HD monitor for color correcting

essami wrote on 11/21/2007, 12:42 PM

Hi people!

OK, so Ive decided to get Vegas8 and my company is bying a Sony PMW-EX1. I want a good monitor for color correcting in HD. I would like to spend 500e or less. I have a display that is 19" as my main display so the secondary wouldnt have to be extremely big.

Would love to get your recommendations on how to setup also. I have an NVIDIA GeForcce 7600 GS display adapter.

Thanks!!!

Sami

Comments

farss wrote on 11/21/2007, 12:56 PM

I was going to say get an Eizo 24" but the price is way outside your budget.

Bob.

Shergar wrote on 11/22/2007, 2:29 AM

I opted for the Samsung Syncmaster 997MB. It's cheap, goes to HD res and looks good to me.

essami wrote on 11/22/2007, 6:31 AM

Samsung Syncmaster 997MB. Cant find this from anywhere. I live in Finland so its not an easy one.

Any other suggestions, Im still a bit baffled. Maybe going HD is just out of my price range. What if I would use JVC TM-H150CGU 15-Inch monitor recommended on another thread? Im not looking for high resolution (of course its related to) but being able to color correct and specifically to see if things are over exposed or under exposed.

One question though? Should I be seeing overexposed images on my LG Flatron L2000C monitor im using now? Maybe my settings are all wrong?

Sami

Shergar wrote on 11/23/2007, 12:30 AM

The samsung is not a "pro" monitor - it's a consumer CRT display (no blue-only gun) that happens to do 1920 x 1440. There may be a newer model number now. But I think you probably do have to choose between HD resolution and getting a standard color response for this budget.

Your over-exposed results may be your monitor, or may be vegas (or may be your footage, of course :-) ). By default 8 bit vegas displays in Studio RGB (output mapped between 15 and 235) in my experience that makes footage looks somewhat lighter in vegas than in everything else.

In any case you should get a tool to calibrate - search for Huey and Spyder in this forum for info.

A further thought - experienced sound producers test their mixes on tiny speakers as well as their superduper studio monitors. So whatever monitor you decide on, probably best to check your color output on various displays too.

essami wrote on 11/23/2007, 3:00 AM

Thanks for the replies, when Im in photoshop doing color correction and levels etc. everything turns out perfect no matter in which monitor I view it. Although the changes I make in Vegas turn out quite different when I view the results on other monitors or television.

I tried the Vegas 8 trial and the 32bit. It seemed easier to spot the overexposed areas. Although I didnt have much time to play with it.

sami

GlennChan wrote on 11/24/2007, 1:03 PM

The video preview, in many typical cases, does show inaccurate colors (inaccurate for display/viewing slash inaccurate for color correction). An option is to use the Windows secondary display device as a monitor, and check the studio RGB checkbox.
Some background:
http://glennchan.info/articles/vegas/colorspaces/colorspaces.html
Consult the table here:
http://glennchan.info/articles/vegas/v8color/v8color.htm

GlennChan wrote on 11/24/2007, 1:10 PM

To add on... one of the problems with consumer LCD computer monitors and TVs is they inherently have a s-shaped transfer curve (and the monitor doesn't correct for that). It's like adding a s-shaped color curve in Vegas. The obvious problem with this is that it makes it difficult to judge shadows, contrast, etc.

2- If you are doing lots of SD work, a SD CRT broadcast monitor is an excellent way to go... basic models are around $600. They tend not to do funky stuff to the image (unlike consumer gear) and images will be fairly consistent between that and other broadcast monitors (which is important if you need to exchange images with other facilities/people).
Of course the $600 monitors don't look exactly like each other... but they are reasonably good.