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Today we're going to be taking a look at a broadcast quality monitor. This
monitor is from Marshall Electronics, and you can adjust it so that you can
get accurate color in your productions. So, your first step is to generate
some bars, and you can do this with your camera or you can do it with your
NLE. Look inside of your instruction manual in your camera, and you can see
if it has bars. I'm using Final Cut Pro here to generate those bars.
Now, the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to change the
monitor into mono-mode, so this gives me this black and white mode, and
we're going to adjust the brightness. So with this monitor, I started at
about 50% and I start to take it down and then I start to bring it up, and
what we're looking for is down in the bottom right, in the pluge. We're looking for this
little black bar right here, and we want to turn down the brightness until it just about
goes away. You want to barely make it visible. It's hard to see it on this
monitor because we're shooting it with a camera, so we have a couple of variables
here. So, I'm going to show you in the simulation just what it would
look like in Final Cut Pro. So again, down in the pluge, down in the bottom
right, you're looking for that little one black bar and
you barely want to make it visible, juts one tick away from it being
visible, and that will give you your accurate setting for brightness.
The next one that we're going to take a look at is adjusting the contrast,
and when we adjust the contrast we're starting again at 50%. We're taking
it down until we see full black, and then we'll take it up until we see
full white. The white should just be totally blooming out, and what we're
looking for is an even gradation all the way across the board. So here in
simulation mode, you can see what happens if we turn it all the way up, all
the way down, and then we're going to try and get a nice even 80% gray for
the white.
The next thing we are going to do is we're going to adjust the color, so
we're going to go into blue mode. This is a unique feature that's on this
monitor and most professional broadcast monitors. And what we're looking to
do here is turn our color until we can get the long bar to be totally even
on both the left and the right. Let's take a look at the simulation. So,
again, that little tiny bar down in the bottom right we want to become
equal. One of the things that you're going to see here is just what a
proper set of bars should look like. So this is what they look like, and
let's jump back over to these features. So down here, you can see F1, F2,
F3, F4 and these are presets that are unique to this monitor. We can go in
and adjust things like freeze input. This is really helpful if you are
shooting in a wide-shot, and then you want to go in and get your close up.
You can freeze your wide shot and see what your hands look like, and then
you can go in and make sure that your hands are holding the same object the
same way.
Another cool feature that you might be interested in knowing about is the
fact that this one has a one to one pixel mapping, so basically it zooms in
and it doesn't scale the image so you're able to see a very zoomed in
looking image and this can help you with focus. Another cool feature is
something here called red peaking, this puts a nice little, sharp, red line
around areas that are in focus. So, as we start to move into focus, you're
going to see the red develop around the edges. A very cool feature for
adjusting focus. And you can use both 1:1 and the peaking at the same time,
kind of cool. I've got that set up on a preset.
One more feature that is pretty unique to this monitor is something called
false color. You'll want to look at the instruction manual and see how to
read false color, but basically it's telling you that this little pink area
right here is what flesh tones should be exposed to. This will just help
you adjusting your iris as you are opening up or if you are turning it
down. You are basically trying to stay away from things looking really
fuchsia, or looking too red or too yellow. So, again, this false color is
going to allow you to adjust your exposure until you get good skin tones,
and it is very helpful.
Another cool feature of this monitor is just its sheer size. It's got a
great viewing angle, and you can put it on top of your camcorder. I like to
use it with an Israeli arm so I can angle it wherever I want. It's
especially helpful when I'm shooting from the hip or on the ground. This
one's got an HDMI input as well as component inputs. You can order them
with HD-SDI as well or just analog component only, it does standard def too. You can
also see that you can power the unit with a slim line battery from Sony, or
you can use a variety of other battery plates from other manufacturers such
as Panasonic, JVC, and Canon, or you can use IDX batteries or Anton Bauer.
Thanks for watching this episode, and I'll catch you later.