So I've been making videos for a while, but lately I've gotten more and more paranoid about my monitor calibration. Will somebody in egypt see the reds in this video the same way I do? Will it be to dark on my TV?

It seems I have two options; eyeball it or buy a $150 monitor calibrator that requires me to put this wand over the monitor and hope that it works. the device does not have a history of working well.

So here's the idea: make a software program that knows how much light your computer screen is putting out and in what colors. This is not as hard as it sounds; simply put your make and model of monitor into the program and it will import information such as the maximum lumens put out by each pixel of the screen at 100% power consumption. Then it will create a custom calibration so that your monitor puts out exactly the same photons as your TV (assuming it is calibrated) matching the brightness, contrast, and color exactly.
-- DIYMatt, Aug 08 2009

Since there have been dual-monitor cards including TVOut for a couple decades, I have to wonder what this idea is about.
-- FlyingToaster, Aug 08 2009


The idea is about making your monitor reproduce an image with 100% accuracy to the original.
-- DIYMatt, Aug 08 2009


If you output it to a TV... then it will look like a TV.
-- FlyingToaster, Aug 08 2009


When i bought this monitor, i had a utility which did exactly that, i thought. Was this either not standard or is there something new about what you suggest?
-- nineteenthly, Aug 08 2009


\\exactly the same photons as your TV (assuming it is calibrated\\ Who has an accurately calibrated TV?
-- pocmloc, Aug 08 2009


//Who has an accurately calibrated TV?//
In the music "biz", most producers try to optimize the sound of recordings, not to how they sound on (bloody expensive) nearfield studio monitors, but to how they're going to sound on iPods and cheapass stereos and boomboxes. I assume the same for video producers.

Matrox, a graphics card mfr. used to make excellent cards specifically for video production work; said technology bled over into their (slightly) more pedestrian consumer graphics card lineup. My (c.1999) G400 is more capable than any card produced today (including Matrox's own) for dual-monitor setups that can include a TV... and that's with drivers that haven't been updated in about 5 years (or upgraded in about 7-8).

No clue what they're on about today: since one of their techies decided to piss me off instead of providing technical support, I decided not to bother purchasing any more of their heavily overpriced cards, but I understand their latest lineup's driverset doesn't include the option of sending the overlay to a second monitor/TV, possibly because Vista doesn't support overlays the same way and possibly because Matrox used third-party driver writers and the ones that wrote the stuff back in the '90s can't be arsed.
-- FlyingToaster, Aug 08 2009



random, halfbakery