Calibrating the Calibrator - Colour management with Eizo CG319X

I've spent a lot of time demo'ing these monitors recently and the thing that tickles customers the most is correlating the internal sensor to an external probe.

https://youtu.be/LB6HFOBJU2c

 

Is there an HDR mastering display that costs less than £20k? Not yet.

I was asked to take a look at the ASUS PA32U monitor - a 32" display that (when I first saw it last year) was initially an sRGB, Adobe RGB, HDR10 high-end graphics/gaming monitor. It comes in at sub £2k and so is expensive for home or office use but almost free from a film/TV perspective. Most interetsingly it could hit >1,000Cdm^-2 peak white and unlike OLED displays (typ. Sony BVM-X300) it doesn't suffer ABL as more than a small percentage of the display hits peak white.

I gave the manufacturer a few pointers - essentially if it is going to have any application in film and TV it should at least support HLG and DolbyPQ. So, just before christmas a new itteration of the monitor arrived and here is a little video.

A few things to note;

1. Terrible "blooming" near black; if it was a CRT it would be akin to bad internal reflection within the tube.
2. The blue primary is not as good as it should be - it can't even hit 100% of rec.709
3. Ironically, however, it does manage 84% of rec.2020 - just shows you can't get too hung up on very saturated colours,
4. There is some sort of noise-coring going on; you should be able to disable that in the menues.

LightSpace reports; http://www.engineersbench.com/phil/docs/ASUS_PA32U/

https://youtu.be/hYCJh9ujhxw

Why I wouldn't buy a Sony BVM-X300 in 2018 (if it was my money)

For a couple of years the Sony BVM-X300 has been the 4k/HDR monitor of choice for Soho edit and grading suites. It is an OLED monitor and can (with some limits) hit 1,000 Cd/m² peak white in it's HDR modes (which include HLG, Dolby PQ and SLog3 camera gamma).

It was the first monitor to be widely regarded as good enough for Dolby Vision mastering (and by extension Netflix deliverables). It was around the £20k mark when it launched, but by last year the price had crept up to mid-twenties and with the v2 of the monitor (which brought a second quad-SDi input and an HDMI input) which launched a year ago it now lists at £32k; but we all know nobody ever pays list for Sony...!

In recent months I've really taken to the Eizo CG3145 which (although an IPS/LCD monitor) is broadly similar in spec to the Sony, but; bear in mind the X300 suffers the following;

1. Noise in the blacks; when I calibrate them I have to do blacks at 5% grey to get a clean reading (and my probe goes down to 0.01 Cd/m²) – the Eizo will read cleanly at 2% grey. Watch this video (hosted on my Twitter feed) - it's an X300 around 3 Cd/m²
2. Max. 8% peak white before the orange PSU-fault LED comes on and the display starts to dim/de-saturate in HDR modes; at the recent Jigsaw24 I showed the "OLED killer" which you can get here.
3. Two years in and several Soho X300s are now showing burn-in (particularly where the 3840-pixel UHD and 4096 pixel-4k rasters differ) 

£10k less list price and available now (the X300 is in such short supply that you can't get one in London currently) also add to the Eizo’s advantages. Integration with LightSpaceCMS (pretty much the industry standard for colour management) is very tight whereas the X300 only talks to Sony’s very clunky colour software (no LUT management, six-point calibration only). 

The Eizo easily allows LUT upload; this SLog3 (in slot 8) was imported via LightSpace.

 

ColorEdge PROMINENCE CG3145 is the first HDR monitor in the world to have its HDR and SDR reproducibility evaluated and awarded by the German Broadcast Technology Institute.

The Eizo has recently been certified as both a Dolby Vision mastering display as well as having Netflix's blessing.

One objection I've heard is that the X300 covers 85% of rec.2020 whereas the CG3145 only covers ~83%. It's the kind of objection that someone with a poor grasp of colourimetry makes. My answer to that is "MacAdam ellipses" - look at the Wikipedia article and tell me anyone can see the (Just Noticable!) differences.

At the recent HDR Summit at Dock10 in Media City, Salford we had more than ten HDR-capable displays.

A few notes on DolbyPQ & the new 4k AppleTV and TV High Dynamic Range.

STOP PRESS! 27th Sept. 2017 Update;

So it turns out that the new AppleTV does support HLG.

- Why did it take somebody hacking around with a firmware update to discover it; perhaps big corporations (Apple and Dolby) talk and would rather not highlight the fact?


HDR is half my life at the moment; the distinction between "Display Referred" and "Scene Referred" video is lost on most people, but is pretty central to understanding why the BBC/NHK "Hybrid Log Gamma" system is ten times more appropriate for television (non-theatrical video) vs anything based on the SMPTE 2084 (AKA Dolby/HDR10 etc) curve.

For my presentation on "intro to HDR for TV" download here.

1. Display Referred HDR makes no sense for TV (when I say TV I mean all non theatrical video). DolbyPQ makes video dimensioned (so code values actually represent light levels) which makes a lot of sense when you have complete control over the environment you're viewing in - a theatre. To define where black and white sit (and actually assign light-levels to them) is problematic for TV workflows. Remember, you have to give the colourist/racks-engineer/domestic-viewer the liberty to set black according to the room. Although BT.1886 is commonly accepted to mean 100Cdm^-2 peak white a lot of colourists drive their rooms at 80Cdm^-2 and at least one film guy I know prefers to work at 60Cdm^-2. Also - what happens in three years when everyone is selling TVs with specular highlights that can hit 2,000Cdm^-2 and people can see the difference between PQ content mastered with peaks at 1,000Cdm^-2 ( the current standard) and new content? The same will be true all the way up to Dolby's max light level of 10,000Cdm^-2. Dolby at least has the benefit of dynamic metadata to allow or this, but HDR10 is static metadata and so has all the problems of display-referred HDR with none of the DolbyPQ benefits.
2. BBC/NHK HLG is a much more pragmatic solution as it doesn't assign code-value to light-levels (when has that ever been a thing in TV?!) and allows HDR content to look good on all devices capable of displaying it; tablets, TVs, laptops etc. It also allows the broadcasters to make a gradual change to HDR. None of the broadcasters I've spoken to have any appetite for having Dolby CMUs all over the place to manage the metadata (which, being a licensed format, they would be obliged to have). HLG also tracks 1886 for most of the curve (to around 65%) which means conversion to/from is easier and even when you get it wrong the pictures look OK. It's why scene-referred video makes sense for TV.
3. Having seen the same SLog3 (so camera HDR gamma) played out from Transkoder in both DolbyPQ (mastered at 1,000Cdm^-2) next to the same machine converting to HLG with two Sony X300 monitors set for the appropriate gamma curves and the same Rec.2020 colour calibration you could not tell them apart in a blind viewing. 
4. It's typical Dolby - they are trying to dominate the domestic space by shoe-horning their theatrical format into TVs. Broadcasters get hobbled with licensing costs, onerous upgrade requirements and pictures that are locked to whatever version of PQ/HDR10/HDR10+ they were mastered for rather than allowing the display to make the best of what it's given; scene referred pictures.
5. The good thing about HLG is that rec.2100 ratifies it, the DVB have too. It's also trivial to upgrade HDR10-capable sets to support it (unlike PQ). I imagine it'll be the case that broadcasters will deliver HDR (for the reasons mentioned) and either you have to upgrade your TV (but pretty much all the current ones support it out of the box) OR your STB will do the conversion.

Which is why the new 4k AppleTV is a damp-squib...   

Calibrating monitors for HLG-1.2 High Dynamic Range working

I've now done a couple of Sony BVM-X300 (4k/HDR OLED panel) monitors for HDR-TV deliverables to the BBC. The Beeb are behind the Hybrid Log Gamma standard, currently at 1.2 for broadcast. It's benefits over Dolby's 10-bit version of their Vision HDR system (also called DolbyPQ) are many and rather splendidly the DVB as well as most manufacturers are now behind HLG. I'll write further about why a scene-referred system is a better bet for domestic TV than a display-referred one (like DolbyPQ) but I just wanted to get down some notes on monitor calibration for HLG.

So first up you need to get the monitor into HDR mode (the correct one! As of v.2 firmware the X300 supports several; the camera gammas; CLog, CLog2, SLog & SLog3 as well as the deliverable standards; SMPTE-2084 (DolbyPQ) as well as SMPTE-2100 (HLG 1.2).

You'll notice the EOTF setting (lit. "Electronic - Optical Transfer Function") is NOT set for HLG 1.2; this available but in the current v. 2.0 firmware it is wrong. Select HLG (Variable), click the know again and dial in 1.2

Next up display a 50% grey field (100% can't be done as the monitor power-limits to stop 1,000Cd/m² being displayed across a lot of the screen) and point your probe at the display. Remember that unlike DCI-P3 we are still at the 6504K white point of tele. However - at 50% grey we should be seeing low-50's Cd/m² being emitted from the screen. 

You might have previously heard Sony's "best practise" (sic) advice of setting 50% grey to 100Cd/m² but this is wrong. Look at the graph; this is the result of profiling an X300 (and they all seem to do it consistently) and notice what happens over the last couple of hundred Candelas at the top end. If you set 50% grey to 100Cd/m² you get loss of detail in the specular highlights. For the correctly 1.2 HLG curve you need to set 50% to around 50Cd/m² to 55Cd/m²- remember the Y-axis on this graph is logarithmic. 

The one display I had previously followed the Sony advice for was sufficiently out of it's linear range that the dark-greys drifted red minutes after I finished adjusting the monitor and (like all OLEDs) the noise in their blacks is sufficient to make the final tweak to 6504k hard work - the Klein probe was having to average over 32 reads to accommodate the OLED panel. Remember - the K10A is accurate to less than 0.001 Cd/m² and not the 1.0 Cd/m² it reads at 10% up the curve of HLG 1.2

So - once you have those under your belt you can PLUGE the display to set blacks correctly for the room (what did I say about scene/display referred?!) and then set about getting the deep greys and the 50% colour balance correct. I've done this now on two X300s with BBC R&D engineers in attendance and they have given this method their blessing!

For a probe I was using a Klein K10A with Klein's own ChromaSurf software. If I get the chance to profile an X300 for myself I will do it with LightSpaceCMS - still the choice of champions for display profiling and LUT-building. They also have an excellent article introducing HDR.

HDR for Television; HLG, DolbyPQ etc - a primer

I have been such a poor blogger! It's been a month-and-a-half since I set finger-to-keyboard but I have been busy at work and home. Here is a presentation I gave at the Soho Screening Rooms for one of Root6's Tech Breakfasts.


You can download the notes from root6.com.

Colourimetry, Rec.709 and HDR video; a presentation.

A couple of weeks ago I was up in Glasgow doing a presentation at Root6 Scotland's PlatformOne event. Gerry shot some video so here it is (in case it's useful). 

The PDF of the notes is here, the URL of the YouTube clips is https://youtu.be/sFpDE8fKlco

Shooting & editing HDR via Avid using CLog gamma

We've got BVE2016 coming up and one of the things Root6 will be showing is an HDR workflow via Media Composer using Canon monitors.

HDR is still a bit of a crap-shoot as far as standardisation is concerned with the BBC/NHK system, Dolby Vision, Sony's SLog3 and Canon's camera-native CLog. The principle of using an alternate gamma so that you concentrate the bit-depth where you want the extra range is well established;

The hope is that all of these manufacturers will coalesce around ST.2084 which (amongst other things) defines how you handle the specular highlights; those very bright parts of the picture which give a real addition to the look of the pictures. These are typically defined to be >500 Cd/m² which is MUCH brighter than broadcast white! The idea is that the last bit of dynamic range (10th bit - all values above 512) represent the highlights and everything up to 50% is akin to the usual video dynamic range. You calibrate the monitor such that 50% is set at 100Cd/m² and just hope that the colourimetry of the highlights tracks RGB-wise!

So - Root6's own Dave Skeggs and I set off around Soho and London Bridge to capture some night time and daytime footage. We were using a Canon C300 mk.2 set to UHD (3840 x 2160) at 25P (no interlaced fields at UHD and no high framerates at that resolution unfortunately). We set the colour space to an optimistic Rec.2020 and gamma to Clog. In that mode the camera shoots 410mBit/s XAVC codec MXF files.
We've been using Media Composer v 8.5 on an HP Z840 workstation & the new Avid/BlackMagic DNXio video hardware; we had to update the firmware to get it to generate quad-link SDi. Although HDMI works it is nobbled down to eight-bit and so would not be suitable for this test. I would put a link to the video but none of the video sharing sites support HDR and neither does the screen of your tablet/laptop/TV! I took all the monitor photos with my Fuji bridge-camera in a very bright office; you'll have to take my word for it!

Notice the headlights of the taxi - you can see details inside the light!

exactly the same frame; notice the dark details in the trees against the night-sky.

 Of course on Media Composer's GUI display you get the CLog gamma rendered as if it was Rec.709 and so it looks very washed out and lacking in detail

You can have Avid flatten the gamma of source clips so that it looks OK on the GUI - that doesn't affect sequences that the clip mas been used in.

 

Quite a large range of alternate gamma and colour spaces

 It shows up in the bin-view which is useful

 

So now clicking the source window and setting the monitor to regular HD gamma (BT. 1886 fact fans) shows you what the same material shot on a "regular" camera would look like; very little detail in the blacks and none in the whites.

 

 Root6's own DOP; Dave "is that in focus?" Skeggs

I'd forgotten how limited a normal video-camera's dynamic range was. The Canon monitors top out the specular highlights at 400Cd/m² which is somewhat less than a Sony BVM-X300 (1,000 Cd/m²!) but for €10k less than the Sony (and losing only a stop-and-a-half of specular highlights) the Canon 30" UHD/4k IPS panel represents superb value. I was a bit disappointed that the camera tops out at 29.97P at >2k resolution so I couldn't see how nice fluid video motion looked at high res; everything has a jerky film-look to it.
Steve Shaw at Light Illusion has a very good article exploring some of the fundamentals of HDR.

High Dynamic Range video

We all know about high dynamic range (HDR) imagery due, in part, to the examples you can find on Flickr. This image I nicked from Wikipedia shows how three bracketed shots are combined into a composite image where you have all the details in both the blacks and whites that couldn't be captured in a single image.

So how could you achieve this with moving images? Have an ultra high frame rate camera where you can capture three frames sequentially with a rotating set of ND filters? Maybe, but the focus and effect are somewhat spoiled by rapid moving parts of the image. The guys at Soviet Montage have a system where they use a beam-splitter to feed the same image into two 5D Mk2s (one of which has 24dBs of attenuation - that's four stops for non-video people!).

HDR Video Demonstration Using Two Canon 5D mark II's from Soviet Montage on Vimeo.

I think it looks very engaging. Kind of like a moving old-master. For my money this is much more engaging than 3D on TV with none of the problems that 3D at home have.