Denver Riddle
Forum Replies Created
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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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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 -
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 -
Yes the issue is with the 2010 Mac Pro’s the lever that locks into the cards in the PCI slots also locks into the PCI fan module. It’s quite finicky so if this operation is performed incorrectly the fan won’t be properly connected to the power. You should verify that the PCI fan is operating after installation. Other than that, temperatures are back where they should be. It’s amazing how much heat will be generated if one fan isn’t working.
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Okay solved! My apologies to all if you found this thread a waste of time. Maybe it’s just on the new 2010 Mac Pro but the PCI fan is a bit finicky when reinstalling after installed cards, the lever that closes on the cards is also part of the the fan housing and so if the fan is not properly installed then the lever closed there won’t be an electrical contact.
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PCI fan not spinning, must figure out why, standbye. This could actually be the heating issue.
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If your Quicktime player gives you preferences see if there is an option in there for using Final Cut Pro gamma, this would be a checkbox.
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Okay it appears I have seemed to resolve the issue so I thought I would share my solution in case others experience a similar issue, BTW I’m running on a 2010 Mac Pro.
What I’ve discovered as I opened up the box is that with the Decklink HD Extreme installed in slot 3 just above the GT 120 in slot 2 that the Decklink inhibits the GT120 to vent properly, it covers half of the GT 120 fan and the vent holes at the other end of the card. What’s particularly frustrating is that BMD team hasn’t seemed to notice this problem and advises that the Decklink be installed here in slot 3.
Solution. I installed the Decklink in slot 4 to give GT 120 adequate breathing room to exhaust its heat. (Only 3 cards for the time being). Just as a precaution I also left the empty slot back cover open in slot 3.
Further implications would be if I wanted to add another card like a RAID card or RedRocket, I might end up back in the same situation with it overheating.
It would be good to get a response from BlackMagic.
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Ronald your observation is very helpful! Are you running HDMI or dual link HD-SDI? As noted on another forum and in the PDF specs of the 20U off the Panasonic website if you look at the chart on the third page it indicates that it doesn’t support 1080P 24fps but that it does with the dual link HD-SDI terminal board. It’s believed that this is purposefully disabled over the HDMI in an attempt to get you to buy the expensive terminal board. Please advise 🙂
Cheers,
Denver Riddle -
It was Peter Chamberlain, 1/4 down this thread that said:
Currently the HDMI output from Resolve is YUV 10-bit.
RGB 10 bit is available from the DeckLink HD-SDI in dual link and 3G standards.
PeterThat concerns me a little bit if Resolve doesn’t support 10 bit RGB over HDMI, only YUV. My situation is I already own a 42″ 11th generation and now it seems I’m still debating over purchasing dual link HD-SDI or buy a new monitor for about the same price and try my luck with HDMI, it’s good that it seems to do 10 bit but the YUV issue is my only hangup if that is indeed correct. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a decision soon.
Not sure how the AJA Hi5 fits into the scenario, please advise.