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Got my new Panasonic 42 pro plasma up and tweaked in..
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I would love to have a cinetal davio to ensure a true Rec.709. Sadly it is not in the budget at this time..
My set up has been tweaked in by my eye against a calibrated crt. Lets just say its very close.
I cant get my head around using the davio to make a true rec709 and doing something that the plasma, lcd or dlp cannot do. It is not really helping how it looks in the real world.
That being said I would love to have the new Dolby with a davio for daily proof that the thing is not drifting and I am seeing the same images every day. So I fire up my crt and my plasma and check it as much as possible with my eye.. “How dare eye”I would however go for a set of panels before that purchase 🙂
Darin Wooldridge
Freelance Colorist / Technical Strategist
818-653-3918-cell
dwooldridge@mac.com
check me out at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Davinci-Resolve-Colorist/117363011609028?ref=…. -
You can get REC 709 by hiring a decent ISF calibrator. Doesn’t a Davio cost $6000?
twitter.com/illyalaney
Motion Design, Color, Editing
SWGC Incorporated -
Once you add the software libraries yes. Thing is with Davio you can also load film LUTs, D-CINEMA (P3) etc So you get a lot functionality.
Tony Manolikakis
Rev13 Films -
For the $6k the Davio is I would tend towards buying a X-Rite Hubble probe and Lightspace cms ( https://www.lightillusion.com/cubebuilder.htm ) or Cinespace which will allow for calibrating monitors and building lut’s for various profiles. I know you can build and load 3d luts into the HD-Link display product how about the Decklink 3D does it have a loadable LUT? or is anyone using a Display lut in Resolve itself and does it mean a performance hit at all on mac?
-Rob-
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I just thought I’d throw my two cents in as I’ve been wrestling with the Panny Pro 42″ for two months now to get it calibrated. Let me just say that if you want it to be a color critical reference grade monitor, no ISF calibrator in the world will be be able to get it to REC 709 specs unless you employ a LUT box or video equalizer equivalent to handle the necessary video processing. So the Davio would be one option, though expensive. I tried the HDLink Pro in conjunction with Lightspace CMS and though the HDLink Pro is a great 2K scaler for DVI/HDMI the color utility controls only allow you to effectively affect white balance and not fine tune hue, saturation and luminance/brightness. With the Lightspace which is by the way an excellent product and Steve Shaw’s customer service is second to none, it is not a good profiler for plasmas, great for LCD’s, CRT’s and projection but Panny Plasma is very tricky and it doesn’t generate the correct profile to then convert to a REC709 LUT to then feed to the HDLink Pro box.
The solution that I’ve finally arrived at, as surprising as this may sound is Spectracal’s Calman, the same piece of software that the ISF and THX certified calibrators use. When you use this in conjunction with AV Foundry’s VideoEQ Pro box you can successfully get the Panny Plasma within REC709 space and achieve color critical specs. The only caveat is VideoEQ Pro only supports HDMI for the time being though it does support 10 bit deep color, if you want 10 bit via HD-SDI you’d need an HDMI to HD-SDI converter as mentioned in other threads. VideoEQ Pro may get an SDI interface in the future as they are beginning to cater to post houses but cross our fingers. Be advised I’ve spent many grueling hours and sleepless nights to achieve color critical accuracy and so I hope this is helpful for those considering making the purchase of a Panny or to help those struggling to calibrate their Panny monitor. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of information out there regarding this subject with the Panny Plasmas.
To be quite honest with you (this coming from one championing the Panny Plasma) it isn’t what it’s all cracked up to be as a reference monitor as detailed in this forum. Sure it’s got deep blacks and amazing dynamic range but unless one is willing to make the extra investment in hardware and take the extra time to calibrate to color critical you’d be better off with an FSI or equivalent grading monitor already calibrated. The biggest advantage though over other grade 1 monitors is as mentioned deep blacks, large dynamic range, 10 bit monitoring and its 42″ inch size, thought not more of a cost effective solution then other grading monitors.
Here’s what you will need and they can all be purchased from Spectracal with the exception of the plasma:
1) 42″ Panny Plasma
2) Xrite Hubble Probe (or equivalent), contact probes not good for reading plasmas
3) Calman* (professional license)
4) AV Foundry VideoEQ Pro** Requires Windows XP or greater
That can all cost between $5K and $6K at best to get a grade 1 monitor with the Panny Plasma.
Cheers,
Denver Riddle -
For anyone interested here’s the chart results from a pre and post calibrated Panasonic consumer plasma. This is for the 50″ G25 which runs about $1400 – $1500.
https://www.tweaktv.com/images/stories/pansonicg25.pdf
Unless I’m mistaken, the post calibration is pretty much spot on. I don’t see much of a point besides i/o to get a Pro Plasma anymore.
twitter.com/illyalaney
Motion Design, Color, Editing
SWGC Incorporated -
Curious… It’s shocking that the consumer display is that spot on after calibration, which appears to have the THX calibration feature that the professional series lack. The observation that TweakTV did however make is:
Color accuracy in the THX mode is excellent. The primary and secondary colors measured nearly spot on to the Rec 709 specifications… Color decoding is accurate. The one area of color fidelity that is not perfect and needs correction is the grayscale, which measured significantly minus blue. This will render dark grays a greenish red, which was also an issue with last year’s G10, G15, and V10 series panels.
There is also some other perceivable errors according to the charts in the area of gamma and luminance in the red and green channel. Though not significant but critical to doing color work. That is if you want it to be a grade 1 reference monitor.
So my conclusion is I’m blown away by how close this monitor is after calibration, much better than professional series. Though I would still highly recommend the VideoEQ Pro and Calman which will allow you to dial it in perfectly (correct minus blue in grayscale, luminance in red and green channel and hone in gamma perfectly to 2.2). The errors I did mention are off enough on the chart (above 3) that they are errors the human eye will perceive and thus not grade 1 but it wouldn’t take much tweaking with VideoEQ Pro to fix those errors. With professional series it takes a lot of adjustments with the VideoEQ Pro to bring up to grade 1. So I think that perhaps the consumer would be a better buy than the professional series.
Such a disappointment from Panasonic (depending on which way you look at it) that the professional series are lagging behind the consumer displays. I would seriously suggest that anyone considering buying this display to also buy just the VideoEQ Pro and have it professionally calibrated with Calman.
So for $2,500 (display + VideoEQ Pro)=Grade 1 Reference monitor. Not bad 🙂
Cheers,
Denver Riddle -
Plasma white point will drift even if you burn it in for 200 hours or whatever it is. Also there is bound to be a variation amongst different units especially in the consumer variety. So using some kind of box and frequent calibration seems necessary. And personally, I/O is a big deal. I feel the need – rightly or wrongly – to monitor HD-SDI. Still feel we need something like a Davio and pro I/O.
Tony Manolikakis
Rev13 Films -
Agreed, I think a professional probe and some sort of CMS in a facility or small boutique is needed to regularly maintain color accuracy. There’s nothing like the feeling of knowing and not guessing that what you’re looking at is calibrated.
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Pretty interesting stuff, I have been using a Panny 11UK with a SDI in card and the 11 series really needed the SDI card to get 10bits. Maybe I will move the 11 onto a telecine and get a 25 with the Video EQ for the Resolve.
One of the attractive things about Lightspace is support of Film and DCI space.
-Rob-
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