Monitor calibration for Premiere CS6

[Angelo Lorenzo]

It’s a touchy subject.

Firstly, your monitor needs to be calibrated by some external system (X-Rite, Spyder Pro, etc). Most computer monitors will correctly display SRGB color at 6500K with 2.2 gamma.

Rec 709, the color standard for HD material is vastly similar. The gamma is slightly different so you may see some recommendations for 2.35 or 2.4 (the transform curve isn’t continuous so these are average gammas, thus some conflicting recommendations).

With Premiere and Speedgrade, the interfaces are designed to be on sRGB monitors. You should, for the most part, have a what-you-see-is-what-you-get in this situation.

If you’re color correcting for Standard Def NTSC you’ll have to deal with some different issues. This is Rec 601 stuff and it uses different primary colors and a different luma point than HD material and, if you choose the American flavor of NTSC, you’ll have to deal with a different black point.

While in practice your NTSC material should be 80% fine (the changes from 601 to 709 were to fix some issues with certain color combos and other academic reasons), I don’t know how successful you’d be at passing a broadcast QA check unless you know how to use your scopes very well.

The benefits of a real broadcast monitor are, of course, more standardized inputs, better color reproduction in general, gamma switching, colorspace switching (in really high end monitors), built in scopes, etc. You also have the ability to properly watch interlaced footage so you can detect field errors.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Also, you don’t want to load your monitor profile into your color managed programs. It’s a transform to bring your particular monitor to, usually, sRGB standard. The monitor profile is usually applied by the calibration software, your operating system, or your GPU driver at system startup since it’s a transform only for your monitor output.

If you apply it to footage, it’ll just throw things out of whack because you’re overcompensating.

ColorSync is just how Mac manages color profiles between programs, not too much mojo to it.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Will Thompson]

Thanks Angelo. If they’re designed for sRGB, is there any advantage to using a wide-gamut monitor? And would there be a difference in accuracy compared to a fully color managed app like FCPX – or to the same prosumer monitor but attached to an external IO (Matrox mini, DeckLink, etc)?

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Wide gamut monitors are designed more for print proofing. You get more if not close to all of the Adobe 1998 color space which Rec 709 (video) doesn’t expand into. Rec 709 is sRGB; all the primaries and white point are the same, but the gamma (contrast curve, basically) is ever so slightly different.

Wide gamut monitors are more professional overall, you’ll see less banding in gradations, they’ll be easier and more consistent to calibrate and so on so it’s not a total wash.

As for if the output will match… it’s debatable since there are so many hardware factors. In my experience I’ll say you’ll get a match with some inconsistencies. Depending on how you connect your monitor, say DVI, you’re limited to 8bit color. If you connect through something like a Matrox Mini to HDMI you’ll get a 10bit signal. Your monitor may be 8bit (most are) but some have internal processing that will use the extra bit depth to dither other colors – your monitor ends up making up some subtle colors that aren’t there in the product but you won’t see huge shifts.

Color management is weird, period.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Will Thompson]

Color management is weird, period.

Weird and quite complex, it seems!

I have a Dell U2410, which is wide gamut and 10-bit (8-bit panel with AFRC and 12-bit 3D LUT) over DisplayPort. If I had a 10-bit capable graphics card and connect it directly to the display via DP, is there any disadvantage over hardware monitoring solutions? Would I want to leave the display in sRGB mode, or does that matter (I calibrate my displays with an i1Display Pro)?

To keep cost down, I will likely not buy a broadcast monitor and instead get the 27″ version of this Dell, and I’m curious if there is any reason to also buy an IO box, or if the money would be just as well spent on a decent pro graphics card.

(Sorry for the barrage of questions)

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Hmm, little fun fact: Speedgrade’s video output on your computer monitor does not respect monitor calibration .icc files in Windows 7 or Mac OSX. https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1035403?tstart=0

I’m not certain if that is the case or not with helper applications like the Spyder Pro’s loader application that applies a profile after start up.

In terms of using an I/O box vs a graphics card, you’ll probably get near the same results but it’s all a trade off. I/O boxes obviously have the advantage of capturing, they have more output types, you can switch more easily between video resolutions.

One of the big gotchas is that if you use an I/O box you’ll need two monitors: one for your system and one connected strictly to the I/O as video monitoring.

If you do go the dreamcolor route, yes keep it in sRGB mode.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Will Thompson]

I plan on using two monitors, but I wanted to avoid purchasing an IO box, since I don’t need capture or additional outputs. It sounds like this will work.

But it seems that OSX is limited to 8-bit, so Windows would be the only option for software-only 10-bit:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2747703?start=0&tstart=0

https://discussions.apple.com/message/19228496#19228496

This is pretty shocking, considering the graphics card manufacturers advertise 10-bit support in the Mac versions. Evidently, in order to get 10-bit in OSX you must use external IO, even for Photoshop!

Thank you for all the info, Angelo! Hopefully others will find this thread useful.

-Will