Hey there and welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. And today we're continuing
on with our discussion with three industry experts about the state of monitors in 2025. Stay tuned.
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All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. I am one of your
hosts, Robbie Carman. With me as always is Joey D'Anna. Hey, Joey, how are you, man? Hi, everyone.
We are continuing our discussion today with three of our pals and industry experts.
Bram Desmet from FSI, Nate McFarlin from Dolby, and David Abrams from
Avical slash Portrait Displays. And in part one, if you missed that, be sure to go back and check
that out. We kind of just talked a little brief overview, I shouldn't say brief, a overview of
kind of the roles that these guys play in various parts of the display industry. But we thought,
guys, in part two here, we would pepper you with some questions that have been on our minds, have
been on some of our audience minds. And Joey and I spent a lot of time on, you know, forums and user
groups and colors groups and stuff. And so some of these questions that we're going to pepper you
with also come from that source. But guys, I want to start out with something that we get asked
about a lot. And I can answer like in a very dumb way. And that is, how are panels actually made?
Right. Because I think that like, there's a it's just a it's a dark hole, a black hole, I think,
of knowledge from for a lot of people about how these these the displays are made, because it's
like, oh, cool, new display, where'd that come from? No idea, right? From your guy's perspective,
and let's start with you, Bram, because you probably you probably deal with a lot of this
on a day to day basis with FSI. Like, where do these panels come from? How are they made? And
is it is it a super uber technical process? Or is it something that is kind of standard
throughout the industry? Just speak a little bit to how that manufacturing happens.
Yeah. So the the number one requirement for making panels is to have more money than anybody would
ever know what to do with. So, you know, the thing that I always point to as kind of a reality check
for people when they because one thing that we get asked all the time is, why don't you make your
own panels that go into and it's like, well, because I don't have billions of dollars sitting
around. And that's not hyperbole. So you are literally like SBC's quantum
dot OLED facility. To give you an idea there, the capital investment earmarked for that is about 10
billion U.S. dollars. Chump change, yeah. So this is this is why there are only, you know, a handful
of large panel manufacturers. That's why you see this adopted by lots of different TV manufacturers
and monitor manufacturers and why you see so much shared technology, which isn't a bad thing. It's a
good thing because you can only make these things with that sort of scale, even small pilot lines
to make prototypes of stuff. I mean, you're looking at places where they might be spending
500 million dollars just to get a pilot line up and running. So there are some exceptions where,
you know, research departments at universities will do material science type stuff and make
small batch panels. But that is really more the exception than the rule. The rule is more that
these are very, very large semiconductor manufacturers with extensive IP, extensive
manufacturing facilities. And it's also why you see them kind of try to milk it a little bit in
terms of, you know, keeping a plant up and running for years and years and years, even when
the technology is kind of deprecated. And why you see kind of this filtering down in the industry
of, you know, technology that once was high end is now more of the entry level and why they keep
manufacturing it is because they've spent all that money and they need to recoup that cost.
If you look at some of these factories, this is not a simple thing. A lot of this is like
automated clean rooms you're looking at. A lot of these panel substrates are, you know, garage door
size or larger. They look like the side of a house and then they're cut down. So these are
and the size capacity, like how big they can make that underlying glass essentially is what in large
part determines the generation. So you'll hear these like, you know, Gen 8, Gen 8.5, like what
the heck does that mean? A lot of it comes down to the size of the substrates that they can make.
But they're really impressive facilities. If you ever, you know, get to see a video,
they don't typically allow people to tour them. They're pretty, but, you know, if you see videos
of how these made giant machines picking up these pieces of glass, moving them around,
a lot of clean room operations. Now, a lot of material science development has to go into this.
And these people, you know, semiconductor manufacturers work with suppliers like, you
know, Nanosys and whatever to get quantum dot materials or different LED manufacturers for
backlights. That's a very sophisticated process that typically only very big companies with
extremely deep pockets bother to get into because it's very hard for anybody small to try to get into the space.
Yeah, it's funny. I always say that like the biggest advances in technology
always can be kind of narrowed down to material science. Once the material science is handled,
everything else kind of, I won't say falls into place, but the material science, some of this
stuff is incredibly advanced. It is. And, you know, once they nail it, that's usually the hard part,
except that a lot of times they nail it. And then there's fights about IP, people
sue other people and technologies never come out. I've been witness to that several times in my
career where it's really excited about the evolution of a new display technology, new
material science that was going to go into a display. And then because one, another company
had never found its way to market. So disappointment. I always keep my little vial of Quantum Dots here.
There you go. I love it. Now, so I think another question related to that is that I think there is
this idea that, you know, a company like FSI or LG or whoever, right? Like there's,
there's, I think there's confusion about like, especially like, you know, LG and Samsung come
to mind because they're the two ones that I see cited the most that like the TV side of that
company is the same thing as the display manufacturing side of that company. That's not really true,
right? In a lot of cases? Same, same parent company typically. But the, but yeah, the consumer
electronics side of these companies and the semiconductor side of these companies are typically
pretty well siloed. And that part of that is because again, they have to spend so much
money to build these factories. A lot of times selling to just their own consumer electronics
division will never offset that cost. They'll never recoup it and never profit. So they have
to sell to a lot of other manufacturers, you know? So yeah, it, these are very separate entities. And
amusingly, a lot of times you see them, you know, you'll see, you know, the consumer electronics
side of the company buy from the competitor of the semiconductor side of that company.
Like that doesn't making sense, right?
They have to meet certain consumer electronics demands. And funnily enough, sometimes you see
that, you know, what the semiconductor manufacturers produce sometimes will find its way into consumer
electronics partners from competing companies well before the consumer electronics side of that same
company adopts their own technology. So yeah, it's really funny sometimes to see those dynamics
between those large companies, but they are typically very separate entities. And that's
something that causes a lot of confusion because people are like, Oh, you get your panels from
Samsung. And I've literally had customers come to me and go, Oh, so you're just taking a part of
Samsung TV, pulling the panel from that, putting it in. We buy the panels from like someone like
SDC, just like a Samsung or Sony or whoever would buy this panel. So that is, you know,
just to be clear about that, those, those entities operate very separately.
No, it's a, it's a, it's a confusing thing. So thanks for clarifying that. Speaking of confusing
things, I want to get into some technical things for all three of you, because I think there's a
lot of opinion. There's a lot of fact, there's a lot of confusion around all these things.
So I want to talk a little bit about kind of the idea of some of the things that impact
monitor performance for lack of a better term. And what I mean by that is that I think there's,
you know, as colorist, we're used to working in a dark room and we understand, you know,
kind of the implications of ambient light and that kind of stuff. But like, how much, how important
is viewing conditions and some other parts of like the, the, the viewing process important to like,
kind of, I don't know, lack of a better term, successful viewing or accurate viewing,
like things like I'm thinking of things like backlights (bias lights), I'm thinking of things like, you know,
you know, actual, you know, hitting, you know, a hundred nits for SDR or whatever for HDR, like,
how, how dramatic are some of those things to overall performance of a display? Does that make
sense? Yeah, I think Nate can definitely talk on that quite well. Because we, I talked to Nate about
viewing environment. It's probably the thing we've talked about more than anything over the
last year, to be honest. So I know that, that, you know, ambient light is a huge factor,
viewing environment's a huge factor. I know David also deals with this a lot in terms of,
you know, the difference between what he sees on his more consumer install type situations versus
professional installations. Yeah, I'll give you a great example, right? One thing that comes up
often in a lot of the forums that I'm on, people talk about backlights, right? And they go, all
right, well, I'll just go and I'll get a backlight and I'll just pop it on there. And there doesn't
seem to be any consideration for where that backlight's going, how bright it should be,
what the rest of the lights look like in the room. So I'm just curious from your guy's perspective,
because, you know, you walk into any given suite and it's a totally different lighting situation,
a totally different environment than another suite, and how much that goes into just our
observation of the display. This is a really good question, Robbie, and this is, as
Bram alluded to, this is probably one of the most common questions we get. I think in an ideal world,
we would all do our grading in a 10 by 10 completely blacked out with bias light, you know,
exactly following the SMPTE specs for whatever you're doing. But the reality is that that's not
the case, right? And it's not just an ambient light variation. Obviously, everybody sees things
differently, everybody's eyeballs are differently, but things as simple as reflections,
texture of the wall, color of the wall. Like these are all, I mean, I've been in cinemas where,
you know, the entire, every seat in the cinema is red, right? So that casts like a red, you know,
like, so there's a ton of variability here. And I think that the thing that makes it even more
complicated is that it's not the same for SDR and HDR, right? And when you start talking about
bias lightings, then you get into discussions of things that you've already discussed, right? Where
do you put it on the display? How bright do you have it? How do you measure how bright this is?
Like this is these are all very great questions. And I think in a perfect world,
a standards body like SMPTE or the ITU would just, you know, go ahead and update that and give more
concrete guidelines. But we've at Dolby been looking at this a lot recently, we're actually planning
on talking about this more in our webinar after NAB for more kind of like specific recommendations,
but long story short, it plays a massive role. I would actually argue and Bram & David, I'm sure
would agree is that when you're working with lower luminance scenes, this becomes imperatively
important because your eyes are a lot more sensitive down in that region to any sort of
minute details and changes that happen in the environment. So yeah, very, very important.
And I'm curious, David, when you walk into a customer site, whether it be somebody with a
really fancy home theater or one of like a top Hollywood studio, how often do you find yourself
making viewing environment recommendation and changes before you even start talking about
calibrating a display, right? Because if the viewing environment is completely wackadoodle,
you know, all your calibration work could go out the window.
Yeah, so a couple of things there. So a lot of the customers that are having us calibrate, say,
a bay have already, you know, they're savvy, right? They know, hey, I'm color grading. I know a bit
about this. I know enough to call a calibrator, you know, maybe use a reference monitor. So those
customers pretty much have a room that's at least darkened, right? Maybe the walls aren't painted
black or have gray, but they've darkened the room, they've minimized their reflections,
they've got their ideal seating position. And typically, they do have a bias light. So not
always, but typically they do, I would say more often than not, those customers have a bias light
already there. And then once you move into like the consumer, right, the content consumer,
and you're in these homes, and you're in these theaters, and you're in these rooms,
most people that are hiring a professional calibrator will have some form of shades, I'd say,
you know, well over 90%, right, it's going to have some form of shades room darkening,
so they can enjoy their movies during the day, and they can do those types of things. But those rooms
are also not perfect. And they might have some light leakage, they might have a little bit of
reflection, they might have they a customer just might like watching with a little bit of light on
right? We've talked to customers. Yeah, that was gonna be kind of my next question is how much
you know, butting heads do you get into with like, I like it this way? Well, that is not really right.
Well, yeah, I mean, where do you kind of draw the line?
Yeah, and to into written to riff on that, sorry to interrupt Joey, but to riff on that, well,
I'm curious, like somebody like you, David, who, you know, does this professionally,
do you have like a panic attack when you see like home theater groups and people with like
hue light systems, and they're constantly changing like the light, you know, based on what's on
screen? Does that like, like send you into the shakes? I mean, if they were going to have me sit
there watch a movie, maybe, but you know, if I'm coming in calibrating and leaving, like it's,
hey, you know, to each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What what's important to note is, is a calibrator is
that the calibration of monitor with the with the probe, right, your meter doesn't change because
of the ambient light. And what I mean by that is you really don't want to be lighting because the
probe doesn't know the difference between the ambient light in the room and the light coming
off the TV. So then you're you're taking that into account and you're making adjustments on the TV
for what's happening in the room and you don't want that. So when you calibrate, you really do
want the room is as dark as possible, so there's at least contamination is possible. But then if
you do have a user that is watching with higher light, well, would you calibrate to 100 nits in
709? Would you still do you know, a 2.4 EOTF? This is a question that I don't think and Bram,
and Nate can correct me, I don't think there's any standard of if you measure this much lux in the
room, adjust the EOTF to be a 2.35 and the luminance to go to 140. Now there are some research
documents that have been done recently, where people have done some perceptual modeling and
saying in these type of environments, you might want to do this, but I don't think any of that's
been standardized. So as a calibrator, you have to sort of make these decisions and figure out how
do I get my customer something that is true to the artist's intent as I can in the environment
that they're in because a home user typically isn't going to take a living room and say, I'm
going to now paint it black and the ceiling black and the walls this and especially if they've got
significant others that might not have the same decor preference. What do they call the wife
acceptance factor? I like that. So you have to kind of, yeah, that's a big thing on the forums,
they call it the wife acceptance factor. Like how can you just, your guys, your guys, partners,
and spouses don't like just like break out, you know, CIE diagrams when you're watching TV. I mean,
what's what's up. Yeah, that's weird. No, I know. There's one thing he said there is really important,
I think, to differentiate is this idea of separation between preference and accuracy,
because that's like at the heart of all these discussions, right? And that's why,
at least from Dolby's perspective, like on any of our playback devices, you always see more than
one Dolby Vision picture mode, right? Because if you were to go into the reference or most accurate
picture mode in a super blind or whatever, be able to say like, I can't see anything, right?
So I think that's really hard to juggle because like David said, like there's no sort of
one size fits all and you can kind of skirt around this with things like ambient light sensors and
things like that to get it. But then ultimately, like Joey was saying, like, all this could just
be for not because you could just have somebody who likes to, you know, vivid mode exists. Like
people watch. Right? Like they like to watch. I see this. I see this interesting dichotomy that
isn't play though, right? Is that as so the monitors have gotten better, the standards are
more well known. And it's like companies like Dolby, like you guys are assisting people in
kind of trying to get the more accuracy, right? Like, you know, with the, you know, your, your
certifications, your different modes. But like, it also seems like these two things are a little
bit at, at, at, at loggerheads, right? Because we have things like filmmaker mode and reference
mode and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, like that's just the TV. We're not really
speaking to the rest of the viewing environment with there. And it seems so it seems like somebody
could be, it could be a little bit of a case where like of disappointment, right? Somebody turns on
filmmaker mode and it's a hundred nits, you know, and gamma 2.4
It's too dim. Well, this filmmaker modes crap, right? What was this filmmaker thinking!
right? That's probably the most accurate mode, but it still doesn't look good to them. So I guess a
follow up to this is I'm like, I understand the reference environment, but on the consumer side
of things, like how much variance or tolerance is there to, you know, a little above or below
whatever the kind of the standard is like is, and David, you probably deal with this all the time,
right? Like, is there a difference between, Hey, this is accurate and this is what looks great in
this room? If that makes sense. You know, it's, it's not exact yet, right? There's no like guide
where I can walk in, make a measurement and say, ah, the specification says I need to now do this
because of this is your environment. A little bit of that does come from your intuition and your
understanding of human perception as a calibrator and the type of room that you're in.
Ultimately, as Nate was saying, with a personal preference, you know, you want to, you may want
to make your customer happy. So there's a lot you can do, even if you're not getting that 100 nits,
709, you know, 2.4 EOTF perfectly. And that's, you know, you can turn off a lot of the
sharpening, right? You can, you can make sure your image processing for like two, three pull
down and everything is optimized. You can set up all your sources and make sure those sources are
set up properly through maybe there's an AV receiver and there's the TV. You can calibrate
that white balance. So it is hitting D65. Even if you're putting out 150 nits, right? Or 175 nits
off the screen. So there's, there's still a lot you can do to say I'm getting this a lot more
accurate, and then I'm going to take it from there and sort of make a shift for the room environment.
One of the things I'll ask a customer when I show up and I'm at their home is, you know,
hey, is this the mode you've been watching it in? How do you feel the brightness is?
Because I can take a quick measurement of the mode they're in, maybe it's a vivid mode,
I can take a measurement if it's 250 nits, they go, Oh, I love how bright it is. I wish it was
brighter than I know. Oh, okay, this guy's got a preference for really bright images. And maybe
that means I need to explain to them, this is a little overkill for what you're watching and
depending on the room. But it's, it's variable, you know, I wish I could tell you this. And I keep
I get to say my favorite expression, how much is a boat? Exactly!
One other thing that we've, we've seen drastically change in both the consumer landscape
and the professional display landscape is the available sizes, right? For years, for most of
my career, you know, 20 to 25 inch reference monitor was where we were living every so often,
you had the big, we had the big 32 inch BVM because we were, we thought we were, we were hot stuff.
But a 32 inch BVM was gigantic, right? To have a 32 inch reference monitor back in the day
was like absurdly huge. And the big screen was something that was really, you know, only existed
in the home. Once, you know, larger CRT started coming out and more importantly, big flat panel
started to come out. Now we're starting to see people, especially because there's the technology
that's available now, reference monitors in these bigger 55 inch, 40 inch, 65 inch sizes. Whereas,
you know, I've always kind of, you know, your default when you go into a grading suite is like,
oh, you got a 55 inch, that's the client monitor. It's almost as good. But I'm looking at my 25
reference monitor. Now I've moved up to a 32 inch reference monitor, which my personal preference
is I love the 32 inch size and this kind of distance to it. That is like my sweet spot.
I know Robbie's rocking the 55 inch and he likes that better than the 32 inch. How much are you
guys seeing in the professional world? You know, are colorists accepting these bigger monitors or
are they kind of looking at them like, oh, that's just just a client monitor or it's too big for me
to grade on. I'd rather be closer to a smaller one. Are we seeing that like, what's that landscape
look like these days? I know my opinion on it, but I'm curious what other people in the business
are doing. Yeah. I can speak to that a little bit. So we actually talked about this in a webinar
last year. I think there's pros and cons for each, what I would call like a one or a dual display
setup. I think from a, an education standpoint, showing folks for the first time, the differences,
like there's always going to be the necessity of viewing them side by side. But I think when you
get into, when I've started to talk to more and more colorists, I think they're starting to consider
going down to that one display now that the bigger sizes are more readily available and acceptable.
Wearing my engineer like scientists hat, I would say that, you know, sticking with the same size
that, you know, the average person at home would also be watching it on and more in some cases,
even the same panel technology, right? Like there's, you know, a plethora of benefits for doing
that. I also am a big fan of, you know, when you do are doing a dual display setup, you kind of,
you know, we were just speaking about bias lighting and how the standards are different
between SDR and HDR. Like how do you make that call? Right? If you want to view both at the same
time, like, do you average out the ambient light or like, you know what I mean? Like,
so that's a tough discussion to have. I think it's, I'm seeing, it's probably still like a 50 50
from the people that I talked to that like to do dual versus single. But I think that, again,
like the XMP lineup and stuff, I think has opened a lot of people's eyes to the possibilities.
I will say to you, like that you cannot, you cannot articulate the difference of
perception when it goes to different screen sizes. Like an example, I always like to tell people is
like, if I bring you into my Dolby cinema in New York and show you 108 nits full blast, you'd be
thinking you're looking at like a 10,000 nits at least just because it's huge, right?
Yeah, I was, I was gonna, I was gonna say, I think the biggest change for me having,
Joey mentioned that I'm now generally prefer larger format monitors than smaller format
monitors. I'm actually doing, you know, the whole idea of like, you know, used to be like audio
mixers or take the, you know, the mix and go to the car to listen to it on that other set of speakers.
I'm actually doing that kind of in a sense, but I'm going to a smaller monitor to test the
translatability of my grade from the bigger monitor because of that perceptual difference.
Right? Like, I, I have like a permanent setup where I have an iPad Pro that I'm also monitoring
on at the same time that I'm looking at the big display because of that perceptual difference.
Right. It is, it is weird how that perception can, can really, that size can really change things.
Well, I almost like want to put it back on you then, Robbie, too, from like a,
just a practical standpoint. Like, do you find that the going to the bigger sizes a lot more
like natural for like client interaction and stuff like that? Because that was always,
So I think there's, I think there's several benefitsto this. One, I think that the single
display in the room gets rid of that age old problem of where am I supposed to be looking,
how I should be looking, especially when they're different display technologies. It's like,
just eliminates that as a, as a variable. Right. I also think I'm really unscientifically,
I'm really tied into the idea of trying to replicate the home viewing experience ish
a little bit, right? In terms of size, distance, sitting on the couch, et cetera. Like I see a lot
of benefits to that. And then third, I would just, I would just say that the, the, from a client
confidence point of view, it's always seemed to me that they know that the small monitor on the desk
is traditionally been better. So they don't actually trust what they're seeing in front of them as much
as like, there's like the clients think there's some game being played. Right. So I think that
when you have like, Oh no, we're just looking at this one monitor, there's a psycho, you know,
psychological thing that's happening on there where it's like, Oh no, the colorist is looking
at the same monitor. That must be the accurate one kind of thing that's in play. And I think
that, you know, my ideal situation, maybe one of these days we'll get that. I would love, I think
for me in the rooms that I work in a 77 or an 83 inch size panel would rule them all. Right.
Ergonomically, because that's where I get caught up is for me to be comfortable with the 55 inch
size, it's got to be a little bit further back ergonomically. And then it takes up more physical
space than I have in the suite. Whereas with the 32, I I'm the exact right distance from it.
That like huge enough size where you can just set your distance from it where it needs to be.
It becomes more, it becomes more like a grading theater at that point in time. Right. Exactly.
And I kind of love that idea. Yep. Where I think, I think it's good. Okay. So David, as a, as a
calibrator, you know, and we talked about our previous episode, kind of the challenges of,
you know, reference calibration gear versus more consumer gear. One of the things that you mentioned,
and I think is something that I've spent a lot of time thinking of about and I, but I don't have all
the answers. So I'm curious what you say. You mentioned earlier, the idea of, Hey, we're going
to profile this display using the Spectro to build a, you know, correction matrix or whatever for,
for the colorimeter. That process has always kind of seemed like a pain in the ass to me,
to be honest with you. Right. Like I get what it does and I understand what we're doing to,
to kind of profile the meter, but like, it just seems antiquated. You know, we're taking, you know,
white, red, green, blue, and white. And then we're okay with math. Like, is there something better,
I guess is what I'm asking. And where do you see that kind of improving for the, for the end user?
Because it just seems like, yeah, okay, I can do this the right way, but it's a whole lot of steps
to get right. I got to do this for every single display. Where, where, what role or what changes
do you see potentially happening with that? How that kind of, that kind of operation works.
Yeah. This is, this is a fight. I think every, every person who's calibrating, especially if
you're calibrating a lot of displays, we end up, we end up having these thoughts. I would love to
just have a spectoradiometer that can measure any type of display. It doesn't need a correction to it.
Right. You take it out, measure, do my job and move on. If I'm doing something like a digital
cinema projector, where you do what's called an MCGD, right? Measured color gamut data. You measure
red, green, blue, and white typically. You tell it your target and then you validate it. Not a lot
of measurements, right? So building the meter profile might take longer than actually just
doing the calibration with the spectroradiometer. So, so we often see in those markets, right,
in the cinema markets, that those customers are only using spectroradiometers because they don't
need to make thousands of measurements and do this. When you start to get to those correction
tables, we talk about for, for colorimeters, right, to make a colorimeter have the same
measurement as the spectro on that display technology. A lot of things come into that.
When you're making that meter profile, you want to make sure the display is in as native as a state
as you can. Right. So if you have a display, let's say P3, but you're correcting it to 709
making your profile. Well, there's actually blue and red in green to bring that green in.
So now you're making a profile with some contamination of the channels.
Typically, what I've personally found is if I'm building a meter matrix for 709 on a
display and doing 709, it doesn't matter if I have a little contamination, but if I go to
a different target and I made it in 709 with some contamination, I get an error. So
the process of warming up the display, putting in that native state, making sure it's in a stable
state, right? You don't want to do a profile usually at 2000 nits because the display itself
will fluctuate during the meter profile. Right. It does take time, but you get the gain on the
measurement speed and you get the gain on the sensitivity side because the colorimeter is going
to measure faster than most spectroradiometers. It's going to be able to measure lower than most
spectroradiometers. So if you have those displays that need really close to black, it does end up
being worth the time to do it. So does that answer? No, it does. Let me expound on that one with one
other question because I've heard mixed things about this. Is there any value to doing any kind
of volumetric profiling of the colorimeter as in doing ramps as opposed to just primaries?
I can speak on that if you like. Sure, sure. Bram's probably done a lot of research on this.
So yeah, I think the added value of volumetric profiling for colorimeters, which is something
that you'll find in various ways. Right. So you have simpler systems that break down just into
a few extra readings and a few divisions. So you have something like the Bodner method,
which is built into CalMAN. Then you also have like the multi-point volumetric profiling that's
for colorimeters is built into software like Colourspace. Some of that probably from me
bugging Steve over the years to add something like that. And the desire for something like that
and the desire for methods like the Bodner method are more to deal with displays that are non-additive.
So if you have an additive display that is a red, green, blue additive for white,
four color matrix method, which is the NIST kind of official approach for colorimeter calibration,
tends to work really well. We've done a lot of side-by-side testing with volumetric profiling
Bodner vs four color matrix method. And there's really very little gain to doing anything more
complex as long as your display is additive. Now, when you get to non-additive display technologies
like WOLED specifically, there can be some measurable significant improvements. Now,
how much does it matter? If you're doing a consumer TV and a consumer install, I'm not sure that the
gain is all that much. If you're doing it for a colorist, maybe there is some real value in
exploring these other methods. But my personal opinion on this is that you don't need anything
greater than this as long as your display is additive. Now, the other thing that I think
goes into some of the questions you were asking earlier is this necessity to have a
spectro and a colorimeter, that's going to be hard to ever get around. You have devices already that
exist that kind of combine a colorimeter and a spectro in a single device. You also have very
high-end spectros. But ultimately, you're looking at a physics problem here. And this is not something
that's easy to solve with new technology because with a spectroadiometer, the issue is you only
have so many photons going in and you got to split them up over diffraction grading, as opposed
to something that just has three photo diodes in it with filters on top of it. So that's collecting
a lot more photons, which is why it measures so much faster, why it measures so much better into
low lights, because it doesn't need as many photons or it's not splitting up those photons
inefficiently through a diffraction grading. And then if you have a combined device, which
have existed for a long time, Photo Research had this many, many years ago, and there are other
companies that do it where you have something like a beam split that splits the light between a
colorimeter section and a spectro section. The problem there, again, is the same thing, right?
You're splitting that light. And so with very little light and you're steering the photons
one way or another, that's why all of this is necessary in the first place, right? So it's not
something that's going to be easy to solve on a technology level because it's ultimately a
physics problem, which I know Joey is a big physics fan. Well, all I really, I can deal with
the four color method in the time. I just really want wireless meters, but well, that's a talk for
another, another day. I hate cables. So the more wireless we can get, the better. All right. One
last big subject, then we'll wrap up is just, I have a few consumer questions that have popped up
or consumer related questions. And I think you guys are experts in this. So I'm curious your
thoughts. You know, I think we've seen this, this merging of, you know, I think the generically,
you could call pro-sumer, right? You know, it's somewhere between, you know, maybe it's not perfect
reference, but it's not consumer. It's really good. And we've seen a lot of people, I feel like
we call this happening with that. The WOLEDs and LG became kind of like, LG kind of became like a
Kleenex tissue kind of conversation, right? Where it's like, you know, it's just like, oh, well,
we have an LG in the front of the room kind of thing. That merging of consumer and pro kind of,
you know, using consumer panels and pro situations, I think is here to stay.
But I'm guessing it has a lot of challenges from, you know, connectivity, you know,
SDI versus say, HDMI or USB-C. There's some of the calibration stuff that we spoke about in part one,
where consumer companies simply don't have enough time to, you know, to really do a thorough job on
some of these and set up. What are the, what are we not thinking about? What are the impacts of
using consumer monitors in a professional environment? And what do we have to pay attention
to and consider? Because obviously a lot of people are doing it, but are they doing it in a blind way
that's causing them more problems or can these things truly be adapted to work in a professional
environment the way that pros expect them to? < David> I think when it comes to that, it's, it's kind of
like Bram was talking about before with the economies of scale, right? With the panels. So, so some of
these broadcast manufacturers are buying the same panels that are actually going into these
consumer TVs at some level. And then you have what goes behind the TV. And one of the things that we
keep pushing for, I think as an industry is the ability to turn off some of these like adaptive
contrast or light sensors and some of these enhancement features that we don't necessarily
want in the grading suite. Some displays let you do that. There are manufacturers that have
different SKUs of a display for post-production of a consumer model that might turn off auto dimming,
right? To protect the panel from burn-in where you might want to not want a consumer, you know,
burning in a game score or a CNBC stock ticker or news ticker. So, so something designed for consumer
typically doesn't always have the stuff we want in the pro world or the features and functionality
to be disabled that we want in the pro world. And then we also don't always have the level of
optimization we want, right? There's some consumer TVs I've seen some customers buy here in the
Hollywood area. They go, Hey, I need to master in P3D65, PQ for Dolby. And we go, well, this,
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,
it's got BT.709, but there's no P3. And that's not everyone, right? So you really have to find the
right display if you're going to go that route that meets the needs of what you're looking for
in the grading suite. So those are some of the considerations I think on my side, Nate and
Bram might have some other problems there. Yeah. Yeah. This is a huge, and I like the word
caveat whenever we're talking about consumer displays, because the unfortunate reality is
that there's a lot of them. And we actually, my colleague, Timo and I, and some folks from
Meta and university academia spoke on this as a panel discussion at the latest color imaging
conference a few months back, but it's really tough, especially for wanting to use a lot of
these modern panels for like research R&D applications, because something as simple
like David was just talking about is getting a clean signal in and out on a TV is not very
straightforward. And there's a lot of hurdles you have to go through. You know, he spoke to
the plethora of auto enhancement features, true motion, contrast, I mean, even things like power
management. Not to mention, sometimes they'll just decide to reset those settings for you.
100%. And you get into scenarios where it's reset, you do a firmware things change.
And there's also the in there's also the insertion of AI into everything, right? Like, yes,
your TV is now this all knowing smart device that can make decisions.
Correct. Yeah. There's a lot. And I wish honestly, that we had a playbook of just like,
hey, it's almost like a yellow pages where you could like scroll through and be like, okay,
this model this year, turn X, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, off, but it's not.
We've actually been, you know, hopeful that the idea will come together where there's like some
sort of standards group that can push the manufacturers to do what we would, I don't
know, we would call it something like a scientific mode or something that disables all of these,
right? But for the reality is, it's like speaking of scale, like David and Bram have already read
like for 99% of people at home, like they don't need that, or they don't want that, right?
So it's correct me if I'm wrong, that was kind of the initial, the initial thought behind something
like a filmmaker mode, right? Is that it was like, it would kind of, you know, disable and turn off
some of that stuff. Are you saying that like... It's a variable though, man. So like filmmaker mode in
like, in its inception makes a lot of sense, right? But there's no, no guarantee that, you know,
manufacturer A is going to implement filmmaker mode exactly like manufacturer B does, right?
I mean, similar with like HDR 10, right? Where it's like this open, proprietary or non-proprietary
thing where it's kind of up to the individual OEM to implement how they best see for you. So I think
a lot of it is really good in practice, but not executed super well. So when you're getting
questions, I mean, we get a ton of questions about consumer TVs. And my whole thing is always just
like, just understand, do your research, understand where the caveats are and work around them if
possible. And that comes down to what we've talked about in all of the, any, any episode we've ever
done talking about display, we talk about what is the actual truth. I've been in suites that only
have a consumer monitor that yes, they've gone through and calibrated them and tried to get
around all these caveats. I still don't trust it. I will always want at least some level of
professional reference monitoring available, whether even if it is to like, if I had a gigantic,
perfectly calibrated consumer display that measured exactly right, I'd still want some way to verify
my signal on an actual instrument, not just this consumer TV, because yeah, an errant firmware
update could grenade the whole thing. And I would never know. Well, and that will also then
cascade down the stream, right? And that's, that's where my, you know, we always are advocates of
like, use the highest quality display possible. Hopefully that means a reference display. But if
you have to make, you know, a budget choice or that's not available to you, at least at the very
least understand the limitation. So I mean, another good example of this, right? It's like a
lot of TVs are sort of like these prosumer monitors will have varying like PQ modes, right? So
in a colorist world, you guys always want everything hard clipping, right? But some
displays might do be doing roll offs and stuff. Roll off behavior one is not the same as roll
behavior two. And if I make a grading choice, why something's rolling off, I have no idea how that's
going to permeate downstream when it's getting to like a variety. So you could go down to rabbit
hole very quickly with this stuff. So yeah, This is where I become a little bit more of an elitist than
most colorists. I'm sure Bram & David would attest to this too. It's like, there's not really
a good way around it besides just spending time in the lab. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think you're on
something with the idea of just that a standards body can hopefully more or less dictate to these
display manufacturers that like, Hey, no, there really should be a cheat code here that we can
just turn everything off. Right. And the other side of that coin though? It's never going to
happen. I understand. I understand. Now we need 51 to make it really perfect. And so a couple
of thoughts on that too. So one is that on a lot of these TVs, turning something off doesn't really
turn it off, but rather low. So a lot of most of these TV companies use, you know, chips from
Mediatek or other companies like that, that there are toggles, they can trigger things, they
can label it whatever they want though. Right. So something that may be off is really a low setting.
The other thing is that you have to remember that these consumer electronics TV manufacturers are
not necessarily always incentivized to give you clean in and clean out because they're trying to sell
you the advantage of their TV. Their AI makes it look brighter or better or more colorful or
whatever it is. So those things aren't in there for, you know, by accident. If, if I think it's,
I think you're barking up the wrong tree. If you think you're going to convince the standards
bodies to try to enforce this with, with TV manufacturers, because what you're doing,
you're saying, Hey, make everything so that regardless of what I buy, it looks the same.
Then it just becomes no competitive advantage. I get it. No, I, I get it. I get it. All right.
The last thing, last, very last thing is I just want to get your last thoughts on this.
Cause this just came in. We had somebody comment on one of our other episodes the other day about
this. And David, you had mentioned it kind of offhandedly about color spaces and stuff like that.
And that is, is that one of the things that I think as we move into the world of HDR, that is,
is, is confusing for people about displays is that we, it used to be everything in our
life was Rec. 709, you know, and that's all we were concerned ourselves about.
But now we have, you know, on the far end of it, we have 2020, which is, you know, we'll
I'll have some specifics about that in a second, but then we have, you know, P3 D65, right?
There's P3 DCI. Like there's all these varying kinds of things. And it strikes me that one of the
confusing things for a lot of users is we don't know where we sit with this stuff.
And 2020 is a great example, right? It's just, I've been hearing about 2020 for a decade plus,
right? And it's like, Oh yeah, we'll eventually get there. Like, here we are 10, 12 years later.
And we're not quite there yet. Like, can you guys speak to some of the challenges just maybe
from each one of your perspectives of what these wider gamuts and, and, and what it really means
and why we're not quite there yet with some of these things, including 2020.
Yeah. I mean, I feel like I've talked a lot. If anybody else wants to jump in, go ahead.
But I have strong thoughts on 2020. So I think, you know, I think what's being appreciated more
and more by, by certainly colorists. And I think professional post-production is that 2020 can be
a useful container space essentially, right? But that it has a lot of caveats when it comes to
being an actual target space for displays. This is something I know that the EBU has, has found
quite challenging in terms of, you know, where they thought things were going to go. And I think a lot
of things were specified early on without recognizing what the knock on effects may be.
I think the good news is that in, in post-production for content steered towards streaming services,
we do have either a delivery in P3 and then it gets containerized by, by those services for
distribution out the TVs operating 2020. Or you have mandates from those services to say, yes,
give me something that's 2020, but containerized to P3.
Limited to P3
Exactly. Limited to P3. And I think that's great. The biggest issue with 2020 that we see now is in
terms of broadcast in 2020, and especially in Europe and with HLG especially, where that can,
that limiting to P3 is not happening. And so you get a lot of variable behavior because every
display is doing a different percentage of 2020. And then there's questions about what you do
when the targets are outside of 2020. Do you preserve, preserve hue towards those target
primaries or do you go max sat? It would be display native. If you go display native,
then the problem you have is that it's variable in every single display because every display has
different native primaries. And if you do a hue preservation, the problem is that the gamut
actually gets a lot smaller than you would think it would be. The other big problem is even if we
had displays that could do all of 2020, and we've seen this in the projector space and we've seen
this now in some of the flat panels getting closer and closer to 2020, is that you probably could not
have chosen worse primaries when it comes to the impact of things like observer metamerism.
The closer you get, because the 2020 primaries lie on the spectral locus, you get these narrow,
it's basically laser light, one nanometer peaks is how it's defined. That causes a lot of
observer metamerism, but it's not just the narrowness of it, it's also the location of those.
And so you get into issues where the closer and closer we get to 2020,
the more and more things look different between observers and especially anomalous observers.
So observers who have minor sorts of what we would...
Vision defects
generically is color blindness, right? So anomalous, pro-anomalous. And so the more you get to those wide gamut
displays, the worse those problems become. And so you see this pullback now where a lot of people
in post are trying to say, "I kind of wish we had just said P3 and we'll be happy with it."
Well, that's the follow-up. That's of course the follow-up, right? It seems like 2020 is always
one goalpost, but we have this perfectly acceptable wider gamut. Because the thing
that's always got me about any of these wider gamuts is that most people are not even coming
close to extending the boundaries of any of these wider gamuts, let alone 709, right?
Yes, it's done. I'm thinking the animated films, etc. are probably the greatest pushers of that.
But when I'm just doing a basic grade, honestly, I look at my vectorscope and I'm like,
My signal is this on the vectorscope, and I'm going, yeah, I don't really have to worry about
those boundaries. I mean, I know that's different for everybody, but why didn't we just go,
Yeah, P3 is the thing?
Well, I think the goal was to obviously have something that was a little bit more future-proof.
It was still not using imaginary primaries. You didn't want to define things as like AP0
or something like that, right? So you wanted something that could actually be, in theory,
hit. Laser projectors can do this. There are laser projectors that can do this.
Those manufacturers typically bring the gamut in a bit to avoid other issues though.
So I still think the path of least resistance is to say, look, we've had 2020 as a standard for
so long. It's going to be way too difficult to go back at this point. But where I do think there
is room, especially for the post-production community, network streamers, all these people,
to put pressure on standards bodies like the EBU, like SMPTE, is to get something standardized
that, for example, says, yes, we are going to continue to encode things relative to 2020,
but let's standardize P3 limiting. Let's not have it be a per network per...
Yeah, yeah.
Have it be something where maybe there's an EBU spec that says, we're going to target 2020
if we're encoding, but we're going to do P3 D65 as the target display space that we're limiting
to within. If we do that, we're going to avoid a lot of problems. And until standards bodies do
this, our problems as it relates to 2020 are going to get worse and worse. Because when I talk to the
semiconductor suppliers who are making the panels, they all are actively chasing more and more
coverage of 2020 because that's what sells. Right? That's what it's actually...
This does 90%. This does 97%. And that's something consumers understand bigger number better.
Continue to chase that. And I've had those conversations that I've had people at semiconductor
manufacturers tell me, we will not stop chasing that unless you can show us something in writing
saying this is no longer necessary. And so I would love for standards bodies to say, we're
going to limit to P3 because then what we can do is we can focus on making displays that just have
native P3 primaries. And that will avoid a lot of these observer metamerism issues. It'll avoid
a lot of the other issues. But still have 2020 signaling for all the work that's been done.
Yeah, because it's too late because... You can't.
... we're saying there's no P3 mode in a lot of these things. They don't know how to decode
this stuff. It all is going out as 2020. Even when you deliver to Netflix as a P3 D65 deliverable.
It's still going out 2020.
We're doing that as a service almost to the post-production community to make your life easy,
but it still gets encoded as 2020 and delivered to the home. Right?
I gotcha.
So that's why I think it's too late. The Pandora's box is open, right? But we still have this ability
to maybe do this. If we don't do that, then the future becomes really tricky in display technology
because the only way we're going to avoid these other problems is go to multi-primary systems,
which are prohibitively expensive, especially for... You can do a projection at cost, but you can do
it relatively easy. Flat panels, it's really difficult to do at any sort of reasonable cost
level. And then you could do things like, again, where you have something non-additive and you
have a broadband light, and that can help with some of these other issues as it comes to
anomalous viewers and inner observer metamerism. But again, you're looking really complex.
But whats the point? Like you don't get any tangible benefit.
Exactly. It's a really complex problem that we're just creating for ourselves. I think
you nailed it, Joey. I think when we had this metamerism experts day in December at the now,
unfortunately, gone MPC, the overwhelming consensus among every colorist, every post supervisor
there was, We're happy with P3D65. Let's just live with that.
Yeah. Yeah. I gotcha.
I feel like it's a stupid metric to chase, just like full screen peak brightness. Every
so often you'll see that spec. It's a useless spec. Nothing ever does full screen white in HDR.
It's silly. Nothing is ever going to display full gamut 2020 for any creative reason.
All right. So the very last question I want to wrap with David because, David,
this has been something that's been on my mind and you are the experts experts on this. In fact,
have developed software to help this process. There is a large swath of people who go, Well,
I'm an editor who does color, so I'm not going to invest in a $20,000 reference monitor. I'm going
to use my higher end consumer computer monitor to do so. And I know one of the challenges that you
see with your customers and when you work with Portrait, one of the challenges that you're trying
to solve is, hey, how do we get more accurate consumer devices, be laptops, iPads, et cetera?
Can you just wrap things up here for us a little bit with what the challenges of that are using a
computer display, making it accurate, and where tools like Patterns come into play to help make
those devices as good as they could possibly be given the use case? Yeah. So it's a huge can of
worms that you're opening, right? And it sort of depends on your platform, right? So Mac OS and
Windows have different ways of handling color management, but because these computer systems
are typically multi-windowed systems and each window can have its own format, maybe one's
sRGB, maybe one's P3, one's 709, there's a lot of color management that's happening in the image
processing. So on a Mac, everything's color managed. Whether you set your app up for color
management or not, there's color management. And then how the system tries to function is say,
What am I connected to? And that creates a ICC color profile through what we call EDID,
extended display identification data. And you need that profile to match with the monitor.
And this comes back to our conversation earlier where I said, you can have a perfectly calibrated
monitor, but if the source isn't set up, it all falls apart. Right? So that's where the
systems get really complex because with a broadcast monitor like FSI, it's very manual.
You can go to your monitor, you can tell it what you want it to be. And typically you're trying to
send just a bit accurate signal out of that system to that monitor. With a computer system,
there's no bit accurate mode that's easy to get. On a Mac, everything goes through color management,
whether you want it to or not. And on Windows, you have what we call a color aware or non-color
aware app. So it's color aware, it'll go through a color management pipeline. If it's not color
aware, it'll come out, but you still have some of the processing that might happen from that GPU,
right? Like an NVIDIA GPU, AMD, Intel, et cetera, they have their own controls and they might be adding
their own flavor. So you still have some adjustments that might be happening on that output
that's going to that display. So to really get what you're asking for, which is, can I connect
a monitor directly to my Mac or my Windows machine and then start grading?
It's not something I personally recommend because of the can of worms, right? As you start to test
the system, you start to see, oh, there's a gotcha here, there's a gotcha there. There are instances
where you can make it right, where you can take a Windows machine and say, okay, in this instance,
if I'm grading for X, this is now set up properly, I can do it. And the same thing on macOS, you can
say for this instance, I'm grading properly where it falls apart though, is when you're switching
formats. Maybe you're going to HDR, maybe you're going back to SDR, maybe you're going from 709 to
working on something in Adobe RGB for print. And so then that's where it starts to fall apart,
where you can't easily switch and make sure you're always in that perfect thing. So my recommendation
for customers and for people in the creative community is, I still recommend using a reference
monitor, I still recommend coming out of a card that's going to give you an accurate output like
an AJA or a Blackmagic card or similar. The apps talk to that card directly, they bypass the color
management system. These developers we trust like Resolve and Baselight and these companies, we trust
that they're sending bid accuracy to these cards, it's coming out to the monitor, we can trust that
what we're getting is what we're sending, and we don't have that. But I do think this is a hot
topic, it's been a hot topic for a long time. I do think we're going to start to see organizations
like Apple, like Microsoft, etc. continue to improve their color management system. I think
there will be a day where we get to a point where we say we can plug in a computer monitor and turn
on maybe it's a creator's mode or reference mode, like you have on your iPad, you have reference
mode on your iPad and say, okay, now this output is coming a bit accurate and there's no
adjustments happening. Because even if you get a specific like on your Mac, if you get your Mac
plugged in and you forget to turn off your true tone, because you happen to have a Mac with true
tone, it's still applying that true tone to that signal sometimes. So just a lot of gotchas and a
lot of stuff you have to make is perfect. So I've worked with a number of studios where we have made
it work, we have been able to get really accurate images for their workflows. But it's often not
worth the extra effort because the cards are now so affordable. You look at some of the cards,
you're like imagine a couple hundred dollars. Go ahead. Can you speak to what Patterns does
that's unique compared to, for example, just using like a generic TPG window that does like
red, green, blue colors? Like why does Patterns work better in that scenario?
Okay, yeah. So a friend of mine, my friend Eric, and now Portrait Display owns it, but we worked
on an app called Patterns. It's on Mac OS and iOS. And one of the things we wanted to do is we
wanted to understand what was happening with the color measurements. So we built in the ability to
use Apple color management on the pattern window. So if you've looked at computer test pattern
generators, I think until now, I don't know any of them that are sophisticated in that way, where
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
pattern, process it as such, then I can set my let's say CalMAN to 709 2.4 and measure off the
front of the screen and say, am I getting what this actually is? And it can do HDR as well on
the Mac. So it can do HDR so you can actually measure in high dynamic range for BT 2020 or
P3 and see what is my EOTF doing? Is it tone mapping? Is it following the curve? So it really
allowed us to start to see what was happening with some of these things within the processing
pipeline and where things were happening with color management and how we might get around them.
Well, guys, this has been very illuminating information. I know that we have a ton more
questions and thoughts about this, but we'll save that for another day. We'll do a follow up
at a later date. For any of our viewers watching, all three of these guys, whether they'll admit
it to it or not, are excellent tutorialists, right? And they have very, very good videos on the internet
If you want to go over to flanderscientific.com and check out some of the video resrouces there
Bram's metamerism video is like its gold. That video, I've shared that
with more people than I know because it really explains a lot of some of those display challenges that we see.
Nate, as well with all the Dolby training that he has helped design and pushed forward to the consumer
it's worth noting that if you are interested in Dolby Vision
can become Dolby Vision certified, which is sort of a combination of some testing and kind of,
you know, traditional test kind of stuff, but also with a do it component of having to kind of show
how the, you know, that you grasp how this stuff works. And then also worth the watches to head
over to the Portrait Displays YouTube channel where David handles a lot of tutorial videos
about calibrating specific displays
talks more about Patterns as well. All three of these places
are fantastic resources for deeper dives on some of these challenging issues that we've spoken about
over these past few episodes when it comes to displays. So guys, I can't thank you enough for
spending some time with us. We're sorry that we, the viewer doesn't know this, but we've recorded
for about 11 and a half hours here today. So we have plenty of content that we'll get out to
everybody there. But guys, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. And we'll
have to do this again sometime soon. Really, really, really big heartfelt thanks. So for the
Offset podcast, I am Robbie Carman. And I'm Joey D'Anna. Thanks for listening!