Daniel Grindrod

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How to Calibrate Your Monitor for Video

How to Calibrate Your Monitor for Video

In this video, I'm going to show you how to calibrate your monitor for colour correcting and grading.

I've used a few different tools for calibrating in the past, however, for this video, I'm going to be using the i1 Display Pro Plus which has been very kindly sent to me by the team over at X-rite.

There are a few variations to this model and if you're not quite sure which one might be the best for you, I'll give you a quick rundown of each one:

The i1Display studio replaced the ColorMunki Display, which some of you may be familiar with. This model is aimed at those who are just getting started in the world of colour and who don't need all of the advance functionality.

The i1Display Pro, as the name suggests,  is designed for professionals that need more advance options.  

Last but not least, you have the i1Display Pro Plus. This is the model I'm going to be using and remains the same, in that it is aimed for professionals who need more advanced options.

The i1Display Pro Plus offers the same functionality as the Pro version, however, it is also able to calibrate at 2,000 nits for high brightness displays, and also offers slightly better detail in the blacks. So is ideal if you are working with HDR footage. It also comes with a USB C converter which is handy.

It's a good idea to calibrate any monitor that you are going to be using. This includes your reference monitor as well as your main display.

For the purpose of this video, I'm going to be using my Macbook Pro and the i1 Display profiler software which comes with the Pro Plus.

To get started, once you have your colour meter plugged in and the i1 Display Profiler software loaded up, The software automatically does an excellent job of walking you through the setup. Firstly you have your display settings, it's recognised the built-in display of my MacBook and so I don't really need to change anything here.

Next up is the white point. I'm using D65 as this is the standard reference point. It basically stands for 6,504 Kelvin.

The luminance is the brightness of your display, Cd/m stands for candelas per square metre, which is also known as Nits. These are essentially the same thing and Nits is often used as a simpler way of saying candelas per square metre. I'm using 120 as I'm usually delivering my videos online and I'm not really in a Profesional grading suite. Any lower than that and things would start to get quite dark and would be more suited for TV and Cinema.

Next up is the Gamma choice, this is where your display interprets the gamma your camera uses and converts in a way that that matches what our eyes see. The higher you set your gamma will determine how bright the screen is and how much it's correcting for that. I'm grading in a reasonably bright environment usually and as I mentioned most of my videos end up online. For that reason, a gamma of 2.2 is ideal for that. 2.6 would be a good option if you are grading for cinema in a darkened room. If you're not sure, there are a few presets within the software or you can stick with the default.

You never know where someone is going to be watching the videos you create, however for me, I always assume for the most part that it will be on a mobile, tablet or laptop of some sort under average lighting conditions. With this in mind, I tend to adjust my settings accordingly.

Once you have everything set up here you can move on to the colour chart which it will measure. You will get on-screen instructions that will tell you to open up your colour meter and to place on the screen as so. I usually aim for directly in the centre because I'm not using a high-end reference monitor.

Click next and your display will cycle through a variety of test patterns. It will then ask you to adjust the brightness of your monitor. Once you've got it close enough, click next again and it will cycle through the next set of test patterns. Once it's completed, it will instruct you to remove the colour meter. You now have a calibrated screen!

You can repeat this process as often as need. If you are working on a cheaper monitor you may want to do this more regularly. However, if you are using a high-end reference display, you can leave it much longer.

The next step in the process is to set up a colour profile.

I usually like to name mine the date it was calibrated just as a reminder to myself, however, the software does allow you to set up a reminder as needed.

It also gives you an option to turn on ambient light monitoring. I would advise you to turn this off.

I won't get into too much detail on this now, as I plan to put another video together on how to best set up a grading suite later on and this will include how to control the ambient light in your editing room.

That's it for now, I hope you found this video useful. If you have any questions, please drop them down below in the comments.

If you would like to see more videos on colour and filmmaking in general you can subscribe to my channel by clicking the link below or here somewhere!

Thank you for watching, I'll see you next time.

How to Calibrate Your Monitor for Video

In this video I show you how to calibrate your monitor for video editing, colour correcting and colour grading.

This is not a sponsored video, however, X-rite did very kindly send me the i1Display Pro Plus to use (Thank you X-rite!). It's a fantastic tool to calibrate your monitor and I've used a couple of different versions of it in the past.

The exact model I used (Not an affiliate link):

https://bit.ly/3gYfkKk

If you're not sure what kind of display your Macbook has, this is a handy link from X-rite: 

https://www.xrite.com/service-support/imac_technology_type