Monitors and colour.

[dfgh11]

Hello,

I've started to edit and grade a lot of footage so I recently bought myself a Dell u2311 IPS monitor. Before now I had always just been grading on a variety of high end Vista/Windows 7 based laptops and machines using either Avid composer or Sony vegas. A while back I started to notice how my grades always looked not as intended when viewed on MAC, they looked rather saturated and some of them even looked tinted towards a certain colour and was another reason for my monitor purchase. As expected when viewing some of my footage on it, my new IPS screen shows the footage much like the MAC does even though every other PC regardless of what monitor they were running displays the footage correctly. I decided to try grading using using it, the results of which have left me a little confused. For when I grade on the IPS screen the resulting footage on non IPS screens looks understaurated and not how I intended and if I calibrate my IPS monitor to undersaturate colours, then the resulting footage could end up looking different on a Mac. I understand that you have very little control over how your footage is viewed on other peoples' screens due to a wide range of factors, but surely there is a way of obtaining a middle ground? Is it my screen or am I just grading wrong? I have to admit that I don't use or understand very little the Vectroscope/YCbCr Parade/RGB graphs and I tend to grade a lot by eye. Could this could also be contributing to my problems?

[jagabo]

Get your system calibrated. Be aware that the Desktop and video use different paths to get video to the monitor so you have to calibrate both the Desktop and video paths. Then you can be sure that what you see is correct. As you know, you can't control what other people see.

An example of a calibration tool:
http://www.amazon.com/Pantone-MEU116-ColorMunki-Create-Software/dp/B001E2J464/

In addition to that, video works in the YUV colorspace and monitors work in RGB. So YUV has to be converted to RGB for display. There are a few different common ways of doing this. You have to be sure it's done right with the source, software, and hardware you're working with. There are some more detail in these posts:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/329866-incorrect-collor-display-in-video-playback?p...=1#post2045481
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/329866-incorrect-collor-display-in-video-playback?p...=1#post2045830
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/326496-file-in-Virtualdub-has-strange-colors-when-o...=1#post2022085

[dfgh11]

Thanks I shall give these a look. I'm suspecting that vegas isn't converting these correctly

[jagabo]

Thanks I shall give these a look. I'm suspecting that vegas isn't converting these correctly

Vegas probably is converting the videos correctly. But, as I understand it, unlike most other video editors, Vegas uses studio RGB to display your videos, not computer RGB. So what you seen in Vegas will look different than what you see when playing a file in a media player.