NEC SpectraView Broadcast Video calibration?

First of all I know that having a real calibrated broadcast monitor is the best solution as emphasized by Ben Balser in his Final Cut Pro X 205: Color Grading tutorial I am currently watching. But let's say you don't have access to one, but you do own a NEC monitor with SpectraView and can calibrate to their Broadcast Video setting. In the limited testing I'm able to perform I found that when the monitor is calibrated for photo editing nothing matches (FCPX, DaVinci Resolve 9 and my Sony HD TV), even though FCPX is suppose to be a ICC aware application. Resolve and FCPX are very far apart. But when I calibrate the NEC to Broadcast Video settings, FCPX, Resolve & the Sony TV are fairly close! Can anyone comment on what the optimal settings would be in SpectraView in this less than ideal setup? The current settings I have are: D65 Gamma 2.2 220 cd/m2 SMPTE-C.

Did they finally release that course? Cool. Thanks for purchasing it.

"Color Sync" only works if you have the ICC profile for that specific monitor. Someone would have to create it, and that takes extremely expensive equipment. Calibrate to standard broadcast color bars. There are tons of guides all over the Internet about how to calibrate to color bars.

Don't compare it to what you see on a TV set. Go with the standard broadcast color bars only.

The ICC profile is created specifically for my monitor. I have the NEC PA271W, SpectraView II & the i1 Display Pro. Besides the options for photo editing/prepress, there is an option for Broadcast Video. Calibrating visually with the broadcast color bars seems so antiquated. In the photo industry we have given up visual calibration in favor of hardware calibrators with excellent results. Why should that not be the case in video?

headproductions wrote: In the photo industry we have given up visual calibration in favor of hardware calibrators with excellent results. Why should that not be the case in video?

In photography you never did use broadcast color bars to calibrate a monitor. You calibrated for print, subtractive color. Much, much, much easier thing to do.

In video we calibrate for light emitting screens, additive color, and it's very difficult. A TV screen and a film projector are not anything near what a computer monitor is, or does, or is capable of. A broadcast monitor by its very mechanics is not a TV screen nor a computer monitor.

Photography and video are extremely different animals when it comes to viewing actual colors and quality on monitors. And Color Sync for video is very questionable, Apple has given out next to no technical information about it, and no one really understands how its supposed to work. An ICC for print won't work for video reproduction.

1. Current OSX architecture limits the output from your Mac via the GPU to 8bit unless you are using a professional I/O solution from AJA, Blackmagic, or Matrox.

2. As far as I know ColorSync is essentially a simple matrix based ICC profile, which is a greatly simplified and less accurate alternative to the 3D LUT engine found in professional broadcast monitors.

3. ColorSync deals with color management, but proper frame-rate and interlaced video support are entirely different issues that to me are even more important in general editing applications and are still going to be very problematic in virtually any workflow that does not include a professional broadcast monitor.

4. FCPX supports ColorSync, but not much else in the professional video world does. The beautiful thing about a professional broadcast monitor is that you can use it with virtually any professional camera, I/O box, etc.

5. Most GPUs have all sorts of video enhancement capabilities. Even if we assume that all of the color related enhancements (including High Dynamic Range adjustments) can be and are turned OFF, it is unclear if other GPU rendering enhancements like noise reduction, dithering, and video playback smoothing techniques can really be disabled. In most professional applications, if you have noise or cadence issues in your source you want to be certain you will see it.

6. ColorSync requires profiling the display in question and most people seem to do try and do this with a very inexpensive colorimeter. If broadcast monitor manufactures could align monitors accurately with an inexpensive colorimeter they certainly would. As is they spend well over $125,000 on measuring equipment over the years and have done so because they've found it necessary in order to get alignment results within what are consider an acceptable tolerance for professional use. Even with display specific offsets determined by a rather expensive spectroradiometer no one has yet to find a puck style colorimeter that can be used for much besides basic white balance and peak luminance measurement. No broadcast monitor manufacturer would ever use any of the dozens of lower end colorimeters (even with offsets) that many have tested in R&D efforts for any alignment procedure that requires accurate measurement of low light levels.

7. Calibrating gamma, color temperature, and even color space with a profile is one thing, but many computer monitors are ill-equipped to operate with a peak white luminance at SMPTE recommended levels (35fL). Most computer monitors are setup much brighter and none of them can be successfully re-calibrated with the necessary lower peak white luminance. Most desktop LCD monitors cannot be adjusted below about 50fL.

Again, the list above is just a starting point of some of the more serious concerns that should be addressed for a workflow that bypasses traditional broadcast monitors and professional I/O cards. Many of the concerns really center around the capabilities of professional I/O cards vs generic GPUs, as well as the mechanical nature of the components that are used in computer monitors vs broadcast monitors.

My conclusion is that Color Sync for video in FCP X is not meant to replace broadcast monitors, but to stabilize gamma reproduction across applications. So that in FCP the image looks the same as it does in QT Player, AE, uploaded, etc. I can’t see any physical way for it to replace broadcast monitors at all. Nor can a colorometer make anything that’s not a physical professional broadcast monitor reproduce as one.