Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/851458
www.postmagazine.com 28 POST JULY 2017 DISPLAY TECHNOLOGY The company's color bay, based around FilmLight Baselight, boasts a Dolby PRM-4200 Professional Reference Monitor for HD color grading. "We've had our monitor for four or five years, and it's a fantastic product," says Clow. "It's super stable at holding color: It's a rock. And Dolby is right up the street if we need calibration." Clow believes the next couple of years will find major monitor makers "staking their claims for an affordable 'color grade' 4K monitor. It's still a bud- ding field, and companies who have never been in the monitor business before are leading with 4K." DELUXE Last year, Deluxe's (www.bydeluxe.com) creative services division, the home for brands such as Beast, Method, Encore, Company 3 and EFILM, made a big investment in Sony BVM-X300s for HDR monitoring. The company wanted to be "in the forefront of the [HDR] movement," said CTO Mike Chiado, and the acquisition of 30 X300s was a major step in that direction. "They've worked out very well for us," he re- ports. "It's nice to have a uniform master reference monitor again; we've retired some of our Dolby PRM-4200s in favor of the X300s. "HDR is here to stay; everybody loves it. It's a big deal in features and episodics, but we're not seeing HDR in the advertising space yet. There needs to be a SMPTE-recommended [standard] for monitor calibration to ensure that, at the end of the day, everybody's viewing the same HDR." In the meantime, Deluxe has been working with Panasonic on a version of a new large consumer monitor, the TX-65EZ1000, which is just rolling off the assembly line. Panasonic's first HDR-capable Ultra HD 4K consumer OLED monitor is a 65-inch panel that Chiado sees complementing Deluxe's Sony X300s. "Panasonic came by with prototypes of the new monitor, which we showed our image scien- tists and colorists," he explains. "We came up with what we thought was a good setting to match the X300s. Then Panasonic went back to the lab, did a little tweaking and the colorists at Company 3, Encore and EFILM embraced it. We recently got a factory sample to check and hope to use the EZ1000 uniformly across Deluxe. People like to look at a big display." The company will be testing large flat-panel dis- plays for theaters later this year, says Chiado. "It will be interesting to see how flat panels for cinema play out — their limited viewing angles, how they deal with theater audio from a solid surface." Currently, however, "the big issue in the indus- try is consistency in the way you calibrate mon- itors. We're confident about the way we handle things, but most other companies aren't set up like Deluxe with an Image Science staff. "SMPTE has introduced part of its suite of 2080 calibration standards. We're looking forward to seeing the remainder of the SMPTE 2080 suite this year to gain some consistency across the industry." Deluxe creative services (home of Company 3) invested last year in Sony X300's for HDR monitoring.