Hacker News Reader

Comment by ancientworldnow | Hacker News Reader

I'm a colorist. Many of us do use windows, many use OSX, many more use Linux. Every major color critical application supports many types of LUTs and color management.

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.

View on HN

Yep. I was a Colourist in my former life (TV ads, promo films, music videos mainly), used Resolve on OSX with a Flanders monitor. Most other people I talked to were either using OSX or Linux. (Granted, this is a few years ago when ProRes was the primary capture and delivery codec).

That's interesting regarding OLED, I thought over time the different colour LEDs decay at different rates?

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?

Eizo's high end displays are great for almost all uses up to the highest end color critical installs. I recommend them over the DreamColors all the time. You can't get much better without moving to ultra high end pro solutions.

Awesome, thanks for the heads up :) Just for curiosity what manufacturers make the very best monitors in your eyes for colour work?

Flanders Scientific, Sony, Dolby in order from cheapest to most expensive. FSi and Sony use the same panels for their 25" models. Sony x300 is the go to right now for affordable HDR. Dolby is the gold standard for non projector color critical work.

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 don't have any experience with the more expensive panels you listed, but I do have an LG OLED, and I'd be a bit more careful about recommending it for color critical work as a computer monitor.

I've owned it for about a year and the red channel on mine exhibits painfully obvious burn-in patterns.

I don't know why you are being downvoted so hard. Red is a very complicated color on OLED displays and manufacturers admit that frequent calibration is not only necessary but will eventually kill the display after a few years.

I'm a colorist

This sounds pretty interesting. What do you actually do, in layperson-y terms?

Sit in darkened rooms, spin 3 trackballs, and turn a few knobs to make pictures look pretty, mostly. DaVinci Resolve[1] and Baselight[2] are quite popular, take a look at the websites to give yourself an idea of what it looks like.

1. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

2. https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/baselight/overview_bl....

Hah, thanks! I should have been a little bit clearer - not an ELI5-layperson, a layperson who has some vague handwavey idea of how video/film is made and once read a popular article about orange/teal contrast.

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.

Check out this YouTube tutorial to see the kinds of things they're doing with those knobs and panels.

The inputs are roughly "An ordered sequence of footage clips" and the output is roughly "A final projection/broadcast/download-ready movie"

https://youtu.be/ojjfhCrjDus

Reply on news.ycombinator.com