Colour monitoring and grading is big business, especially when you start talking about TV, film and DVD/BD production - but where to start? When to start? Is it important for you? Hopefully this and the follow up posts will help answer a few of those questions...
The extent to which you should improve your setup is defined, on one side, by the accuracy and level of broadcast-safe colour required for your final productions and on the other is your own personal aims for the quality of the finished product. For instance, if your projects will only ever be exported to the web then video monitoring isn’t a huge issue as you’ll be seeing the same pixel arrangement and bad colour calibration on every computer monitor, but if you do invest in the quality then it will still be appreciated and noticed by the viewer. This becomes more of a creative decision to grade and monitor your edit properly. When you enter the realm of film, DVD production or TV Broadcast it becomes much more critical that your colours are monitored by a proper production panel to ensure they fall within the 'safe' requirements of the broadcast world and the best consistency with the vast number of different TV screens and cinema systems out there.
There are a number of different levels you can consider for your video monitoring; the basic method would be using a low-cost standalone HDMI card . This gives you a precise HDMI colour space and will send a proper HD video signal into the monitor. This would be coupled with Sony’s entry level LMD production monitor, the 2030W, which has composite, component and HDMI inputs as standard. Up from this you can look at HDSDI, the standard professional I/O connection for HD, which will give you the best quality monitoring for any HD video but increases the cost considerably. The route to go down here really depends on the scope of your final productions delivery and the quality required for colour grading and compositing.
At this point the decisions really do require proper consultation if you're not clued up on the differences between the levels and quality of kit available for production monitoring. I'll follow up this post with some more technical information on this biz soon, but for now, thats your intro. If you'd like to talk further about this please contact me via broadcast at jigsaw 24 . com
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