The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP031: Discussing Monitors Part 2

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

In this episode, we’re continuing our discussion with monitoring experts Bram Desmet from Flanders Scientific, Nate McFarlin from Dolby, and David Abrams from Avical/Portrait DisplaysSome of the specific topics we cover in this episode include:How are panels actually made? And why does it cost billions?The role of material science in panel manufacturing Understanding the split between panel manufacturers and consumer brands of the same nameThe importance of viewing environment in regards to display performanceUnderstanding preference vs accuracyThe shift to consumer-sized panels as reference monitors and the ongoing challenges of using multiple monitorsBuilding meter matrices with the four color method, and are there better approaches, like the Bodner method or the volumetric approaches used by some calibration softwareRevisiting using consumer displays in a professional setting & why consumer TV companies have little incentive to integrate reference capabilitiesContinuing challenges of Rec.2020Calibrating computer monitors, iPads, and mobile devicesIf you like this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the podcast give the show a like wherever you're watching/listening! 

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. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Offset Podcast. I am one of your host, Robbie Carmen.

With me, as always, is Joey Dana. Hey, Joey, how are you, man? Hi, everyone. We are continuing our discussion today with three of our pals and industry experts. Brom Desmond from FSI, Nate McFarlane from Dolby and David Abrams from Abakow slash portrait displays. And in part one, if you missed that, be sure to go back and check that out. We kind of tossed 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 I've been on our minds, have been on some of our audience minds. And Joey and I spent a lot of time on forums and user groups and colorist 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 displays are made because it's like, oh, cool, new display. Where'd that come from? No idea, right? From your guys' perspective, and let's start with you, Brom, because 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 a super, Uber technical process, or is it something that is kind of standard throughout industry? Just speak to a little bit to how that manufacturing happens. Yeah. So 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 at all the time is, why don't you make your own panels that go into the phone? And it's like, well, because I don't have billions of dollars sitting around. And that's not hyperbole, like hyperbole, sorry. So you are literally like SDCs, quantum. Oled facility to give you an idea there, the capital investment earmarked for that is about 10 billion US dollars. Oh, Trump change, yeah.

So 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 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.

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. 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 generations. So you'll hear these like, you know, Gen 8, 10.5, 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. Yeah. But, but, you know, if you see videos of how these made giant machines, picking up these, you know, pieces of glass, moving them around, a lot of clean room operations.

And a lot of material science development has to go into this. And these people, you know, semiconductor manufacturers work with suppliers like, you know, nanocyst and whatever to get quantum dot materials or different LED manufacturers. manufacturers for backlights. It'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 of some of this stuff is incredible. advanced. It is. And it, 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 company, another company, it never found its way to the market. So a lot of disappointment. I always keep my little vial of plumbus. I always keep my little vial of quantum dots here. There you go. I love it. Now, so I think another question that 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, 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 side of 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 parent company typically, but 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 time selling to just their own consumer electronics division will never offset

that cost will never recoup it and never profit. So they have to sell to a lot of other manufacturers, you know. So yeah, it, 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 that company. Like that was making sense. That's 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

Samsung TV, pulling the panel from that and putting it in. It's like, no, that's not what we're doing. We buy the panels from like someone like SDC, just like a Samsung or a Sony or whoever would buy that panel. So that is, you know, just to be clear about that, those entities operate very separately. No, 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 colorists, we're used to working in a, you know, dark room and we understand, you know, kind of the implications of ambient light. And that that kind of stuff, but like how much, how important is viewing conditions and some other parts of like 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.

I'm thinking of things like, you know, actual, you know, hitting, you know, 100 nits for SDR or whatever for H.R. Like how, how dramatic are some of those things to overall perform of a display, is that if that makes sense? Yeah, I think Nate can definitely talk on that quite well because 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 ambient light is a huge factor,

viewing environments a huge factor. I know David also deals with this a lot in terms of the difference between what he sees on his more consumer install type situations 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 guys' 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 a, as Brom 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 empty 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, 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 biased 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, these are all very great questions. And I think in a perfect world, Sarin's body, like Simpity or ITU would just go ahead and update that and give more concrete guidelines.

But we've Adobe 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 Brahmin David, I'm sure would agree, is that when you're working with lower luminance scenes, this becomes imperatively important because your eye is 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. 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 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 buy a slide.

So not always, but typically they do. I would say more often than not those customers have a buy a slide 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 caliber

will have some form of shades, I'd say, you know, well over 90%, right? It's gonna 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 a customer just might like watching with a little bit of light on, right?

We've talked to customers. Yeah, that was going to be kind of my next question is how much, you know, budding 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 riff on that, sorry to interrupt Joey, but to riff on that, I'm curious that 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, Hugh light systems and they're constantly changing, like, the light, you know, based on what's on screen. Does that, like, send you into the shakes? I mean, if they were going to have me sit there and watch a movie, maybe, but, you know, if I'm coming in, calibrate and leaving, like, it's, hey, you know, to use their own. It's your space, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What's important to note is a calibrator is that the calibration of monitor 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 ambient 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 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 as dark as possible. or at least contamination as 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 a 2.4 EOTF?

This is a question that I don't think, and Brahm and they 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 1.4. 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. especially if they've got significant others that might not have the same decor preference you know the what are they called the wife acceptance factor but um i like that so you know you have to kind of idea yeah that's a big thing on the forums they call it the wife acceptance factor like how can you just what your guys your guys partners and spouses don't like just like break out you know c ii diagrams when you're watching tv i mean what's what's yeah that's weird no i know there's um

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, you know, blind joke. Be too dim or whatever. Be obviously like, I can't see anything, right? 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, you know, 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 of 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. I see this. I see this interesting dichotomy that is in 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 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 where there. And 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. Yeah, it's too dim. If they're too damn, they go, well, this filmmaker mode's crap, right? When in reality, it was this filmmaker thinking. Right. In reality, 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 understand the reference environment, but on the consumer side of things, like how much. variance or tolerances 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 make your customer happy. So there's a lot you can do even if you're not getting that 100-knit 709, you know, 24 EOTF perfectly. And that's, you know, you can turn off a lot of the sharpening, right?

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 minutes, right, or 175 minutes off the screen. So 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 vivid mode, but I can take a measurement. If it's 250 minutes, 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 that. And this is a little overkill what you're watching and depending on the room.

But it's it's variable. You know, I wish I could tell you. And I keep pushing. I get to say my favorite expression, how much is a boat? Exactly. One other thing that 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, we 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 panels 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 inch reference monitor and now I've moved up to a 32 inch reference monitor, which might. 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? 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 an education standpoint, showing folks for the first time the difference is, 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 scientist had, 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 STR and HGR. 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 talk to that like to do dual versus single.

But I think that, again, like the XMP lineup and stuff, I think is open. a lot of people's eyes to the possibilities. I will say, too, 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 minutes full blast,

you'd be thinking you're looking at like a 10,000 nets at least, just because it's huge, right? Yeah, I was going to say, I think the biggest change from me, having Joey mentioned that I'm now generally, generally prefer larger format monitors versus the smaller format monitors. I'm actually doing the whole idea of like,

you know, it used to be like audio mixers or take 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 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 weird how that perception can really, that size can really change things. Well, I'd 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 size is a lot more like natural for like client interaction and stuff like that? Because that was always a bit too.

So I think there's several benefits to 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 it should be looking, especially when they're different display technologies. It's like just eliminates that 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, etc.

Like, I see a lot of benefits to that. And then third, I would just say that the, from a client confidence point of view, it's always seen to me that they know that the small monitor on the desk has traditionally been better. So they don't actually trust what they're seeing in front of them as much as like there's,

like 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 will 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? If I could just- Ergonomically, because that's where I get caught up is for me to be comfortable with the 55-inch side, it's got to be a little bit further back ergonically. And then it takes up more physical space than I have in the suite. Whereas with the 32, 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, that would probably can make me. It becomes more like a grading theater at that point in time. Exactly. And I kind of love that idea. Yeah, where I think it's good. Okay. So David, as a as a calibrator, you know, and we talked about in a 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, 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 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 kind of profile in 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 Matt, 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 gotta do this for every single display. Where, what role or what changes do you see potentially happening

with how that kind of operation works? Yeah. This is a fight. I think every person who's calibrating, especially if you're calibrating a lot of displays, we end up having these thoughts. I would love to just have a spectradiometer that can measure any type of display.

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 spectra radiometer.

So we often see in those markets, right, in the cinema markets, that those customers are only using spectra radiometers 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 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. So if you have a display that's a 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 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 2,000 nits because the display itself will fluctuate during the meter profile. 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 spectrometers. It's going to be able to measure lower than most spectraryometers. 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 on that if you like. Sure, sure. Brom's 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 reasons. 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 color eminers is built into software like color space. Some of that probably from for 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 Bodder method are more to deal with displays that are non-additive. So if you have an additive, that is a red, green, blue additive for white, four-color matrix method, which is the NIST kind of official approach for colorimeter calibration. It tends to work really well.

We've done a lot of side-by-side testing with volumetric profiling, Bodmer, for a four-color matrix method, and there's really very little gain to doing anything more complex as long as your display is added. Now, when you get to non-additive, non-additive display technologies like W. OLED 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, you know, 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, right? And this is not something that's easy to solve with new technology. with a spectra radiometer, the issue is you only have so many photons going in and you've got to split them up over diffraction grading as opposed to something that just has, you know, 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 kind of 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 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 have completely wireless. 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 prosumer, right? You know,

It's somewhere between, you know, and 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, I really like to recall this happening with that the W OLEDs 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 in 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 USBC. 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 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 use? I think when it comes to that, it's kind of like Bramon about before with the economies of scale, right, with the panels. So some of these broadcast manufacturing 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 skews 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 not want a consumer, you know, burning in a game. game score or a CNBC stock ticker, news ticker. 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 TV doesn't have a P3. Like, you know, there's just no P3 and it's a consumer TV. It has BT 2020. It's got BT709, 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 Bromee 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. 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 insertion of AI into everything, right?

Yes. Your TV and now this all-knowing smart device that can make decisions. Correct. Yeah. So there's a lot. And I wish, honestly, that we had a play. of just like, hey, it's almost like a yellow page is where you could like scroll through and be like, okay, this model, this year, turn X, 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 Abram have already, right, like for 99% of people at home, like they don't need that or they don't want that, right? Correct me from wrong. That was kind of 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 variable though, man. So like filmmaker mode in like in its inception makes a lot of sense, right? But there's 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 or not proprietary thing where it's kind of up to the individual OEM to implement how they best see feed. 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 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. Yeah.

Well, and that will also then cascade down the stream, right? And 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, is like a lot of TVs are sort of like these pro semer monitors will have varying like EQ modes, right? So in a colorist world, you guys always want everything hard clipping, right? But some displays might be doing roll-offs and stuff. Roll-off behavior one is not the same as roll-up 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 a rabbit hole very quickly over this stuff. So yeah, it's where I become a little bit more of an elitist than most colorists. I have a person. I'm sure Brahm and David would attest to this too. It's like, there's not really a good way around it besides just spending time in the up. I mean, I think you're on to 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, is it's never going to happen. I understand. I know. You have 50 standards. Now we need 51 to make it really perfect. Yeah. And so a couple of thoughts on that to, so one is that on a lot of these TVs turning something to off doesn't really turn it to off, but rather low. So a lot, most of these TV companies use, you know, chips from Media Tech 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 and clean out because they're trying to sell you the advantage of their TV. There makes it, you know, look bright 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 there's no competitive advantage. I get it. No, I get it. All right, the very last thing is, I just want to get your last thoughts on this because 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 confusing for people about displays is that we, it used to be everything in our life was Rex 7 and 9, you know, and that's all we, we're concerned. concerned ourselves about, but now we have, you know, on the far end of it, we have 2020, which is, you know, we'll ask some specifics about that in a second, but then we have, you know, P3D-65, right? There's P3 DCI. Like, there's all these varying kind 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 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. Me too. So I think what's being appreciated more and more 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 found quite challenging in terms of where they thought things were going to go. And I think a lot of things were specified early on without recognizing what knock-on effects maybe. I think the good news is that in post-production for content steered towards streaming services, we do have either delivery in P3 and then it gets containerized by those services for distribution out of the TV's operating 2020, or you have

mandates from those services to say, yes, give me something that's 20-20, but containerize to P-3. with limited to p3 yeah exactly limited to p3 and i think that's great the 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 p of 2020 and then there's questions about what you do when the targets are outside of 2020 do you preserve hue towards those target primaries,

or do you go max set? Would be just going 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 on some of the flat panels getting closer and closer to 2020, is that you probably probably, could not have chosen worse primaries when it comes to the impact to things like observer metamorism, right?

Sure. So the closer you get, so because the 2020 primaries lie on the spectral locus, you get these narrow, basically laser light one nanometer peaks is how it's defined. That causes a lot of observer metamorism, 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 or over.

So blindness, right? So like anomalous, protonomalous. And so the more you get to those wide gamut displays, the worst those problems become. And so you see this pullback now where a lot of people in Post are trying to say, kind of wish we had just said P3 and we'll be happy with that. That's the, that's the, that's the, of course, the follow up, right? Is that 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 even coming close to extending the boundaries of, you know, any of

these wider gamets, let alone seven or nine, right? I mean, yes, it's done. I'm thinking the animated films, et cetera, are probably the greatest pushers of that. But when I'm just doing a basic grade, like, honestly, like I look at my vector scope and I'm like, you know, my signal is this on the vector scope 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, why didn't we just go, yeah, P3 is the thing? Well, you know, I think I think the goal was to to obviously have something that was a little bit more future proof. Sure. Yeah. It was still not using imaginary primaries like, like, you know, like you can't, you didn't want to. find things as like AP zero or something like that, right? Yeah, sure. So you want something that could actually be, in theory, hit.

And laser projectors can do this. Our laser protectors 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 CEMT, 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 person. Have it be something where,

you know, Maybe there's an EVU 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?

This does 90%. This does 97%. And that's something consumers understand bigger, number better, and 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, I'd say we're going to limit to P3 because then what we can do is we can focus on making displays that just have made of P3 primaries, and that will avoid a lot of these observer metammerism issues. It'll avoid a lot of the other issues. But still have 2020 signaling for all the work that's been done. It's too late because no.

You can. 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. You know, even when you deliver to a Netflix as a P3D-65 deliverable. It's so. We're doing that as a service, you know, almost to the post-production community. make your license, but it still gets encoded as 2020 and delivery to the home, right?

So I got you. So that's why I think it's too late. You know, the Pandora's box is open, right? So, 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, for, you can do it, projection at cost, but you can do it relatively easy.

Flat panels, it's really difficult to do in any sort of reasonable cost level. And then you could do things like, you know, again, where you have something non-additive and you have like a broadband white. And that can help with some of these other issues as it comes to anomalous viewers and inter-observer metamorism. But again, you're looking, but what's the really complex? 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, when we had this metamorism expert stay in December at the now, unfortunately, gone, PC. 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 got you. And I feel like it's a stupid metric to chase, just like full screen peak brightness, you know, every so often you'll see that spec. It's a useless spec. Like 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'm wondering. The very last question is I want to wrap with David because David, this has been something that's been on my mind and you are the experts to 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, you know, a $20,000 reference monitor. I'm going to use my higher-end consumer computer monitor to do so, right? And I know one of the, you know, one of the challenges that you see with your customers and, you know, in your work with Portrait, one of the things that you're, one of the challenges that you're trying to solve is, hey, how do we get more accurate consumer devices, be laptops, iPads, etc. Can you just kind of 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 can 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 windowed, can have its own format, maybe one's SRGB, maybe one's B3, one seven or nine. 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 Edd, extended,

display identification data. And you need that profile to match with the monitor. This comes back to our conversation earlier, where I said, you can have a perfectly calibrated monitor. But if the source is in the setup to work with that, it all falls apart, right? So that's where these systems get really complex. Because with the broadcast more 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 to color management, whether you want it to or not. And on Windows, you have what we call 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, Intel, et cetera. They have their own controls. Then 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.

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, in this instance, if I'm grading for X, this is now set up properly, I can do it. And the same thing on Mac OS. 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 and 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 black magic 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, et cetera, 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, right, or reference mode. Like you have on your iPad, right? You have reference mode on your iPad and say, okay, now this output is coming 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 gotches and a lot of stuff you have to make is perfect. So we do work with, 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 car is now so affordable. You look at some of the cars, black magic, 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 windup that does like red, green, blue, the colors. Like, why does patterns work better in that scenario?

Okay, yeah. So a friend of mine, my friend Eric, and now Portrait Displays owns it, but we worked on an app called Patterns. It's on MacOS and iOS. And one of the things we wanted to do is we wanted to understand what was happening with the color management. 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 the menu and say this is a 70924. And then it tells the OS, this is a 70924 test pattern, process it as such.

Then I can set my, let's say, CalMans and 79924 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 resources there,

The Brahms metammerism video is like it's it's gold that video like I've shared that with more people more people than I that I know because it really explains a lot of that some of those display challenges that we see Nate as well with all the Dolby training that he has helped design and push forward to the consumer it's worth noting that if you are interested in Dolby vision you can become Dolby Vision certified which is sort of a combination of some testing and kind of, you know, traditional tests kind of stuff, but also with a do-it component of having to kind of show how that you grasp how the stuff works. And then also worth the watch is to head over to the Portrait Display's 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. Sorry that we, the viewer doesn't know this, but we've recorded for about 11.5 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 Rob. Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.