EP031: Discussing Monitors Part 2

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Hey there and welcome back to another episode of The
Offset Podcast. And today we're continuing

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on with our discussion with three industry experts about
the state of monitors in 2025. Stay tuned.

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This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders
in color accurate display solutions for

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professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an
editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer,

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Flanders Scientific has a professional display
solution to meet your needs.

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Learn more at FlandersScientific.com.

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All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode
of The Offset Podcast. I am one of your

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hosts, Robbie Carman. With me as always is Joey
D'Anna. Hey, Joey, how are you, man? Hi, everyone.

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We are continuing our discussion today
with three of our pals and industry experts.

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Bram Desmet from FSI, Nate McFarlin
from Dolby, and David Abrams from

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Avical slash Portrait Displays. And in part one, if
you missed that, be sure to go back and check

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that out. We kind of just talked a little brief overview,
I shouldn't say brief, a overview of

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kind of the roles that these guys play in various parts
of the display industry. But we thought,

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guys, in part two here, we would pepper you with some
questions that have been on our minds, have

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been on some of our audience minds. And Joey and I spent
a lot of time on, you know, forums and user

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groups and colors groups and stuff. And so some of these
questions that we're going to pepper you

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with also come from that source. But guys, I want to
start out with something that we get asked

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about a lot. And I can answer like in a very dumb way.
And that is, how are panels actually made?

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Right. Because I think that like, there's a it's just
a it's a dark hole, a black hole, I think,

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of knowledge from for a lot of people about how these
these the displays are made, because it's

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like, oh, cool, new display, where'd that come from?
No idea, right? From your guy's perspective,

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and let's start with you, Bram, because you probably
you probably deal with a lot of this

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on a day to day basis with FSI. Like, where do these
panels come from? How are they made? And

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is it is it a super uber technical process? Or
is it something that is kind of standard

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throughout the industry? Just speak a little
bit to how that manufacturing happens.

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Yeah. So the the number one requirement for making panels
is to have more money than anybody would

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ever know what to do with. So, you know, the thing that
I always point to as kind of a reality check

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for people when they because one thing that we get asked
all the time is, why don't you make your

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own panels that go into and it's like, well, because
I don't have billions of dollars sitting

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around. And that's not hyperbole. So you are literally like SBC's quantum

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dot OLED facility. To give you an idea there, the capital
investment earmarked for that is about 10

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billion U.S. dollars. Chump change, yeah. So this is this is why there are only, you know, a handful

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of large panel manufacturers. That's why you see this
adopted by lots of different TV manufacturers

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and monitor manufacturers and why you see so much shared
technology, which isn't a bad thing. It's a

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good thing because you can only make these things with
that sort of scale, even small pilot lines

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to make prototypes of stuff. I mean, you're looking
at places where they might be spending

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500 million dollars just to get a pilot line up and
running. So there are some exceptions where,

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you know, research departments at universities will
do material science type stuff and make

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small batch panels. But that is really more the exception
than the rule. The rule is more that

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these are very, very large semiconductor manufacturers
with extensive IP, extensive

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manufacturing facilities. And it's also why you see
them kind of try to milk it a little bit in

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terms of, you know, keeping a plant up and running
for years and years and years, even when

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the technology is kind of deprecated. And why you see
kind of this filtering down in the industry

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of, you know, technology that once was high end is
now more of the entry level and why they keep

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manufacturing it is because they've spent all that
money and they need to recoup that cost.

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If you look at some of these factories, this is
not a simple thing. A lot of this is like

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automated clean rooms you're looking at. A lot of these
panel substrates are, you know, garage door

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size or larger. They look like the side of a house
and then they're cut down. So these are

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and the size capacity, like how big they can make that
underlying glass essentially is what in large

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part determines the generation. So you'll hear these
like, you know, Gen 8, Gen 8.5, like what

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the heck does that mean? A lot of it comes down to the
size of the substrates that they can make.

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But they're really impressive facilities. If
you ever, you know, get to see a video,

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they don't typically allow people to tour them. They're
pretty, but, you know, if you see videos

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of how these made giant machines picking up these
pieces of glass, moving them around,

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a lot of clean room operations. Now, a lot of material
science development has to go into this.

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And these people, you know, semiconductor manufacturers
work with suppliers like, you

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know, Nanosys and whatever to get quantum dot materials
or different LED manufacturers for

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backlights. That's a very sophisticated process that
typically only very big companies with

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extremely deep pockets bother to get into because it's
very hard for anybody small to try to get into the space.

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Yeah, it's funny. I always say that
like the biggest advances in technology

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always can be kind of narrowed down to material science.
Once the material science is handled,

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everything else kind of, I won't say falls into place,
but the material science, some of this

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stuff is incredibly advanced. It is. And, you know, once they nail it, that's usually the hard part,

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except that a lot of times they nail it. And
then there's fights about IP, people

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sue other people and technologies never come out. I've
been witness to that several times in my

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career where it's really excited about the evolution
of a new display technology, new

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material science that was going to go into a display.
And then because one, another company

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had never found its way to market. So disappointment. I always keep my little vial of Quantum Dots here.

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There you go. I love it. Now, so I think another question related to that is that I think there is

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this idea that, you know, a company like FSI
or LG or whoever, right? Like there's,

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there's, I think there's confusion about like, especially
like, you know, LG and Samsung come

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to mind because they're the two ones that I see cited
the most that like the TV side of that

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company is the same thing as the display manufacturing
side of that company. That's not really true,

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right? In a lot of cases? Same, same parent company
typically. But the, but yeah, the consumer

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electronics side of these companies and the semiconductor
side of these companies are typically

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pretty well siloed. And that part of that is because
again, they have to spend so much

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money to build these factories. A lot of times selling
to just their own consumer electronics

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division will never offset that cost. They'll never
recoup it and never profit. So they have

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to sell to a lot of other manufacturers, you know? So
yeah, it, these are very separate entities. And

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amusingly, a lot of times you see them, you know, you'll
see, you know, the consumer electronics

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side of the company buy from the competitor of
the semiconductor side of that company.

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Like that doesn't making sense, right?

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They have to meet certain consumer electronics demands. And funnily enough, sometimes you see

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that, you know, what the semiconductor manufacturers
produce sometimes will find its way into consumer

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electronics partners from competing companies well before
the consumer electronics side of that same

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company adopts their own technology. So yeah, it's
really funny sometimes to see those dynamics

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between those large companies, but they are typically
very separate entities. And that's

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something that causes a lot of confusion because people
are like, Oh, you get your panels from

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Samsung. And I've literally had customers come to me
and go, Oh, so you're just taking a part of

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Samsung TV, pulling the panel from that, putting it
in. We buy the panels from like someone like

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SDC, just like a Samsung or Sony or whoever would
buy this panel. So that is, you know,

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just to be clear about that, those, those
entities operate very separately.

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No, it's a, it's a, it's a confusing thing. So thanks for clarifying that. Speaking of confusing

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things, I want to get into some technical things for
all three of you, because I think there's a

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lot of opinion. There's a lot of fact, there's a
lot of confusion around all these things.

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So I want to talk a little bit about kind of the
idea of some of the things that impact

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monitor performance for lack of a better term. And
what I mean by that is that I think there's,

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you know, as colorist, we're used to working in
a dark room and we understand, you know,

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kind of the implications of ambient light and that kind
of stuff. But like, how much, how important

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is viewing conditions and some other parts of like the,
the, the viewing process important to like,

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kind of, I don't know, lack of a better term,
successful viewing or accurate viewing,

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like things like I'm thinking of things like backlights (bias lights), I'm thinking of things like, you know,

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you know, actual, you know, hitting, you know, a hundred
nits for SDR or whatever for HDR, like,

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how, how dramatic are some of those things to overall
performance of a display? Does that make

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sense? Yeah, I think Nate can definitely talk on that
quite well. Because we, I talked to Nate about

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viewing environment. It's probably the thing we've
talked about more than anything over the

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last year, to be honest. So I know that, that,
you know, ambient light is a huge factor,

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viewing environment's a huge factor. I know David
also deals with this a lot in terms of,

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you know, the difference between what he sees on his
more consumer install type situations versus

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professional installations. Yeah, I'll give you a great
example, right? One thing that comes up

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often in a lot of the forums that I'm on, people talk
about backlights, right? And they go, all

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right, well, I'll just go and I'll get a backlight and
I'll just pop it on there. And there doesn't

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seem to be any consideration for where that backlight's
going, how bright it should be,

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what the rest of the lights look like in the room. So
I'm just curious from your guy's perspective,

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because, you know, you walk into any given suite and
it's a totally different lighting situation,

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a totally different environment than another suite,
and how much that goes into just our

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observation of the display. This is a really
good question, Robbie, and this is, as

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Bram alluded to, this is probably one of the most common
questions we get. I think in an ideal world,

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we would all do our grading in a 10 by 10 completely
blacked out with bias light, you know,

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exactly following the SMPTE specs for whatever you're
doing. But the reality is that that's not

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the case, right? And it's not just an ambient light
variation. Obviously, everybody sees things

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differently, everybody's eyeballs are differently,
but things as simple as reflections,

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texture of the wall, color of the wall. Like these
are all, I mean, I've been in cinemas where,

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you know, the entire, every seat in the cinema is red,
right? So that casts like a red, you know,

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like, so there's a ton of variability here. And I
think that the thing that makes it even more

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complicated is that it's not the same for SDR and
HDR, right? And when you start talking about

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bias lightings, then you get into discussions of things
that you've already discussed, right? Where

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do you put it on the display? How bright do you have
it? How do you measure how bright this is?

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Like this is these are all very great questions.
And I think in a perfect world,

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a standards body like SMPTE or the ITU would just, you know,
go ahead and update that and give more

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concrete guidelines. But we've at Dolby been looking at
this a lot recently, we're actually planning

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on talking about this more in our webinar after NAB for
more kind of like specific recommendations,

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but long story short, it plays a massive role. I would
actually argue and Bram & David, I'm sure

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would agree is that when you're working with lower
luminance scenes, this becomes imperatively

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important because your eyes are a lot more sensitive
down in that region to any sort of

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minute details and changes that happen in the environment.
So yeah, very, very important.

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And I'm curious, David, when you walk into a customer
site, whether it be somebody with a

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really fancy home theater or one of like a top Hollywood
studio, how often do you find yourself

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making viewing environment recommendation and changes
before you even start talking about

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calibrating a display, right? Because if the viewing
environment is completely wackadoodle,

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you know, all your calibration work
could go out the window.

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Yeah, so a couple of things there. So a lot of the
customers that are having us calibrate, say,

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a bay have already, you know, they're savvy, right? They
know, hey, I'm color grading. I know a bit

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about this. I know enough to call a calibrator, you
know, maybe use a reference monitor. So those

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customers pretty much have a room that's at least darkened,
right? Maybe the walls aren't painted

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black or have gray, but they've darkened the room,
they've minimized their reflections,

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they've got their ideal seating position. And typically,
they do have a bias light. So not

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always, but typically they do, I would say more often
than not, those customers have a bias light

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already there. And then once you move into like
the consumer, right, the content consumer,

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and you're in these homes, and you're in these
theaters, and you're in these rooms,

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most people that are hiring a professional calibrator
will have some form of shades, I'd say,

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you know, well over 90%, right, it's going to
have some form of shades room darkening,

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so they can enjoy their movies during the day, and they
can do those types of things. But those rooms

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are also not perfect. And they might have some light
leakage, they might have a little bit of

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reflection, they might have they a customer just might
like watching with a little bit of light on

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right? We've talked to customers. Yeah, that was gonna be kind of my next question is how much

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you know, butting heads do you get into with like, I like
it this way? Well, that is not really right.

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Well, yeah, I mean, where do you kind of draw the line?

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Yeah, and to into written to riff on that, sorry to
interrupt Joey, but to riff on that, well,

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I'm curious, like somebody like you, David, who,
you know, does this professionally,

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do you have like a panic attack when you see like
home theater groups and people with like

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hue light systems, and they're constantly changing
like the light, you know, based on what's on

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screen? Does that like, like send you into the shakes?
I mean, if they were going to have me sit

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there watch a movie, maybe, but you know, if I'm coming
in calibrating and leaving, like it's,

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hey, you know, to each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What
what's important to note is, is a calibrator is

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that the calibration of monitor with the with the probe,
right, your meter doesn't change because

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of the ambient light. And what I mean by that is you
really don't want to be lighting because the

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probe doesn't know the difference between the ambient
light in the room and the light coming

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off the TV. So then you're you're taking that into account
and you're making adjustments on the TV

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for what's happening in the room and you don't want
that. So when you calibrate, you really do

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want the room is as dark as possible, so there's at
least contamination is possible. But then if

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you do have a user that is watching with higher light,
well, would you calibrate to 100 nits in

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709? Would you still do you know, a 2.4 EOTF? This
is a question that I don't think and Bram,

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and Nate can correct me, I don't think there's any standard
of if you measure this much lux in the

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room, adjust the EOTF to be a 2.35 and the luminance
to go to 140. Now there are some research

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documents that have been done recently, where people
have done some perceptual modeling and

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saying in these type of environments, you might want
to do this, but I don't think any of that's

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been standardized. So as a calibrator, you have to sort
of make these decisions and figure out how

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do I get my customer something that is true to the
artist's intent as I can in the environment

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that they're in because a home user typically isn't
going to take a living room and say, I'm

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going to now paint it black and the ceiling black and
the walls this and especially if they've got

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significant others that might not have the same decor
preference. What do they call the wife

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acceptance factor? I like that. So you have to kind
of, yeah, that's a big thing on the forums,

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they call it the wife acceptance factor. Like how can
you just, your guys, your guys, partners,

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and spouses don't like just like break out, you know,
CIE diagrams when you're watching TV. I mean,

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what's what's up. Yeah, that's weird. No, I know. There's one thing he said there is really important,

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I think, to differentiate is this idea of separation
between preference and accuracy,

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because that's like at the heart of all these
discussions, right? And that's why,

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at least from Dolby's perspective, like on any of our
playback devices, you always see more than

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one Dolby Vision picture mode, right? Because if you
were to go into the reference or most accurate

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picture mode in a super blind or whatever, be able
to say like, I can't see anything, right?

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So I think that's really hard to juggle because
like David said, like there's no sort of

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one size fits all and you can kind of skirt around this
with things like ambient light sensors and

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things like that to get it. But then ultimately, like
Joey was saying, like, all this could just

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be for not because you could just have somebody who
likes to, you know, vivid mode exists. Like

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people watch. Right? Like they like to watch. I see
this. I see this interesting dichotomy that

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isn't play though, right? Is that as so the monitors
have gotten better, the standards are

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more well known. And it's like companies like Dolby,
like you guys are assisting people in

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kind of trying to get the more accuracy, right? Like,
you know, with the, you know, your, your

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certifications, your different modes. But like, it
also seems like these two things are a little

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bit at, at, at, at loggerheads, right? Because we have
things like filmmaker mode and reference

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mode and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time,
like that's just the TV. We're not really

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speaking to the rest of the viewing environment with
there. And it seems so it seems like somebody

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could be, it could be a little bit of a case where like
of disappointment, right? Somebody turns on

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filmmaker mode and it's a hundred nits, you know,
and gamma 2.4

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It's too dim. Well, this filmmaker modes crap, right? What was this filmmaker thinking!

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right? That's probably the most accurate mode, but it
still doesn't look good to them. So I guess a

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follow up to this is I'm like, I understand the reference
environment, but on the consumer side

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of things, like how much variance or tolerance is
there to, you know, a little above or below

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whatever the kind of the standard is like is, and David,
you probably deal with this all the time,

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right? Like, is there a difference between, Hey, this
is accurate and this is what looks great in

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this room? If that makes sense. You know, it's, it's
not exact yet, right? There's no like guide

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where I can walk in, make a measurement and say, ah,
the specification says I need to now do this

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because of this is your environment. A little bit of
that does come from your intuition and your

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understanding of human perception as a calibrator
and the type of room that you're in.

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Ultimately, as Nate was saying, with a personal preference,
you know, you want to, you may want

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to make your customer happy. So there's a lot you can
do, even if you're not getting that 100 nits,

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709, you know, 2.4 EOTF perfectly. And that's,
you know, you can turn off a lot of the

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sharpening, right? You can, you can make sure your
image processing for like two, three pull

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down and everything is optimized. You can set up all
your sources and make sure those sources are

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set up properly through maybe there's an AV receiver
and there's the TV. You can calibrate

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that white balance. So it is hitting D65. Even if you're
putting out 150 nits, right? Or 175 nits

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off the screen. So there's, there's still a lot you
can do to say I'm getting this a lot more

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accurate, and then I'm going to take it from there and
sort of make a shift for the room environment.

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One of the things I'll ask a customer when I show
up and I'm at their home is, you know,

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hey, is this the mode you've been watching it
in? How do you feel the brightness is?

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Because I can take a quick measurement of the mode
they're in, maybe it's a vivid mode,

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I can take a measurement if it's 250 nits, they go,
Oh, I love how bright it is. I wish it was

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brighter than I know. Oh, okay, this guy's got a preference
for really bright images. And maybe

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that means I need to explain to them, this is a little
overkill for what you're watching and

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depending on the room. But it's, it's variable, you
know, I wish I could tell you this. And I keep

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I get to say my favorite expression, how much is a boat? Exactly!

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One other thing that we've, we've seen drastically
change in both the consumer landscape

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and the professional display landscape is the available
sizes, right? For years, for most of

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my career, you know, 20 to 25 inch reference monitor
was where we were living every so often,

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you had the big, we had the big 32 inch BVM because we
were, we thought we were, we were hot stuff.

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But a 32 inch BVM was gigantic, right? To have
a 32 inch reference monitor back in the day

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was like absurdly huge. And the big screen was something
that was really, you know, only existed

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in the home. Once, you know, larger CRT started coming
out and more importantly, big flat panel

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started to come out. Now we're starting to see people,
especially because there's the technology

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that's available now, reference monitors in these bigger
55 inch, 40 inch, 65 inch sizes. Whereas,

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you know, I've always kind of, you know, your default
when you go into a grading suite is like,

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oh, you got a 55 inch, that's the client monitor. It's
almost as good. But I'm looking at my 25

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reference monitor. Now I've moved up to a 32 inch reference
monitor, which my personal preference

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is I love the 32 inch size and this kind of distance
to it. That is like my sweet spot.

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I know Robbie's rocking the 55 inch and he likes that
better than the 32 inch. How much are you

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guys seeing in the professional world? You know, are
colorists accepting these bigger monitors or

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are they kind of looking at them like, oh, that's just
just a client monitor or it's too big for me

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to grade on. I'd rather be closer to a smaller one.
Are we seeing that like, what's that landscape

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look like these days? I know my opinion on it, but
I'm curious what other people in the business

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are doing. Yeah. I can speak to that a little bit.
So we actually talked about this in a webinar

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last year. I think there's pros and cons for each, what
I would call like a one or a dual display

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setup. I think from a, an education standpoint, showing
folks for the first time, the differences,

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like there's always going to be the necessity of viewing
them side by side. But I think when you

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get into, when I've started to talk to more and more
colorists, I think they're starting to consider

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going down to that one display now that the bigger sizes
are more readily available and acceptable.

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Wearing my engineer like scientists hat, I would say
that, you know, sticking with the same size

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that, you know, the average person at home would also
be watching it on and more in some cases,

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even the same panel technology, right? Like there's,
you know, a plethora of benefits for doing

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that. I also am a big fan of, you know, when you do
are doing a dual display setup, you kind of,

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you know, we were just speaking about bias lighting
and how the standards are different

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between SDR and HDR. Like how do you make that call?
Right? If you want to view both at the same

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time, like, do you average out the ambient light
or like, you know what I mean? Like,

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so that's a tough discussion to have. I think it's,
I'm seeing, it's probably still like a 50 50

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from the people that I talked to that like to do dual
versus single. But I think that, again,

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like the XMP lineup and stuff, I think has opened
a lot of people's eyes to the possibilities.

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I will say to you, like that you cannot, you
cannot articulate the difference of

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perception when it goes to different screen sizes. Like
an example, I always like to tell people is

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like, if I bring you into my Dolby cinema in New York
and show you 108 nits full blast, you'd be

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thinking you're looking at like a 10,000 nits
at least just because it's huge, right?

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Yeah, I was, I was gonna, I was gonna say, I
think the biggest change for me having,

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Joey mentioned that I'm now generally prefer
larger format monitors than smaller format

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monitors. I'm actually doing, you know, the whole idea
of like, you know, used to be like audio

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mixers or take the, you know, the mix and go to the car
to listen to it on that other set of speakers.

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I'm actually doing that kind of in a sense, but
I'm going to a smaller monitor to test the

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translatability of my grade from the bigger monitor
because of that perceptual difference.

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Right? Like, I, I have like a permanent setup where
I have an iPad Pro that I'm also monitoring

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on at the same time that I'm looking at the big display
because of that perceptual difference.

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Right. It is, it is weird how that perception can, can
really, that size can really change things.

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Well, I almost like want to put it back on
you then, Robbie, too, from like a,

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just a practical standpoint. Like, do you find that
the going to the bigger sizes a lot more

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like natural for like client interaction and stuff
like that? Because that was always,

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So I think there's, I think there's several benefitsto this. One, I think that the single

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display in the room gets rid of that age old problem
of where am I supposed to be looking,

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how I should be looking, especially when they're
different display technologies. It's like,

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just eliminates that as a, as a variable. Right.
I also think I'm really unscientifically,

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I'm really tied into the idea of trying to replicate
the home viewing experience ish

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a little bit, right? In terms of size, distance, sitting
on the couch, et cetera. Like I see a lot

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of benefits to that. And then third, I would just,
I would just say that the, the, from a client

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confidence point of view, it's always seemed to me that
they know that the small monitor on the desk

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is traditionally been better. So they don't actually trust
what they're seeing in front of them as much

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as like, there's like the clients think there's some
game being played. Right. So I think that

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when you have like, Oh no, we're just looking at this
one monitor, there's a psycho, you know,

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psychological thing that's happening on there where
it's like, Oh no, the colorist is looking

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at the same monitor. That must be the accurate one
kind of thing that's in play. And I think

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that, you know, my ideal situation, maybe one of these
days we'll get that. I would love, I think

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for me in the rooms that I work in a 77 or an 83
inch size panel would rule them all. Right.

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Ergonomically, because that's where I get caught up
is for me to be comfortable with the 55 inch

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size, it's got to be a little bit further back ergonomically. And then it takes up more physical

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space than I have in the suite. Whereas with the
32, I I'm the exact right distance from it.

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That like huge enough size where you can just set
your distance from it where it needs to be.

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It becomes more, it becomes more like a grading theater at that point in time. Right. Exactly.

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And I kind of love that idea. Yep. Where I think,
I think it's good. Okay. So David, as a, as a

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calibrator, you know, and we talked about our previous
episode, kind of the challenges of,

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you know, reference calibration gear versus more consumer
gear. One of the things that you mentioned,

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and I think is something that I've spent a lot of time
thinking of about and I, but I don't have all

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the answers. So I'm curious what you say. You mentioned
earlier, the idea of, Hey, we're going

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to profile this display using the Spectro to build a,
you know, correction matrix or whatever for,

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for the colorimeter. That process has always kind
of seemed like a pain in the ass to me,

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to be honest with you. Right. Like I get what it
does and I understand what we're doing to,

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to kind of profile the meter, but like, it just seems
antiquated. You know, we're taking, you know,

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white, red, green, blue, and white. And then we're okay
with math. Like, is there something better,

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I guess is what I'm asking. And where do you see that
kind of improving for the, for the end user?

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Because it just seems like, yeah, okay, I can do this
the right way, but it's a whole lot of steps

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to get right. I got to do this for every single display.
Where, where, what role or what changes

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do you see potentially happening with that? How that
kind of, that kind of operation works.

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Yeah. This is, this is a fight. I think every, every
person who's calibrating, especially if

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you're calibrating a lot of displays, we end up, we
end up having these thoughts. I would love to

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just have a spectoradiometer that can measure any type of
display. It doesn't need a correction to it.

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Right. You take it out, measure, do my job and move
on. If I'm doing something like a digital

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cinema projector, where you do what's called an MCGD,
right? Measured color gamut data. You measure

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red, green, blue, and white typically. You tell it your
target and then you validate it. Not a lot

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of measurements, right? So building the meter profile
might take longer than actually just

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doing the calibration with the spectroradiometer.
So, so we often see in those markets, right,

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in the cinema markets, that those customers are only
using spectroradiometers because they don't

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need to make thousands of measurements and do this.
When you start to get to those correction

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tables, we talk about for, for colorimeters, right,
to make a colorimeter have the same

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measurement as the spectro on that display technology.
A lot of things come into that.

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When you're making that meter profile, you want to make
sure the display is in as native as a state

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as you can. Right. So if you have a display, let's say
P3, but you're correcting it to 709

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making your profile. Well, there's actually blue
and red in green to bring that green in.

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So now you're making a profile with some
contamination of the channels.

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Typically, what I've personally found is if I'm building
a meter matrix for 709 on a

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display and doing 709, it doesn't matter if
I have a little contamination, but if I go to

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a different target and I made it in 709
with some contamination, I get an error. So

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the process of warming up the display, putting in that
native state, making sure it's in a stable

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00:30:27,283 --> 00:30:31,287
state, right? You don't want to do a profile usually
at 2000 nits because the display itself

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will fluctuate during the meter profile. Right. It does take time, but you get the gain on the

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00:30:39,963 --> 00:30:44,259
measurement speed and you get the gain on the sensitivity
side because the colorimeter is going

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to measure faster than most spectroradiometers. It's
going to be able to measure lower than most

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spectroradiometers. So if you have those displays that
need really close to black, it does end up

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being worth the time to do it. So does that answer? No, it does. Let me expound on that one with one

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other question because I've heard mixed things about
this. Is there any value to doing any kind

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of volumetric profiling of the colorimeter as in
doing ramps as opposed to just primaries?

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00:31:14,789 --> 00:31:20,169
I can speak on that if you like. Sure, sure. Bram's probably done a lot of research on this.

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So yeah, I think the added value of volumetric profiling for colorimeters, which is something

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that you'll find in various ways. Right. So you have
simpler systems that break down just into

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a few extra readings and a few divisions. So you
have something like the Bodner method,

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which is built into CalMAN. Then you also have like
the multi-point volumetric profiling that's

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for colorimeters is built into software like Colourspace. Some of that probably from me

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00:31:52,243 --> 00:31:57,749
bugging Steve over the years to add something like
that. And the desire for something like that

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and the desire for methods like the Bodner method are more
to deal with displays that are non-additive.

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So if you have an additive display that is a
red, green, blue additive for white,

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four color matrix method, which is the NIST kind of
official approach for colorimeter calibration,

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tends to work really well. We've done a lot of side-by-side
testing with volumetric profiling

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Bodner vs four color matrix method. And there's really
very little gain to doing anything more

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complex as long as your display is additive. Now, when
you get to non-additive display technologies

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like WOLED specifically, there can be some measurable
significant improvements. Now,

359
00:32:41,417 --> 00:32:46,631
how much does it matter? If you're doing a consumer TV
and a consumer install, I'm not sure that the

360
00:32:46,631 --> 00:32:53,179
gain is all that much. If you're doing it for a colorist,
maybe there is some real value in

361
00:32:53,179 --> 00:32:59,477
exploring these other methods. But my personal opinion
on this is that you don't need anything

362
00:32:59,477 --> 00:33:05,400
greater than this as long as your display is additive.
Now, the other thing that I think

363
00:33:05,400 --> 00:33:12,782
goes into some of the questions you were asking
earlier is this necessity to have a

364
00:33:13,449 --> 00:33:19,706
spectro and a colorimeter, that's going to be hard to
ever get around. You have devices already that

365
00:33:19,706 --> 00:33:25,670
exist that kind of combine a colorimeter and a spectro
in a single device. You also have very

366
00:33:25,670 --> 00:33:32,760
high-end spectros. But ultimately, you're looking at a
physics problem here. And this is not something

367
00:33:32,760 --> 00:33:38,474
that's easy to solve with new technology because with
a spectroadiometer, the issue is you only

368
00:33:38,516 --> 00:33:43,104
have so many photons going in and you got to split
them up over diffraction grading, as opposed

369
00:33:43,104 --> 00:33:47,984
to something that just has three photo diodes in it with
filters on top of it. So that's collecting

370
00:33:47,984 --> 00:33:52,947
a lot more photons, which is why it measures so much
faster, why it measures so much better into

371
00:33:52,947 --> 00:33:58,619
low lights, because it doesn't need as many photons
or it's not splitting up those photons

372
00:33:58,786 --> 00:34:02,957
inefficiently through a diffraction grading. And
then if you have a combined device, which

373
00:34:02,957 --> 00:34:06,878
have existed for a long time, Photo Research had this
many, many years ago, and there are other

374
00:34:06,878 --> 00:34:11,174
companies that do it where you have something like
a beam split that splits the light between a

375
00:34:11,174 --> 00:34:15,094
colorimeter section and a spectro section. The problem
there, again, is the same thing, right?

376
00:34:15,094 --> 00:34:19,390
You're splitting that light. And so with very little
light and you're steering the photons

377
00:34:19,390 --> 00:34:25,521
one way or another, that's why all of this is necessary
in the first place, right? So it's not

378
00:34:25,521 --> 00:34:29,692
something that's going to be easy to solve on a
technology level because it's ultimately a

379
00:34:29,692 --> 00:34:34,697
physics problem, which I know Joey is a big physics
fan. Well, all I really, I can deal with

380
00:34:34,739 --> 00:34:38,868
the four color method in the time. I just really want
wireless meters, but well, that's a talk for

381
00:34:38,868 --> 00:34:45,208
another, another day. I hate cables. So the more wireless
we can get, the better. All right. One

382
00:34:45,208 --> 00:34:49,378
last big subject, then we'll wrap up is just, I have
a few consumer questions that have popped up

383
00:34:49,378 --> 00:34:56,302
or consumer related questions. And I think you guys
are experts in this. So I'm curious your

384
00:34:56,302 --> 00:35:02,058
thoughts. You know, I think we've seen this, this merging
of, you know, I think the generically,

385
00:35:02,099 --> 00:35:08,064
you could call pro-sumer, right? You know, it's somewhere
between, you know, maybe it's not perfect

386
00:35:08,064 --> 00:35:12,860
reference, but it's not consumer. It's really good.
And we've seen a lot of people, I feel like

387
00:35:12,860 --> 00:35:19,200
we call this happening with that. The WOLEDs and LG
became kind of like, LG kind of became like a

388
00:35:19,200 --> 00:35:23,079
Kleenex tissue kind of conversation, right? Where it's
like, you know, it's just like, oh, well,

389
00:35:23,079 --> 00:35:29,001
we have an LG in the front of the room kind of thing.
That merging of consumer and pro kind of,

390
00:35:29,043 --> 00:35:33,589
you know, using consumer panels and pro situations,
I think is here to stay.

391
00:35:34,090 --> 00:35:38,886
But I'm guessing it has a lot of challenges from,
you know, connectivity, you know,

392
00:35:38,886 --> 00:35:44,725
SDI versus say, HDMI or USB-C. There's some of the calibration stuff that we spoke about in part one,

393
00:35:44,725 --> 00:35:49,689
where consumer companies simply don't have enough time
to, you know, to really do a thorough job on

394
00:35:49,689 --> 00:35:54,318
some of these and set up. What are the, what are we
not thinking about? What are the impacts of

395
00:35:54,318 --> 00:36:00,783
using consumer monitors in a professional environment?
And what do we have to pay attention

396
00:36:00,783 --> 00:36:06,747
to and consider? Because obviously a lot of people are
doing it, but are they doing it in a blind way

397
00:36:06,747 --> 00:36:12,003
that's causing them more problems or can these things
truly be adapted to work in a professional

398
00:36:12,003 --> 00:36:17,800
environment the way that pros expect them to? < David> I think when it comes to that, it's, it's kind of

399
00:36:17,800 --> 00:36:21,888
like Bram was talking about before with the economies of
scale, right? With the panels. So, so some of

400
00:36:21,929 --> 00:36:25,433
these broadcast manufacturers are buying the same
panels that are actually going into these

401
00:36:25,433 --> 00:36:32,481
consumer TVs at some level. And then you have what goes
behind the TV. And one of the things that we

402
00:36:32,481 --> 00:36:37,028
keep pushing for, I think as an industry is the ability
to turn off some of these like adaptive

403
00:36:37,111 --> 00:36:42,074
contrast or light sensors and some of these enhancement
features that we don't necessarily

404
00:36:42,241 --> 00:36:48,706
want in the grading suite. Some displays let you
do that. There are manufacturers that have

405
00:36:49,582 --> 00:36:55,338
different SKUs of a display for post-production of a
consumer model that might turn off auto dimming,

406
00:36:55,338 --> 00:36:59,884
right? To protect the panel from burn-in where you
might want to not want a consumer, you know,

407
00:36:59,884 --> 00:37:08,392
burning in a game score or a CNBC stock ticker or news
ticker. So, so something designed for consumer

408
00:37:09,060 --> 00:37:14,273
typically doesn't always have the stuff we want in the
pro world or the features and functionality

409
00:37:14,482 --> 00:37:18,778
to be disabled that we want in the pro world. And
then we also don't always have the level of

410
00:37:18,778 --> 00:37:22,740
optimization we want, right? There's some consumer
TVs I've seen some customers buy here in the

411
00:37:22,740 --> 00:37:28,621
Hollywood area. They go, Hey, I need to master in
P3D65, PQ for Dolby. And we go, well, this,

412
00:37:28,871 --> 00:37:33,918
this TV doesn't have a P3, right? You know, there's just
no P3 and it's a consumer TV. It has BT.2020,

413
00:37:34,293 --> 00:37:39,257
it's got BT.709, but there's no P3. And that's not everyone,
right? So you really have to find the

414
00:37:39,298 --> 00:37:43,678
right display if you're going to go that route that
meets the needs of what you're looking for

415
00:37:44,095 --> 00:37:48,641
in the grading suite. So those are some of the
considerations I think on my side, Nate and

416
00:37:48,641 --> 00:37:54,355
Bram might have some other problems there. Yeah.
Yeah. This is a huge, and I like the word

417
00:37:54,355 --> 00:37:58,234
caveat whenever we're talking about consumer displays,
because the unfortunate reality is

418
00:37:58,234 --> 00:38:04,407
that there's a lot of them. And we actually, my
colleague, Timo and I, and some folks from

419
00:38:04,407 --> 00:38:09,286
Meta and university academia spoke on this as a panel
discussion at the latest color imaging

420
00:38:09,370 --> 00:38:15,167
conference a few months back, but it's really tough,
especially for wanting to use a lot of

421
00:38:15,167 --> 00:38:19,797
these modern panels for like research R&D applications,
because something as simple

422
00:38:19,797 --> 00:38:23,843
like David was just talking about is getting a clean
signal in and out on a TV is not very

423
00:38:23,843 --> 00:38:27,930
straightforward. And there's a lot of hurdles you
have to go through. You know, he spoke to

424
00:38:28,556 --> 00:38:34,145
the plethora of auto enhancement features, true motion,
contrast, I mean, even things like power

425
00:38:34,145 --> 00:38:37,732
management. Not to mention, sometimes they'll just decide to reset those settings for you.

426
00:38:38,024 --> 00:38:42,486
100%. And you get into scenarios where it's reset,
you do a firmware things change.

427
00:38:42,486 --> 00:38:47,158
And there's also the in there's also the insertion
of AI into everything, right? Like, yes,

428
00:38:47,408 --> 00:38:50,327
your TV is now this all knowing smart
device that can make decisions.

429
00:38:51,328 --> 00:38:57,668
Correct. Yeah. There's a lot. And I wish honestly,
that we had a playbook of just like,

430
00:38:58,210 --> 00:39:01,714
hey, it's almost like a yellow pages where you could
like scroll through and be like, okay,

431
00:39:01,714 --> 00:39:04,842
this model this year, turn X, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, off, but it's not.

432
00:39:05,843 --> 00:39:10,181
We've actually been, you know, hopeful that the idea
will come together where there's like some

433
00:39:10,181 --> 00:39:14,143
sort of standards group that can push the manufacturers
to do what we would, I don't

434
00:39:14,143 --> 00:39:17,563
know, we would call it something like a scientific
mode or something that disables all of these,

435
00:39:17,897 --> 00:39:22,234
right? But for the reality is, it's like speaking of
scale, like David and Bram have already read

436
00:39:22,234 --> 00:39:25,863
like for 99% of people at home, like they don't
need that, or they don't want that, right?

437
00:39:26,113 --> 00:39:29,909
So it's correct me if I'm wrong, that was kind of the initial, the initial thought behind something

438
00:39:29,909 --> 00:39:34,955
like a filmmaker mode, right? Is that it was like, it
would kind of, you know, disable and turn off

439
00:39:34,955 --> 00:39:39,335
some of that stuff. Are you saying that like... It's a variable though, man. So like filmmaker mode in

440
00:39:39,668 --> 00:39:46,842
like, in its inception makes a lot of sense, right?
But there's no, no guarantee that, you know,

441
00:39:46,842 --> 00:39:50,638
manufacturer A is going to implement filmmaker mode
exactly like manufacturer B does, right?

442
00:39:51,180 --> 00:39:55,059
I mean, similar with like HDR 10, right? Where it's
like this open, proprietary or non-proprietary

443
00:39:55,226 --> 00:40:01,565
thing where it's kind of up to the individual OEM to
implement how they best see for you. So I think

444
00:40:01,565 --> 00:40:06,570
a lot of it is really good in practice, but not executed
super well. So when you're getting

445
00:40:06,779 --> 00:40:11,158
questions, I mean, we get a ton of questions about consumer
TVs. And my whole thing is always just

446
00:40:11,158 --> 00:40:16,038
like, just understand, do your research, understand
where the caveats are and work around them if

447
00:40:16,038 --> 00:40:20,709
possible. And that comes down to what we've talked about in all of the, any, any episode we've ever

448
00:40:20,751 --> 00:40:25,464
done talking about display, we talk about what is the
actual truth. I've been in suites that only

449
00:40:25,506 --> 00:40:30,302
have a consumer monitor that yes, they've gone through
and calibrated them and tried to get

450
00:40:30,302 --> 00:40:36,100
around all these caveats. I still don't trust it.
I will always want at least some level of

451
00:40:36,100 --> 00:40:41,564
professional reference monitoring available, whether
even if it is to like, if I had a gigantic,

452
00:40:41,939 --> 00:40:47,778
perfectly calibrated consumer display that measured exactly
right, I'd still want some way to verify

453
00:40:47,903 --> 00:40:54,118
my signal on an actual instrument, not just this consumer
TV, because yeah, an errant firmware

454
00:40:54,160 --> 00:40:59,707
update could grenade the whole thing. And I would never
know. Well, and that will also then

455
00:40:59,707 --> 00:41:04,044
cascade down the stream, right? And that's, that's where
my, you know, we always are advocates of

456
00:41:04,044 --> 00:41:08,799
like, use the highest quality display possible. Hopefully
that means a reference display. But if

457
00:41:08,799 --> 00:41:12,970
you have to make, you know, a budget choice or that's
not available to you, at least at the very

458
00:41:12,970 --> 00:41:17,016
least understand the limitation. So I mean, another
good example of this, right? It's like a

459
00:41:17,057 --> 00:41:22,438
lot of TVs are sort of like these prosumer monitors
will have varying like PQ modes, right? So

460
00:41:22,480 --> 00:41:25,441
in a colorist world, you guys always want everything
hard clipping, right? But some

461
00:41:25,441 --> 00:41:29,653
displays might do be doing roll offs and stuff. Roll
off behavior one is not the same as roll

462
00:41:29,653 --> 00:41:33,532
behavior two. And if I make a grading choice, why something's rolling off, I have no idea how that's

463
00:41:33,532 --> 00:41:37,411
going to permeate downstream when it's getting to like
a variety. So you could go down to rabbit

464
00:41:37,411 --> 00:41:42,958
hole very quickly with this stuff. So yeah, This is where I become a little bit more of an elitist than

465
00:41:43,000 --> 00:41:49,798
most colorists. I'm sure Bram & David would attest
to this too. It's like, there's not really

466
00:41:49,798 --> 00:41:54,094
a good way around it besides just spending time in the
lab. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think you're on

467
00:41:54,094 --> 00:42:01,477
something with the idea of just that a standards body
can hopefully more or less dictate to these

468
00:42:01,477 --> 00:42:06,106
display manufacturers that like, Hey, no, there really
should be a cheat code here that we can

469
00:42:06,106 --> 00:42:09,568
just turn everything off. Right. And the other side
of that coin though? It's never going to

470
00:42:09,610 --> 00:42:17,076
happen. I understand. I understand. Now we need 51 to
make it really perfect. And so a couple

471
00:42:17,076 --> 00:42:21,872
of thoughts on that too. So one is that on a lot of these
TVs, turning something off doesn't really

472
00:42:21,872 --> 00:42:28,087
turn it off, but rather low. So a lot of most of these
TV companies use, you know, chips from

473
00:42:28,087 --> 00:42:32,800
Mediatek or other companies like that, that there
are toggles, they can trigger things, they

474
00:42:32,800 --> 00:42:36,679
can label it whatever they want though. Right. So something
that may be off is really a low setting.

475
00:42:36,804 --> 00:42:42,851
The other thing is that you have to remember that these
consumer electronics TV manufacturers are

476
00:42:42,851 --> 00:42:48,148
not necessarily always incentivized to give you clean in
and clean out because they're trying to sell

477
00:42:48,148 --> 00:42:53,362
you the advantage of their TV. Their AI makes it
look brighter or better or more colorful or

478
00:42:53,362 --> 00:42:59,410
whatever it is. So those things aren't in there for,
you know, by accident. If, if I think it's,

479
00:42:59,410 --> 00:43:03,497
I think you're barking up the wrong tree. If you think
you're going to convince the standards

480
00:43:04,164 --> 00:43:08,919
bodies to try to enforce this with, with TV manufacturers,
because what you're doing,

481
00:43:08,919 --> 00:43:13,382
you're saying, Hey, make everything so that regardless
of what I buy, it looks the same.

482
00:43:14,008 --> 00:43:20,472
Then it just becomes no competitive advantage. I get it. No, I, I get it. I get it. All right.

483
00:43:20,472 --> 00:43:23,976
The last thing, last, very last thing is I just
want to get your last thoughts on this.

484
00:43:23,976 --> 00:43:28,397
Cause this just came in. We had somebody comment on
one of our other episodes the other day about

485
00:43:28,397 --> 00:43:34,445
this. And David, you had mentioned it kind of offhandedly
about color spaces and stuff like that.

486
00:43:35,571 --> 00:43:40,659
And that is, is that one of the things that I think
as we move into the world of HDR, that is,

487
00:43:40,659 --> 00:43:46,915
is, is confusing for people about displays is
that we, it used to be everything in our

488
00:43:46,915 --> 00:43:50,836
life was Rec. 709, you know, and that's
all we were concerned ourselves about.

489
00:43:51,253 --> 00:43:56,300
But now we have, you know, on the far end of it,
we have 2020, which is, you know, we'll

490
00:43:56,467 --> 00:44:01,388
I'll have some specifics about that in a second,
but then we have, you know, P3 D65, right?

491
00:44:01,388 --> 00:44:08,395
There's P3 DCI. Like there's all these varying kinds
of things. And it strikes me that one of the

492
00:44:08,645 --> 00:44:13,400
confusing things for a lot of users is we don't
know where we sit with this stuff.

493
00:44:13,400 --> 00:44:18,405
And 2020 is a great example, right? It's just, I've
been hearing about 2020 for a decade plus,

494
00:44:18,489 --> 00:44:23,702
right? And it's like, Oh yeah, we'll eventually get
there. Like, here we are 10, 12 years later.

495
00:44:23,869 --> 00:44:28,624
And we're not quite there yet. Like, can you guys
speak to some of the challenges just maybe

496
00:44:28,624 --> 00:44:34,421
from each one of your perspectives of what these wider
gamuts and, and, and what it really means

497
00:44:34,421 --> 00:44:39,551
and why we're not quite there yet with some
of these things, including 2020.

498
00:44:40,177 --> 00:44:44,431
Yeah. I mean, I feel like I've talked a lot. If
anybody else wants to jump in, go ahead.

499
00:44:44,431 --> 00:44:51,980
But I have strong thoughts on 2020. So I think, you
know, I think what's being appreciated more

500
00:44:52,022 --> 00:44:58,237
and more by, by certainly colorists. And I think professional post-production is that 2020 can be

501
00:44:58,237 --> 00:45:04,201
a useful container space essentially, right? But that
it has a lot of caveats when it comes to

502
00:45:04,326 --> 00:45:10,416
being an actual target space for displays. This is
something I know that the EBU has, has found

503
00:45:10,416 --> 00:45:15,921
quite challenging in terms of, you know, where they thought
things were going to go. And I think a lot

504
00:45:15,921 --> 00:45:19,800
of things were specified early on without recognizing
what the knock on effects may be.

505
00:45:19,842 --> 00:45:26,849
I think the good news is that in, in post-production
for content steered towards streaming services,

506
00:45:27,599 --> 00:45:36,733
we do have either a delivery in P3 and then it gets
containerized by, by those services for

507
00:45:36,733 --> 00:45:43,615
distribution out the TVs operating 2020. Or you have
mandates from those services to say, yes,

508
00:45:43,615 --> 00:45:47,411
give me something that's 2020, but containerized to P3.

509
00:45:47,619 --> 00:45:48,412
Limited to P3

510
00:45:48,704 --> 00:45:54,501
Exactly. Limited to P3. And I think that's great. The
biggest issue with 2020 that we see now is in

511
00:45:54,501 --> 00:46:04,011
terms of broadcast in 2020, and especially in Europe
and with HLG especially, where that can,

512
00:46:04,470 --> 00:46:09,391
that limiting to P3 is not happening. And so you get
a lot of variable behavior because every

513
00:46:09,391 --> 00:46:14,938
display is doing a different percentage of 2020.
And then there's questions about what you do

514
00:46:14,980 --> 00:46:20,444
when the targets are outside of 2020. Do you preserve,
preserve hue towards those target

515
00:46:20,486 --> 00:46:25,699
primaries or do you go max sat? It would be display
native. If you go display native,

516
00:46:25,741 --> 00:46:29,828
then the problem you have is that it's variable in every
single display because every display has

517
00:46:29,828 --> 00:46:34,249
different native primaries. And if you do a hue
preservation, the problem is that the gamut

518
00:46:34,249 --> 00:46:39,922
actually gets a lot smaller than you would think it
would be. The other big problem is even if we

519
00:46:39,922 --> 00:46:43,342
had displays that could do all of 2020, and we've seen
this in the projector space and we've seen

520
00:46:43,383 --> 00:46:48,180
this now in some of the flat panels getting closer and
closer to 2020, is that you probably could not

521
00:46:48,180 --> 00:46:57,147
have chosen worse primaries when it comes to the
impact of things like observer metamerism.

522
00:46:58,190 --> 00:47:04,571
The closer you get, because the 2020 primaries lie
on the spectral locus, you get these narrow,

523
00:47:04,780 --> 00:47:11,662
it's basically laser light, one nanometer peaks
is how it's defined. That causes a lot of

524
00:47:11,745 --> 00:47:16,416
observer metamerism, but it's not just the narrowness
of it, it's also the location of those.

525
00:47:17,000 --> 00:47:21,171
And so you get into issues where the closer
and closer we get to 2020,

526
00:47:22,005 --> 00:47:28,053
the more and more things look different between observers
and especially anomalous observers.

527
00:47:28,512 --> 00:47:32,099
So observers who have minor sorts of what we would...

528
00:47:32,349 --> 00:47:33,141
Vision defects

529
00:47:33,141 --> 00:47:39,815
generically is color blindness, right? So anomalous, pro-anomalous. And so the more you get to those wide gamut

530
00:47:39,856 --> 00:47:44,486
displays, the worse those problems become. And so you
see this pullback now where a lot of people

531
00:47:44,486 --> 00:47:49,408
in post are trying to say, "I kind of wish we had
just said P3 and we'll be happy with it."

532
00:47:49,408 --> 00:47:54,788
Well, that's the follow-up. That's of course the follow-up, right? It seems like 2020 is always

533
00:47:55,372 --> 00:48:00,544
one goalpost, but we have this perfectly acceptable
wider gamut. Because the thing

534
00:48:00,544 --> 00:48:05,591
that's always got me about any of these wider gamuts
is that most people are not even coming

535
00:48:05,674 --> 00:48:11,555
close to extending the boundaries of any of these wider
gamuts, let alone 709, right?

536
00:48:11,680 --> 00:48:16,727
Yes, it's done. I'm thinking the animated films, etc.
are probably the greatest pushers of that.

537
00:48:17,185 --> 00:48:22,274
But when I'm just doing a basic grade, honestly,
I look at my vectorscope and I'm like,

538
00:48:22,482 --> 00:48:26,486
My signal is this on the vectorscope, and I'm going,
yeah, I don't really have to worry about

539
00:48:26,737 --> 00:48:32,534
those boundaries. I mean, I know that's different
for everybody, but why didn't we just go,

540
00:48:32,701 --> 00:48:33,660
Yeah, P3 is the thing?

541
00:48:33,660 --> 00:48:40,459
Well, I think the goal was to obviously have something
that was a little bit more future-proof.

542
00:48:41,043 --> 00:48:47,883
It was still not using imaginary primaries. You
didn't want to define things as like AP0

543
00:48:47,883 --> 00:48:54,139
or something like that, right? So you wanted something
that could actually be, in theory,

544
00:48:54,139 --> 00:48:56,892
hit. Laser projectors can do this. There are
laser projectors that can do this.

545
00:48:57,517 --> 00:49:00,520
Those manufacturers typically bring the gamut
in a bit to avoid other issues though.

546
00:49:00,562 --> 00:49:10,864
So I still think the path of least resistance is to
say, look, we've had 2020 as a standard for

547
00:49:10,864 --> 00:49:15,827
so long. It's going to be way too difficult to go back
at this point. But where I do think there

548
00:49:15,827 --> 00:49:20,123
is room, especially for the post-production community,
network streamers, all these people,

549
00:49:20,123 --> 00:49:26,838
to put pressure on standards bodies like the EBU,
like SMPTE, is to get something standardized

550
00:49:27,506 --> 00:49:33,512
that, for example, says, yes, we are going to continue
to encode things relative to 2020,

551
00:49:34,179 --> 00:49:40,227
but let's standardize P3 limiting. Let's not
have it be a per network per...

552
00:49:40,227 --> 00:49:41,812
Yeah, yeah.

553
00:49:42,145 --> 00:49:47,776
Have it be something where maybe there's an EBU spec
that says, we're going to target 2020

554
00:49:47,901 --> 00:49:55,283
if we're encoding, but we're going to do P3 D65 as
the target display space that we're limiting

555
00:49:55,367 --> 00:50:01,206
to within. If we do that, we're going to avoid a lot
of problems. And until standards bodies do

556
00:50:01,206 --> 00:50:06,253
this, our problems as it relates to 2020 are going to
get worse and worse. Because when I talk to the

557
00:50:06,253 --> 00:50:11,800
semiconductor suppliers who are making the panels,
they all are actively chasing more and more

558
00:50:11,800 --> 00:50:16,930
coverage of 2020 because that's what sells.
Right? That's what it's actually...

559
00:50:17,681 --> 00:50:24,896
This does 90%. This does 97%. And that's something
consumers understand bigger number better.

560
00:50:25,856 --> 00:50:31,069
Continue to chase that. And I've had those conversations
that I've had people at semiconductor

561
00:50:31,278 --> 00:50:36,575
manufacturers tell me, we will not stop chasing that
unless you can show us something in writing

562
00:50:36,575 --> 00:50:41,163
saying this is no longer necessary. And so I would
love for standards bodies to say, we're

563
00:50:41,163 --> 00:50:44,791
going to limit to P3 because then what we can do is
we can focus on making displays that just have

564
00:50:44,791 --> 00:50:51,339
native P3 primaries. And that will avoid a lot of
these observer metamerism issues. It'll avoid

565
00:50:51,339 --> 00:50:55,510
a lot of the other issues. But still have 2020 signaling for all the work that's been done.

566
00:50:55,510 --> 00:50:57,846
Yeah, because it's too late because... You can't.

567
00:50:58,221 --> 00:51:01,183
... we're saying there's no P3 mode in a lot of these
things. They don't know how to decode

568
00:51:01,183 --> 00:51:07,731
this stuff. It all is going out as 2020. Even when you
deliver to Netflix as a P3 D65 deliverable.

569
00:51:07,731 --> 00:51:08,607
It's still going out 2020.

570
00:51:08,607 --> 00:51:12,819
We're doing that as a service almost to the post-production
community to make your life easy,

571
00:51:12,819 --> 00:51:15,697
but it still gets encoded as 2020 and
delivered to the home. Right?

572
00:51:15,989 --> 00:51:16,281
I gotcha.

573
00:51:16,490 --> 00:51:22,913
So that's why I think it's too late. The Pandora's box
is open, right? But we still have this ability

574
00:51:22,954 --> 00:51:27,626
to maybe do this. If we don't do that, then the future
becomes really tricky in display technology

575
00:51:27,626 --> 00:51:31,630
because the only way we're going to avoid these other
problems is go to multi-primary systems,

576
00:51:31,630 --> 00:51:38,136
which are prohibitively expensive, especially for...
You can do a projection at cost, but you can do

577
00:51:38,136 --> 00:51:42,766
it relatively easy. Flat panels, it's really difficult
to do at any sort of reasonable cost

578
00:51:42,808 --> 00:51:47,354
level. And then you could do things like, again, where
you have something non-additive and you

579
00:51:47,354 --> 00:51:51,066
have a broadband light, and that can help with
some of these other issues as it comes to

580
00:51:51,191 --> 00:51:56,613
anomalous viewers and inner observer metamerism.
But again, you're looking really complex.

581
00:51:56,613 --> 00:51:59,324
But whats the point? Like you don't get any tangible benefit.

582
00:51:59,574 --> 00:52:03,703
Exactly. It's a really complex problem that we're
just creating for ourselves. I think

583
00:52:03,703 --> 00:52:10,210
you nailed it, Joey. I think when we had this metamerism
experts day in December at the now,

584
00:52:10,252 --> 00:52:17,717
unfortunately, gone MPC, the overwhelming consensus
among every colorist, every post supervisor

585
00:52:17,843 --> 00:52:22,055
there was, We're happy with P3D65.
Let's just live with that.

586
00:52:22,055 --> 00:52:23,223
Yeah. Yeah. I gotcha.

587
00:52:23,640 --> 00:52:29,980
I feel like it's a stupid metric to chase, just
like full screen peak brightness. Every

588
00:52:29,980 --> 00:52:36,945
so often you'll see that spec. It's a useless spec.
Nothing ever does full screen white in HDR.

589
00:52:37,279 --> 00:52:43,118
It's silly. Nothing is ever going to display full
gamut 2020 for any creative reason.

590
00:52:43,118 --> 00:52:51,626
All right. So the very last question I want
to wrap with David because, David,

591
00:52:52,419 --> 00:52:57,716
this has been something that's been on my mind and
you are the experts experts on this. In fact,

592
00:52:57,716 --> 00:53:04,556
have developed software to help this process. There
is a large swath of people who go, Well,

593
00:53:04,639 --> 00:53:10,979
I'm an editor who does color, so I'm not going to invest
in a $20,000 reference monitor. I'm going

594
00:53:10,979 --> 00:53:19,362
to use my higher end consumer computer monitor to do
so. And I know one of the challenges that you

595
00:53:19,362 --> 00:53:24,993
see with your customers and when you work with Portrait,
one of the challenges that you're trying

596
00:53:24,993 --> 00:53:30,457
to solve is, hey, how do we get more accurate consumer
devices, be laptops, iPads, et cetera?

597
00:53:31,041 --> 00:53:37,714
Can you just wrap things up here for us a little bit
with what the challenges of that are using a

598
00:53:37,714 --> 00:53:44,721
computer display, making it accurate, and where tools
like Patterns come into play to help make

599
00:53:44,721 --> 00:53:52,437
those devices as good as they could possibly be given
the use case? Yeah. So it's a huge can of

600
00:53:52,437 --> 00:53:58,151
worms that you're opening, right? And it sort of depends
on your platform, right? So Mac OS and

601
00:53:58,318 --> 00:54:03,323
Windows have different ways of handling color management,
but because these computer systems

602
00:54:03,323 --> 00:54:09,537
are typically multi-windowed systems and each window
can have its own format, maybe one's

603
00:54:09,537 --> 00:54:16,002
sRGB, maybe one's P3, one's 709, there's a lot of color
management that's happening in the image

604
00:54:16,002 --> 00:54:21,758
processing. So on a Mac, everything's color managed.
Whether you set your app up for color

605
00:54:21,758 --> 00:54:29,474
management or not, there's color management. And then
how the system tries to function is say,

606
00:54:29,557 --> 00:54:35,814
What am I connected to? And that creates a ICC
color profile through what we call EDID,

607
00:54:35,814 --> 00:54:40,360
extended display identification data. And you need
that profile to match with the monitor.

608
00:54:40,360 --> 00:54:44,656
And this comes back to our conversation earlier where
I said, you can have a perfectly calibrated

609
00:54:44,739 --> 00:54:51,413
monitor, but if the source isn't set up, it all
falls apart. Right? So that's where the

610
00:54:51,454 --> 00:54:58,086
systems get really complex because with a broadcast
monitor like FSI, it's very manual.

611
00:54:58,086 --> 00:55:01,673
You can go to your monitor, you can tell it what you
want it to be. And typically you're trying to

612
00:55:01,673 --> 00:55:08,221
send just a bit accurate signal out of that system
to that monitor. With a computer system,

613
00:55:08,805 --> 00:55:14,394
there's no bit accurate mode that's easy to get. On a
Mac, everything goes through color management,

614
00:55:14,394 --> 00:55:19,357
whether you want it to or not. And on Windows, you
have what we call a color aware or non-color

615
00:55:19,357 --> 00:55:23,445
aware app. So it's color aware, it'll go through a
color management pipeline. If it's not color

616
00:55:23,445 --> 00:55:28,533
aware, it'll come out, but you still have some of the
processing that might happen from that GPU,

617
00:55:29,200 --> 00:55:34,372
right? Like an NVIDIA GPU, AMD, Intel, et cetera, they have
their own controls and they might be adding

618
00:55:34,414 --> 00:55:37,959
their own flavor. So you still have some adjustments
that might be happening on that output

619
00:55:38,251 --> 00:55:43,173
that's going to that display. So to really get what
you're asking for, which is, can I connect

620
00:55:43,298 --> 00:55:48,470
a monitor directly to my Mac or my Windows
machine and then start grading?

621
00:55:50,388 --> 00:55:55,518
It's not something I personally recommend because of
the can of worms, right? As you start to test

622
00:55:55,518 --> 00:56:00,482
the system, you start to see, oh, there's a gotcha here,
there's a gotcha there. There are instances

623
00:56:00,940 --> 00:56:06,071
where you can make it right, where you can take a Windows
machine and say, okay, in this instance,

624
00:56:06,071 --> 00:56:11,659
if I'm grading for X, this is now set up properly, I
can do it. And the same thing on macOS, you can

625
00:56:11,659 --> 00:56:15,288
say for this instance, I'm grading properly where it
falls apart though, is when you're switching

626
00:56:15,288 --> 00:56:20,376
formats. Maybe you're going to HDR, maybe you're going
back to SDR, maybe you're going from 709 to

627
00:56:20,418 --> 00:56:26,633
working on something in Adobe RGB for print. And so
then that's where it starts to fall apart,

628
00:56:26,633 --> 00:56:32,138
where you can't easily switch and make sure you're always
in that perfect thing. So my recommendation

629
00:56:32,138 --> 00:56:38,061
for customers and for people in the creative community
is, I still recommend using a reference

630
00:56:38,144 --> 00:56:44,192
monitor, I still recommend coming out of a card that's
going to give you an accurate output like

631
00:56:44,192 --> 00:56:51,157
an AJA or a Blackmagic card or similar. The apps talk
to that card directly, they bypass the color

632
00:56:51,157 --> 00:56:57,247
management system. These developers we trust like Resolve
and Baselight and these companies, we trust

633
00:56:57,247 --> 00:57:02,001
that they're sending bid accuracy to these cards, it's
coming out to the monitor, we can trust that

634
00:57:02,001 --> 00:57:07,590
what we're getting is what we're sending, and we don't
have that. But I do think this is a hot

635
00:57:07,632 --> 00:57:12,220
topic, it's been a hot topic for a long time. I do think
we're going to start to see organizations

636
00:57:12,387 --> 00:57:18,268
like Apple, like Microsoft, etc. continue to improve
their color management system. I think

637
00:57:18,268 --> 00:57:24,190
there will be a day where we get to a point where we
say we can plug in a computer monitor and turn

638
00:57:24,190 --> 00:57:29,195
on maybe it's a creator's mode or reference mode, like
you have on your iPad, you have reference

639
00:57:29,195 --> 00:57:34,159
mode on your iPad and say, okay, now this output
is coming a bit accurate and there's no

640
00:57:34,659 --> 00:57:42,083
adjustments happening. Because even if you get a specific
like on your Mac, if you get your Mac

641
00:57:42,083 --> 00:57:45,628
plugged in and you forget to turn off your true tone,
because you happen to have a Mac with true

642
00:57:45,628 --> 00:57:51,885
tone, it's still applying that true tone to that signal
sometimes. So just a lot of gotchas and a

643
00:57:51,885 --> 00:57:56,556
lot of stuff you have to make is perfect. So I've worked
with a number of studios where we have made

644
00:57:56,556 --> 00:58:01,519
it work, we have been able to get really accurate images
for their workflows. But it's often not

645
00:58:01,519 --> 00:58:07,567
worth the extra effort because the cards are now so
affordable. You look at some of the cards,

646
00:58:07,567 --> 00:58:11,821
you're like imagine a couple hundred dollars. Go
ahead. Can you speak to what Patterns does

647
00:58:11,821 --> 00:58:17,452
that's unique compared to, for example, just using
like a generic TPG window that does like

648
00:58:17,452 --> 00:58:22,498
red, green, blue colors? Like why does Patterns
work better in that scenario?

649
00:58:23,791 --> 00:58:28,630
Okay, yeah. So a friend of mine, my friend Eric, and
now Portrait Display owns it, but we worked

650
00:58:28,630 --> 00:58:34,719
on an app called Patterns. It's on Mac OS and iOS.
And one of the things we wanted to do is we

651
00:58:34,719 --> 00:58:38,681
wanted to understand what was happening with the color
measurements. So we built in the ability to

652
00:58:38,973 --> 00:58:44,854
use Apple color management on the pattern window.
So if you've looked at computer test pattern

653
00:58:44,854 --> 00:58:49,442
generators, I think until now, I don't know any of them
that are sophisticated in that way, where

654
00:58:49,442 --> 00:58:55,698
you can say you go to menu and say this is a 709 2.4
and then it tells the OS this is a 709 2.4 test

655
00:58:55,740 --> 00:59:01,704
pattern, process it as such, then I can set my let's
say CalMAN to 709 2.4 and measure off the

656
00:59:01,746 --> 00:59:09,295
front of the screen and say, am I getting what this
actually is? And it can do HDR as well on

657
00:59:09,295 --> 00:59:14,926
the Mac. So it can do HDR so you can actually measure
in high dynamic range for BT 2020 or

658
00:59:14,926 --> 00:59:21,266
P3 and see what is my EOTF doing? Is it tone mapping?
Is it following the curve? So it really

659
00:59:21,266 --> 00:59:25,895
allowed us to start to see what was happening with
some of these things within the processing

660
00:59:25,937 --> 00:59:31,067
pipeline and where things were happening with color
management and how we might get around them.

661
00:59:31,484 --> 00:59:36,906
Well, guys, this has been very illuminating information.
I know that we have a ton more

662
00:59:36,948 --> 00:59:40,910
questions and thoughts about this, but we'll save
that for another day. We'll do a follow up

663
00:59:41,202 --> 00:59:48,793
at a later date. For any of our viewers watching, all
three of these guys, whether they'll admit

664
00:59:48,793 --> 00:59:55,341
it to it or not, are excellent tutorialists, right?
And they have very, very good videos on the internet

665
00:59:55,383 --> 01:00:02,724
If you want to go over to flanderscientific.com and check out some of the video resrouces there

666
01:00:02,724 --> 01:00:08,354
Bram's metamerism video is like
its gold. That video, I've shared that

667
01:00:08,354 --> 01:00:16,529
with more people than I know because it really explains a lot of some of those display challenges that we see.

668
01:00:16,529 --> 01:00:23,202
Nate, as well with all the Dolby training that he has helped design and pushed forward to the consumer

669
01:00:23,202 --> 01:00:26,164
it's worth noting that if you are interested in Dolby Vision

670
01:00:26,164 --> 01:00:32,378
can become Dolby Vision certified, which is sort of
a combination of some testing and kind of,

671
01:00:32,545 --> 01:00:38,176
you know, traditional test kind of stuff, but also with
a do it component of having to kind of show

672
01:00:38,801 --> 01:00:43,806
how the, you know, that you grasp how this stuff works.
And then also worth the watches to head

673
01:00:43,848 --> 01:00:49,020
over to the Portrait Displays YouTube channel where
David handles a lot of tutorial videos

674
01:00:49,020 --> 01:00:51,105
about calibrating specific displays

675
01:00:51,105 --> 01:00:54,817
talks more about Patterns as well. All three of these places

676
01:00:54,942 --> 01:01:01,157
are fantastic resources for deeper dives on some of these
challenging issues that we've spoken about

677
01:01:01,366 --> 01:01:06,662
over these past few episodes when it comes to displays.
So guys, I can't thank you enough for

678
01:01:07,121 --> 01:01:11,876
spending some time with us. We're sorry that we, the
viewer doesn't know this, but we've recorded

679
01:01:11,918 --> 01:01:18,800
for about 11 and a half hours here today. So we have
plenty of content that we'll get out to

680
01:01:19,050 --> 01:01:22,303
everybody there. But guys, thank you so much for joining
us. We really appreciate it. And we'll

681
01:01:22,303 --> 01:01:23,429
everybody there. But guys, thank you so much for joining
us. We really appreciate it. And we'll

682
01:01:23,429 --> 01:01:28,518
have to do this again sometime soon. Really, really,
really big heartfelt thanks. So for the

683
01:01:28,518 --> 01:01:32,814
Offset podcast, I am Robbie Carman. And I'm
Joey D'Anna. Thanks for listening!