Picking the Right Grading Monitor!

okay so now we're going to cover the very very fun topic of monitors the number one question that all colorists get asked is what's the best monitor now this is a really hard question to answer because you know it really depends on a ton of different things kind of like asking someone you know what's the best car for driving you know it depends on your budget it depends on what you're grading it depends on who you're grading for you're just your experience level a lot of different variables are involved in answering that question what i typically tell people and what i know a lot of other colorists typically tell people is the best monitor is the best one that you can afford this might be a few hundred bucks it might be 500 it might be you know a thousand dollars it might be five thousand dollars if i or anyone else were to answer that question just truthfully what's the best monitor you could buy we'd be telling you fifty thousand dollar hundred thousand dollar thirty thousand dollar monitors um which is obviously very unrealistic um and it honestly would make you look pretty bad if you answered that question to everyone and they asked you a beginner came up to you and asked you and you gave him a 30 40 000 monitor um so with that being said i want to go over you know just things to watch out for when you're choosing a monitor um some of these things tend to really be available in i would say medium moderate level to high-end monitors so even if you can't go out and buy a monitor that has perfect rec 709 color space and a 2.4 gamma and all these other features don't worry about it get the best one that you can afford as long as that monitor is calibrated i think you should be good as a sort of way of getting started and if anything if you know absolutely nothing about monitors right now you probably want to start with something on the less expensive end because then once you start using that monitor and you start learning about grading and you start learning about other monitors you'll find that you'll then start realizing what you actually need if you were only grading you know projects 30 second spots for the web you might you might just need a certain monitor that's maybe you know a thousand bucks if you're grading you know something for high-end clients or larger films that have really good budgets then yeah you might want to spring for something that's five thousand or ten thousand dollars um very very few people or even studios ever have those fifty hundred thousand dollar monitors we're talking about big budget hollywood studios that kind of thing and they honestly also you're grading in an actual movie theater so okay before i keep going on about that um here's a few things to watch out for when choosing a monitor and calibrating that monitor okay so here are a few things that you want for your monitor so the first thing we want to talk about now is color space so um the color space ideally you want something that will reproduce the rec 709 color space at least 99 percent if not a hundred percent okay rec 709 is basically a gamut of colors that's still kind of considered the industry standard now that is obviously changing and you are starting to see rec 2020 a lot more and you could even make the argument that p3 is uh becoming more common as well but for now especially if you are kind of getting started looking for your first monitor the bare minimum i would say is reproducing at least 99 ideally 100 of the rec 709 color space okay and so next let's talk about gamma um you need your monitor to accurately reproduce a gamma of 2.2 or 2.4 if you are working on stuff that's going to the web such as something for youtube or instagram or something that's going to be viewed online through a web browser then you can probably have a monitor that is a gamma of 2.2 that's actually what most monitors are other more high-end monitors will be able to reproduce a gamma of 2.4 or say 2.6 for the cinema but you do want ideally 2.2 or 2.4 and then from here let's talk about contrast so contrast is important because this will help show you accurate black levels or at least part of that as well as just basically how close you get in getting a good accurate sharp image and not get muddy blacks for example and so you would want in contrast ratio to be minimum a thousand to one and with that i mean a true contrast there's a lot of uh display technology out there right now as i've mentioned before the thing they have things like auto contrast dynamic contrast or you know a contrast where it's really software based you wants to be true hardware contrast uh what you're actually seeing out of the display that you're purchasing and then as far as the connections some connectors that you want some inputs and outputs are sdi which is an industry standard as well as hdmi and you want to connect your monitor to davinci resolve via a clean output um you really should ideally not be grading on your computer display um you know kind of placing the viewer or something like that on a computer monitor because then without getting too technical into it you're basically letting your graphics card of your computer do a lot of processing do a lot of work that's not the clean image that you shot on camera and by a clean image i mean that what you want is the image that you shot on your camera whether you shot on you know a canon digital slr or a red camera or an area camera or um anything in between you want your source camera image being output to your grading monitor with no graphics card intermediate no software manipulation intermediates of any kind and for that you would want to get for example something such as the black magic design mini monitor 3g or just the mini monitor as well as a ultra studio hd mini or if you're going to be working in 4k and have a 4k display um and have a 4k output possibly the ultra studio 4k this again sends out a clean signal from davinci resolve to your grading monitor and then lastly again this is a quick overview because as i mentioned before i could make an entire course off of this all of this is completely worthless if you do not calibrate your monitor ideally you would want a hardware calibration which again is mainly found in higher end monitors they can do hardware calibration which means that you calibrate your monitor using a color meter and then it creates a lookup table or lut and it installs that into the monitor and that's that you have accurate calibration or a lot of these color meters um also have software that you can use to calibrate and a word of caution about that is if you do end up purchasing a color meter calibration device make sure that whichever one you buy the software that comes with it can calibrate according to video standards a lot of those by default especially if you get the less expensive ones might only come with photo calibration that will only calibrate your monitor to say something like adobe rgb which that's not what you want to use for video so make sure that whatever software comes with the calibration device that you purchase has a setting for video calibration so that is a very quick kind of bullet point a version of what you want your monitor to have again you want to have your rec 709 color space a 2.2 or 2.4 gamma 1001 contrast you want to have professional outputs connected to a professional playback card such as a mini monitor and you want to make sure that you're calibrating that device so that coupled with having the proper grading environment with a 65k bias light a 18 gray wall and you will be on your way to having a truly professional grading environment

Channel: Fred Trevino

Views: 989

Keywords: color grading, colour Grading, resolve

Id: 5uKnSfu4RpU

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021