Further, HP Dreamcolors have tons of problems and aren't considered solid for color critical work (but are fine for semi color accurate stuff like intermediate comps etc). Color accurate work is done over SDI with dedicated LUT boxes handling the color transforms and the cheapest monitors being $7500 Flanders Scientific Inc 25" OLED panels.
A while ago I had a look at Eizo's 10 bit / channel TFTs, which looked impressive to me (from a layman's perspective), do you have any opinions of those?
For non color critical necessary displays, Eizo is about the best. Lots of" good enough" panels from LG, Acer, and Fell though. I actually have a gaming panel that calibrated surprisingly well and holds those numbers.
The best consumer display by far though are the LG OLED televisions. They're so good that we're installing them in lots of mid level suites as client monitors (aka close enough to our color critical panels).
I've owned it for about a year and the red channel on mine exhibits painfully obvious burn-in patterns.
This sounds pretty interesting. What do you actually do, in layperson-y terms?
1. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/
2. https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/baselight/overview_bl....
It's more stuff like 'what is it about this process that makes a dedicated colour specialist necessary?', 'what are the things things they're supposed to accomplish?', 'what are their technical and creative constraints/inputs/deliverables?', etc.
The inputs are roughly "An ordered sequence of footage clips" and the output is roughly "A final projection/broadcast/download-ready movie"
There are exceptions - some apps (ZBrush) don't run on Linux, so there are Windows machines around, but in general >= 95% of machines the artists and developers use are Linux at the big places.
And most of those apps use OpenColorIO as a framework for handling colourspaces.
The lineage is from SGI, where many of these applications were born, but as the company faltered and consumer graphics hardware took off thanks to gaming, Linux became the natural home.
(I've worked at a few of the larger VFX studios mentioned throughout the thread)
That's for rendering, where the OS and Desktop experience doesn't really matter, and the cheaper it is the better.
Few pros do the actual editing and color work (where the decisions are made, not the rendering part) on Linux.
Every major color house I've worked in runs Linux exclusively in their suites (CO3, The Mill, Technicolor, etc).
That's not to say windows and OSX suites don't exist, I use them and my own suite runs windows, but the highest end of color is basically Linux only.
The recommended setup is a super micro chassis with dual xeons (12 core cpus min rec, 20 core preferred), min 32GB ram (usually at least 64,128+ common on high end systems), SSD for OS, thunderbolt (min)/pciE/10GbE/fibre (preferred) attached storage usually 8 bay raid6 or similar min, almost always NVIDIA GPUs with 8x 1080ti's or the latest Titans being the most common set up I see.
This runs on CentOS or RHEL 6.8 or 7.3.
Video signal is output over SDI from a PCIe to a LUT box (for color transforms) then to a color critical display (FSi, Sony, or Dolby typically with the best suites using cinema projectors). A second SDI runs out to a box showing video scopes. Everything is usually calibrated by light Illusions software and using a Minolta colorimeter probe (typically a 3rd party service does this every few months).
The GUI monitor(s) are usually just regular consumer whatever.
The software is controlled by a large, $30K control panel that looks similar to an airplane cockpit.
That's most of the important stuff, but I can fill in details where you're curious.
Can you help me answer two things, as both have bugged me for years..?!
How do they achieve a look of tinted monochrome in films, which are still actually in colour? If that doesn't make sense - I'm thinking of films like Heat where there is often a strong blue tint which gives the feel of monochrome but it is all in colour. I've found was able to replicate it somewhat by combining the image with a quadtoned version, but it was still fairly far off tbh.
The other question is - how does colour gamut relate to the brightness of the display? Is it all to do with the dynamic range of each channel - i.e. the difference between black and, say, red, rather than overall brightness? I was at a photography show recently, and was blown away by some of the prints made by some of fuji's printers. Is it ever possible to match the gamut our eyes can see? And what colour space/gamut do you usually work in? Sorry two extra Q's there...
Thanks, and thanks for the fascinating info already.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7zms77/gnome_2_spott...
The recommended setup is a super micro chassis with dual xeons (12 core cpus min rec, 20 core preferred), min 32GB ram (usually at least 64,128+ common on high end systems), SSD for OS, thunderbolt (min)/pciE/10GbE/fibre (preferred) attached storage usually 8 bay raid6 or similar min, almost always NVIDIA GPUs with 8x 1080ti's or the latest Titans being the most common set up I see.
This runs on CentOS or RHEL 6.8 or 7.3.
Video signal is output over SDI from a PCIe to a LUT box (for color transforms) then to a color critical display (FSi, Sony, or Dolby typically with the best suites using cinema projectors). A second SDI runs out to a box showing video scopes. Everything is usually calibrated by light Illusions software and using a Minolta colorimeter probe (typically a 3rd party service does this every few months).
The GUI monitor(s) are usually just regular consumer whatever.
The software is controlled by a large, $30K control panel that looks similar to an airplane cockpit.
That's most of the important stuff, but I can fill in details where you're curious.
At the risk of asking a silly question, what does the LUT-box do that couldn't be done in software (or, I guess, why isn't it done in software)?
This stuff is fascinating to me.
Do you know of any good YouTube videos on colorist hardware? I've seen a couple of videos on workflow, but neither went into the guts of the machines and LUT-boxes.
If you need color accuracy then you're calibrating your monitor hardware.
People using Macs certainly do care about ColorSync. That’s the name of the software which uses the display characterization to keep colors looking as expected throughout the operating system and most applications.
Using LUTs either at the application or OS level to adjust colour information is a big no-no, although that doesn't stop some people from doing it. You simply don't want to change your colour space[1] until you absolutely have to.
The point of calibrating your monitor (which is a hardware + firmware level problem) is to see how your RGB image will look on a colour space restricted piece of hardware (for example in video this is often 12-bit RGB --> Rec709).
Same story if you want to show your image on a display with a different gamut.
Most gamut mapping algorithms used in practice (whether on a display or in software) are actually pretty mediocre in my opinion. It would be possible to do substantially better by writing your own code, at the expense of being a bunch of work. Alas.
P.S. The Wikipedia article about color space (and articles about many other color-related topics) is pretty terrible, but I’ve been too lazy to rewrite it.
I currently work for a media conglomerate where colour tends to matter a lot to both the print and digital channels. I'm not sure which monitors they use as I tend to work rather separate from that group, but they all work on Macs—that's been the case since the late 80's early 90's in publishing and there seems to be no move to stray.
What platforms do they all use? Not Macintosh, despite its reputation for being the platform for "graphics professionals" (it was missing 10 bit/channel color until very recently). And not Linux, despite its use in render farms.
They use Windows 10 and HP DreamColor monitors. That's the only platform that works and works well for people who need to care about color.