitor but horribly dark on the Apple flat screen monitor. Not knowing whether this reel would be played more often on a tube tv or flat panel, I continued to color correct according to the video monitor.
When I finally finished and burned it to a DVD, it looked great on the video monitor but dark on an LCD. The strange thing is that, although it was darker and worse looking on the LCD, it didn’t look as bad as it did on the Apple flat screen. (This I think may be attributed to the gamma differences used by Mac versus PC.)
My question is, is there a good middle ground for color correction between flat panel displays and tube displays? Is there a good way to achieve a descent looking picture on both types of displays or do I need to just pick a medium to color adjust for and go with it?
The only other thing I would know to do would be to burn 2 versions, one corrected for tube and one for flat panels, but that is wildly inefficient!
Chad Mayeux
Metter, GA
Pineland Technology Solutions
Videographer/ Digital Artist -
5 Replies
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How is your video monitor calibrated?
How is your LCD Calibrated?
These are key. Just having a video monitor alone doesn’t mean you’re looking at proper video quality. You need to calibrate is properly using Bars and if available, a Blue Only mode.
If this project is only going to be shown on the Web, you need to make sure your computer monitors are calibrated correctly for Mac or PC Gamma and not too dark or too bright. I have my primary computer monitor set up to pretty much match my broadcast monitor so they look very close.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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ok that sounds awesome. How would I go about calibrating the monitors? Is there an article or video tutorial that would explain it? I can get color bars but i am not too sure about all blue mode.
Chad Mayeux
Metter, GA
Pineland Technology Solutions
Videographer/ Digital Artist -
There is a product called Spyder3 Pro that I have on my wish list. If you have the budget you may want to look into it. The whole Spyder 3 combo with printer calibration is around $600 or so I believe.
A normal CRT TV monitor will not give you much control for calibration.
I am not very proficient at calibrating my own monitors and lcd’s yet. My 28″ Hanns-G doesn’t even appear to have much room for calibration. I use it strictly for the workspace it offers.
But Walter has it right when he says “these are key”. I may not know how to do it yet but all work will be fruitless until they are calibrated.
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If the LCD does not have a “Blue” mode, I’m not really sure how to help with that. You would need some sort of a probe I guess.
We’re looking at some TV Logic and FSI LCD displays for our shop and each can be calibrated with probes. The probes are incredibly expensive so I’ll be having the engineers come to the shop once in a while to just set it up themselves.
There is something out there called a Spyder for LCD displays that is ok, not great, but ok. It’s better for photographers than moving video. Kind of a waste of money as I think you can calibrate by eye better than using one of those. I honestly don’t know anyone who has made a decent probe that’s under $2,000 for folks to use. That would be something nice to see.
Adobe has some pretty good calibration tools and even the Apple Display controls have pretty good calibration tools.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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Can you post some names of these higher end probes?
I am curious now 🙂
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