[Craig Sommerer]

Bob,

Please reread my post. The Sony PVM and LMD are 2 different lines of monitors. In one instance I made casual mention that at this year’s NAB I saw the new PVM monitors and was quite pleased and surprised with the product considering the debacle of their LMD and BVM lcd products. The PVM is a superior product to the FSI monitors but it also has a much superior price point.

I mentioned the LMD only because I compared it to the TV Logic line of products, which you had put on par with a Cine-tal in your first post. It’s my belief that the only line of critical monitoring worse than the TV Logic line is indeed the Sony LMD. This is what I said as I thought it was widely known that the LMD line was a horrible, cynical joke of a product. Perhaps I’m wrong?

Back to Flanders Scientific; I am cynical by nature, doubly so by a meaningless career spent in live tv so I read reviews and hold them at arms length until I can make my own decisions of a product. I saw the Flander’s monitors at NAB and even with the pitiful viewing experience of their booth, I have to admit that I while I wasn’t floored, I also wouldn’t discount them. I said they are a good product for the price point and until such time comes around that I can work with one, hopefully this fall, that is all the endorsement I will offer.

My very poor opinions of the TV Logic and Sony LMD products mentioned in this thread do come from previous work experience. I should also mentioned that I have had great fortune to do some very minor work on a daVinci Resolve with Cine-tal monitoring: it ain’t nothing to sneeze at all.

[Craig Sommerer]

As a general observation to Bob’s first comment, I would never put TV Logic and Cine-tal in the same sentence other than to compare polar opposites when it comes to the quality of the image.

I hate it when I have to agree with you, Walter, and this time I do agree with you, but not completely. The FSI monitors are good for the money but not as a complete and total CRT replacement.

I think for a CRT replacement, we’ll have to shift our monitoring paradigm of what is good and what isn’t, perhaps when I don’t have too look through a monitor’s ND screen to see decent gamma and black. Perhaps the paradigm of quality imaging in broadcast/cable tv has changed completely and in that rodeo quality doesn’t matter anymore?

I recently saw the Sony PVM lcd monitors and quite honestly, much better than the FSI, but true to Sony form, these monitors come with big dollar signs and then if you actually want to use them, you have to shell out more big dollars for the input cards.

I recently had to work with 3 TV Logic monitors again, shading 7 Thomson LDK6000 Worldcams. The only lcd monitor WORSE on the market is a Sony LMD. I hate the TV Logic line of monitors.

[Craig Sommerer]

I guess I wasn’t clear. I was not an exhibitor at this year’s NAB, I was an attendee and quite honestly, my experience this year was one of the best I’ve had in many years due to the decreased attendance.

[Craig Sommerer]

Mark,

I’m sorry to hear of the experience but I’m really not surprised at all. I had the day off, I’d registered and gosh darn it, I’d found far more important things to do in my house, like watching some freshly applied paint dry.

I live in Chicago, I know the small venue they had the booked and I wasn’t up for a constant sales pitch. I work in live television, last thing I care about is a sales pitch for the latest and greatest heavily compressed, pixel-shifted 15k resolution ultra-hd yet proprietary prosumer piece of gear that is the new miracle tool for the next great American documentary.

I am sorry of hear of your experience and now I’m really glad I didn’t waste my time on the train to go. NAB was great this year. Lots of people believed the hype of the demise of the trade show and I could talk to any product manager I needed to talk to, no waiting. I’m hoping the hype continues on to next year.

[Craig Sommerer]

I was making this much more difficult than it really is. You did spur me in the right direction, the problem I was having is I was creating a separate shape layer and trying to use that shape to animate the Particle playground cannon.

On a whim and I should have known this, I used the shape tool on the solid layer to create a Mask Shape path on the solid. Easy to use this as the cannon animator now. However, if a path operand is used on a shape, I guess it’s easiest to use auto-trace to still create the mask shape to use as the motion path.

[Craig Sommerer]

Todd,

Sorry for the extremely tardy thank you to your reply.

Yes, I had gotten this to work quite easily with bezier paths. Let me more specific, I’d like to use a parametric path created by the shape tools as a motion path instead of the a hand drawn path from the pen tool. I thought I’d used a much easier method in the past other than using auto-trace on the layer.

Thanks.

[Craig Sommerer]

I hope that the display is adjustable as I find there is a TON of wasted space and information in this product so far. All I want is YRGB parade and a vectorscope with the abilty to zoom and place them where I want. I could get by with a 12 inch display perfectly. I’m really hoping that this becomes a viable alternative to the Tektronix rasterizers in the future.

[Craig Sommerer]

I have to agree completely with Mr. Eisen on this subject; don’t do anything save fix any “illegal” highlights, maybe some minor enhancement or some selective blurring of skin contours – stage lighting can appear very harsh in video.

Theatrical lighting designers do not design for video or film they design for the human eye. If you knew ahead of time and had access to the lighting designer, you would have wanted to consult with them to design the lighting cues to be much more video friendly. If you start messing around you’ll very soon find yourself painting yourself into a hole with no way out.

[Craig Sommerer]

I have used both the DT-V24L1U and the DT-V24L3DU, separately and side by side in several different jobs and contexts. If used them both for post color work and both for on-set camera shading. The JVC monitors are visually very stunning, I think they do show the truth, as much as flat panel technology this cheap can display. I’d never compare them to something like an eCinema DPX. My main complaints which keeps me from purchasing or recommending the JVC products are the screen and the viewing angle, or lack thereof.

The glossy screen will reflect things from the next county over, even in an enclosed, controlled environment. In a control room with all sorts of little colored LED equipment lights, it’s darn near impossible to keep any sort of reflection off that blasted glossy screen.

The viewing angle sweet spot is the size of a postage stamp. I’ve literally been cheek to jowel with clients and producers while watching an edit or a live cut. Even if you move a couple degrees off axis, you’ll see a severe degradation in color imaging.

Beyond these limitations that I see, the D3 is a great monitor, certainly better than models from TV Logic that I currently find are no better than the first Sony LMD products.

[Craig Sommerer]

I used one on a job to color a 13 episode show in 9 days.

I also used 2 of these on a 3 week job this past fall.

It does make nice images. A little noisy in the shadows. However, the highly glossy screen needs a severely controlled room to cut any reflections and the off axis viewing is dismal; the sweet spot is about the size of a postage stamp. Imagine a you and client, literally cheek to cheek.

Like any flat screen at the moment, it just is not worth the money. My opinion.