@balazar, Thanks so much for all your great work, really helpful in Vegas Pro . Question: The Output LUT BT.709 has 11 options. You recommend Logarist to BT.709, LumaComp 0.66 cube. What is the difference between LumaComp and HighComp and when to use it. ? I don't really notice much differences between the BT.709 LUTS

Sorry, I overlooked the BT.709 output section. Thanks wslagter

I sent balazer an e-mail about this, but use of this procedure crashes Vegas Pro 14 on my 16GB i7 computer with 4GB of video RAM (GTX1050). The original files were 4K UHD ProRes HQ files shot in Vlog L 10bit, attempting to render in XAVC S 8bit.

A screen shot with the settings is attached.

I used Logarist in FCPX and i found it very useful. I am considering to buy the LG 4k to use as external monitor with my Macbook 15" mid 2014, which uses a sRGB color space. Would you think Logarist would benefit from this possible configuration?

In my experience, the monitors with the most accurate colors are wide-gamut displays with an sRGB mode. And that's what I recommend for anyone who's serious about video. A wide-gamut display with an sRGB mode will be more versatile, because you can use it two ways. You can use it in a wide-gamut mode with color management turned on, or you can use because it in sRGB mode with color management turned off. The latter will show colors correctly in applications that don't support color management. A wide-gamut display without an sRGB mode can't do that. Also, being able to operate in sRGB mode or a wide-gamut mode gives you an extra point of comparison to be sure that your color management is working correctly. Color management can get a bit hairy. You avoid all the complications of color management by doing everything in the sRGB color space.

In my opinion, even if it is high end monitor with 12bit, or at least 10bit panel for grading non professionals it is best to avoid wide gamut monitors, with 8bit panels it'll always be easy to spot issues. No emulation mode actually can change spectrums of pure R, G and B pixels. All it can do is to make some mix from existing ones based on CIE models.

To be short - ideal monitor to making sRGB work is monitor with R, G, B matching primaries.

Display standards don't specify the spectra of the red, green, and blue pixels. They specify the primary chromaticities in terms of the CIE 1931 XYZ color space. Display makers must invoke the CIE color model. It is unavoidable.

CIE 1931 model is model derived from specific task, if you read it. And large display is far from such conditions. Yet, it makes mostly accurate predictions, except in cases where they are wrong.

Maybe someday in the era of laser and LED displays we will have display standards with spectral primaries, but not today.

With Rec 2020 you already are literally forced to extremely narrow variation.

And current idea is to use QLED further cut with filter (can be very close to Rec 2020), quite cheap actually.

The problem with making a display with a natively sRGB gamut is that you rely entirely on the physical properties of the materials used to make the display. You depend on the emission spectra and transmission spectra of your phosphors, backlight, and/or color filters. It's very difficult to control those physical properties to achieve exactly the primary chromaticities you want. That's why we have a whole lot of ostensibly sRGB displays that are sort of close to sRGB, but not really that close.

It is not really hard as you think it is. Making proper P3 primaries that you suggest to look for is much harder.

Also, if you just look at actual statistical experiments you will see that variation of human spectral sensitivity actually is not as small as pro display manufacturers want you to believe :-) Actually, with wider gamut it becomes real issue, and due to spectrums it stays such issue after calibration.

The better approach is to aim for a gamut somewhat wider than sRGB, measure the chromaticities of the resulting primaries, and use math to make up the difference. Done correctly, it yields almost perfectly accurate color. You can read about it at http://www.displaymate.com/Color_Accuracy_ShootOut_1.htm Again, there is no downside to using math and the CIE color model.

http://www.displaymate.com is kind of for sell guys (loving Samsung lately) with not very deep understanding of that they are doing and promoting.

Yet I agree that on good pro level monitor with high bit panel you can do it with proper tool (note that colorimeter is made as eyes sensors analog, so with wider gamut you have rising issues due to sample variation or filters degrading). I am just not sure that this advice is good for average Joe reading this. Average Joe has instead big chance to get something with strange absolutely non standard wide gamut, 8bit panel and lot of trouble on his head.

You need to do that anyway, because the display standards are specified in terms of the CIE color model.

Well, to be really pro level accurate as stated, display must reconstruct specific viewer curves, instead of CIE standard observer. Plus add requirements for working space, display borders material and colors, etc, etc.

I don't agree with most of that and I don't want to debate it with you. Plus it's not really relevant to this topic.

You got tired. :-) Your topic, your preference. Yet, suggest guys selecting monitor to read and think hard.

Hi @balazer It is not easy to grasp all the implications of wide-gamut vs sRGB. I see the advantages of using a monitor with at the same time wide gamut and sRGB (by the way, would you give me any suggestion about which 4K model to chose?). What I don't see yet is the advantage of a wide gamut monitor actually.... At this point why don't use just a sRGB monitor? May be the wide gamut monitor could be useful only in this scenario: color grading at the same time for big screen projection and for web and home vision. In this scenario I would grade for wide gamut delivery and control on a second display (or also the sole display if it has sRGB mode) how it works in sRGB. In this scenario therefore I would use Logarist how and when?

I'm not an expert on calibrators. I had an i1Display Pro for a while. Every time I tried to calibrate my display with it, the picture looked worse than without calibration. I concluded that my display was more accurate than the calibrator, and therefore calibration couldn't help.

Well, it is colorimeter and require proper adjustment matrix for specific backlight, ideally. Some old also can't measure wide gamut displays. Besides that latest models are pretty accurate devices.

I think calibrators made sense back in the days of analog displays, which had a bunch of adjustments that could be grossly misadjusted. I don't think they make as much sense with modern displays.

Cool, especially talking into account proposal to buy wide gamut displays and calibrate them. :-)

Of course it is wrong statements. Modern display can have like 10x more adjustments :-)

Frankly I wouldn't expect any calibration device that costs less than a few thousand dollars to be very good. Precision measurement devices are not cheap. Also, calibration on your PC can only apply some 1-D LUTs. It can't do any gamut remapping.

Well, Colormunki (same as i1Display Pro) is considered among best consumer colorimeter ever made. Spyder 5 is worse, but still better comparing to anything older.

Also, calibration on your PC can only apply some 1-D LUTs. It can't do any gamut remapping.

If it possible to look for documents stating it?

ICC documentation list two options, one being 3x3 matrix of the colorant primaries tristimulus values and one-dimensional tone curve for each colorant , but it can be more complex same 3x3 matrix, one-dimensional tone curve for each colorant , 3 dimension LUT, second 1D tone curve for each channel.

@balazar, A question about the Camera to Logarist LUTS:

The Sony Cine 1 (Hypergamma 4), S-Gamut3.cine to logarist.cube LUT corresponds with my camera's PP Cine 1 and S-Gamut3.cine as Color Mode. What would be the best Color Mode to use for the other Cine 1 (Hypergamma4) to logarist.cube LUT ? ( In ACEScc , I remember that you recommended Still or Pro as Color Mode )

Thanks

Logarist now supports Adobe Premiere Pro and Premiere Elements in Windows. Please download and test and let me know how it works: logarist.com

Thanks, @JanH. Glad to hear it.

I'm not really clear on how noise fits into this. Logarist doesn't do anything to improve noise. If the noise is in the source, it will be in the output too, but at least it won't be any worse. To minimize the noise, increase the exposure in the camera.

Which Logarist input transforms did you end up using for each of your cameras?

Dear balazer,

I just started using your 3D LUTs with Davinci Resolve to color correct videos produced with a Panasonic FZ1000.

I found out that the output of this camera works great with the GH4 LUTs. I've been able to rescue clips that I thoght were completely useless before finding your code (mostly overexposed clips).

So first of all I would like to thank you for your great work!

There is one thing that puzzles me that is that the FZ1000 has two different Luminance level adjustments: 16-255 and 0-255. When I realized that I had to chose one of the Luminance levels to transform my footage to the logarist color space I checked what were my settings and I found out that they were adjusted to 16-255, wich seemed odd to me. After searching through forums I found people stating that some video editors have problems managing this 16-255 range and therefore people that care about that, tended to use either 16-235 (for compatibilty reasons) or 0-255 (to have a slightly higher color depth). On the other hand, from panasonic you get the following statement: 16-255 - best for normal video recording / 0-255 - best for creating still pictures from recorded video.

As all those statements seem quite confusing to me, I was wondering if you may have any idea of what could be the advantage of using the 16-255 data range instead of 0-255. And most important I would like to know if there is any way of checking what Luminance levels were used to record a given clip without having to check the diferent options and having to guess which one works best. I already tried with ffprobe output but didn't find any clue...

Thanks again for your work!