[Bitcoin_McPonzi]

Many of my (Hollywood) clients need to do color grading and other accurate color work.

What platforms do they all use? Not Macintosh, despite its reputation for being the platform for "graphics professionals" (it was missing 10 bit/channel color until very recently). And not Linux, despite its use in render farms.

They use Windows 10 and HP DreamColor monitors. That's the only platform that works and works well for people who need to care about color.

[ancientworldnow]

I'm a colorist. Many of us do use windows, many use OSX, many more use Linux. Every major color critical application supports many types of LUTs and color management.

Further, HP Dreamcolors have tons of problems and aren't considered solid for color critical work (but are fine for semi color accurate stuff like intermediate comps etc). Color accurate work is done over SDI with dedicated LUT boxes handling the color transforms and the cheapest monitors being $7500 Flanders Scientific Inc 25" OLED panels.

[muzfuz]

Yep. I was a Colourist in my former life (TV ads, promo films, music videos mainly), used Resolve on OSX with a Flanders monitor. Most other people I talked to were either using OSX or Linux. (Granted, this is a few years ago when ProRes was the primary capture and delivery codec).

[anfractuosity]

That's interesting regarding OLED, I thought over time the different colour LEDs decay at different rates?

A while ago I had a look at Eizo's 10 bit / channel TFTs, which looked impressive to me (from a layman's perspective), do you have any opinions of those?

[ancientworldnow]

Eizo's high end displays are great for almost all uses up to the highest end color critical installs. I recommend them over the DreamColors all the time. You can't get much better without moving to ultra high end pro solutions.

[anfractuosity]

Awesome, thanks for the heads up :) Just for curiosity what manufacturers make the very best monitors in your eyes for colour work?

[ancientworldnow]

Flanders Scientific, Sony, Dolby in order from cheapest to most expensive. FSi and Sony use the same panels for their 25" models. Sony x300 is the go to right now for affordable HDR. Dolby is the gold standard for non projector color critical work.

For non color critical necessary displays, Eizo is about the best. Lots of" good enough" panels from LG, Acer, and Fell though. I actually have a gaming panel that calibrated surprisingly well and holds those numbers.

The best consumer display by far though are the LG OLED televisions. They're so good that we're installing them in lots of mid level suites as client monitors (aka close enough to our color critical panels).

[fro0116]

I don't have any experience with the more expensive panels you listed, but I do have an LG OLED, and I'd be a bit more careful about recommending it for color critical work as a computer monitor.

I've owned it for about a year and the red channel on mine exhibits painfully obvious burn-in patterns.

[pvg]

I'm a colorist

This sounds pretty interesting. What do you actually do, in layperson-y terms?

[muzfuz]

Sit in darkened rooms, spin 3 trackballs, and turn a few knobs to make pictures look pretty, mostly. DaVinci Resolve[1] and Baselight[2] are quite popular, take a look at the websites to give yourself an idea of what it looks like.

1. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

2. https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/baselight/overview_bl....

[pvg]

Hah, thanks! I should have been a little bit clearer - not an ELI5-layperson, a layperson who has some vague handwavey idea of how video/film is made and once read a popular article about orange/teal contrast.

It's more stuff like 'what is it about this process that makes a dedicated colour specialist necessary?', 'what are the things things they're supposed to accomplish?', 'what are their technical and creative constraints/inputs/deliverables?', etc.

[pzone]

Check out this YouTube tutorial to see the kinds of things they're doing with those knobs and panels.

The inputs are roughly "An ordered sequence of footage clips" and the output is roughly "A final projection/broadcast/download-ready movie"

https://youtu.be/ojjfhCrjDus

[danceparty]

I don't agree, the entire visual effects industry, including their color departments, run on linux. Baselight and Resolve, are the two most common color correction programs in the industry, baselight exclusively runs on linux, and the big color companies (company 3, efilm, technicolor) all run resolve on linux. Coloring is done either on projectors, or broadcast monitors (something like a sony PVMA250 on the low end @ ~$6,000)

[foepys]

Do you by any chance have some links where I can read more about Linux as a front-end system in the film/graphics industry? This is field of work in which I would never have guessed Linux to be strong.

[berkut]

Pretty much (there's a bit of Windows at the smaller places) all the big VFX studios (ILM, SPI, Weta, Framestore, MPC, DNeg) are running Linux for almost everything involving content creation, using apps like Maya, Nuke (for compositing), Katana, Houdini, etc.

There are exceptions - some apps (ZBrush) don't run on Linux, so there are Windows machines around, but in general >= 95% of machines the artists and developers use are Linux at the big places.

And most of those apps use OpenColorIO as a framework for handling colourspaces.

[dtf]

It’s mainly in large facilities that run huge jobs with massive amounts of data. Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Flame, Baselight, many in-house VFX software all run perfectly well Linux. And of course the cornucopia of renderers running on their server farms, as might be more expected.

The lineage is from SGI, where many of these applications were born, but as the company faltered and consumer graphics hardware took off thanks to gaming, Linux became the natural home.

[danceparty]

All true, windows is kept around for Zbrush and Adobe suite. I'd put it at around 5% of artist workstation count.

(I've worked at a few of the larger VFX studios mentioned throughout the thread)

[AboutTheWhisles]

Every large visual effects studio runs on linux, with hundreds of linux workstations at each one. Color sensitive work like lighting and compositing has been done for well over a decade on linux. Artist workstations are calibrated and every major computer graphics application has support for look up tables.

[coldtea]

>Every large visual effects studio runs on linux, with hundreds of linux workstations at each one. Color sensitive work like lighting and compositing has been done for well over a decade on linux.

That's for rendering, where the OS and Desktop experience doesn't really matter, and the cheaper it is the better.

Few pros do the actual editing and color work (where the decisions are made, not the rendering part) on Linux.

[ancientworldnow]

This is just not true, you're spreading misinformation. I am a colorist, I'm the person making these final decisions. Every single high end color suite I've ever been in runs Linux. In fact, the full version of Baselight (one of the defacto color correction suites) only runs on Linux. DaVinci Resolve (one of the other major ones) ran only on Linux for the majority of it's existence and the full panel version (the pro choice) only ran on Linux until last year.

Every major color house I've worked in runs Linux exclusively in their suites (CO3, The Mill, Technicolor, etc).

That's not to say windows and OSX suites don't exist, I use them and my own suite runs windows, but the highest end of color is basically Linux only.

[softwarelimits]

I am really very interested in reading about a typical hardware and software setup for a Linux colorist workstation with a special focus on which graphics card and which drivers to use! Nvidia?

[ancientworldnow]

So this is about DaVinci Resolve since it has the most flexibility for setup, many other systems are borderline turnkey.

The recommended setup is a super micro chassis with dual xeons (12 core cpus min rec, 20 core preferred), min 32GB ram (usually at least 64,128+ common on high end systems), SSD for OS, thunderbolt (min)/pciE/10GbE/fibre (preferred) attached storage usually 8 bay raid6 or similar min, almost always NVIDIA GPUs with 8x 1080ti's or the latest Titans being the most common set up I see.

This runs on CentOS or RHEL 6.8 or 7.3.

Video signal is output over SDI from a PCIe to a LUT box (for color transforms) then to a color critical display (FSi, Sony, or Dolby typically with the best suites using cinema projectors). A second SDI runs out to a box showing video scopes. Everything is usually calibrated by light Illusions software and using a Minolta colorimeter probe (typically a 3rd party service does this every few months).

The GUI monitor(s) are usually just regular consumer whatever.

The software is controlled by a large, $30K control panel that looks similar to an airplane cockpit.

That's most of the important stuff, but I can fill in details where you're curious.

[dm319]

you might want to see the post further down with the technical details (possibly ended up in the wrong place)

[ancientworldnow]

Yeah that's exactly what happened. Mobile client glitched, but it's in both places now.

[Arelius]

I'd like to confirm that ILM also does color work in Linux.

[bleair]

I think we might have a different definition of "Few pros do ... color work.. on Linux". Have you worked at Sony, Company 3, Dreamworks, Lucasfilm, Pixar, or Deluxe?

[pzone]

That's not right - Linux is used on desktop workstations as well. Check out the discussion in this recent thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7zms77/gnome_2_spott...

[ancientworldnow]

So this is about DaVinci Resolve since it has the most flexibility for setup, many other systems are borderline turnkey.

The recommended setup is a super micro chassis with dual xeons (12 core cpus min rec, 20 core preferred), min 32GB ram (usually at least 64,128+ common on high end systems), SSD for OS, thunderbolt (min)/pciE/10GbE/fibre (preferred) attached storage usually 8 bay raid6 or similar min, almost always NVIDIA GPUs with 8x 1080ti's or the latest Titans being the most common set up I see.

This runs on CentOS or RHEL 6.8 or 7.3.

Video signal is output over SDI from a PCIe to a LUT box (for color transforms) then to a color critical display (FSi, Sony, or Dolby typically with the best suites using cinema projectors). A second SDI runs out to a box showing video scopes. Everything is usually calibrated by light Illusions software and using a Minolta colorimeter probe (typically a 3rd party service does this every few months).

The GUI monitor(s) are usually just regular consumer whatever.

The software is controlled by a large, $30K control panel that looks similar to an airplane cockpit.

That's most of the important stuff, but I can fill in details where you're curious.

[Nexxxeh]

Are the ports on the 1080ti's used for video output at all? Is there one with SDI out? Or are they just used for CUDA?

At the risk of asking a silly question, what does the LUT-box do that couldn't be done in software (or, I guess, why isn't it done in software)?

This stuff is fascinating to me.

Do you know of any good YouTube videos on colorist hardware? I've seen a couple of videos on workflow, but neither went into the guts of the machines and LUT-boxes.

[coldtea]

For 3D yes.

[giovannicarruba]

After reading this Linux rant and seeing how Apple is systematically marginalising its Pro customers, I'm actually inclined to believe you. Windows might be a pain for John Doe sometimes, but Microsoft also makes sure an insane amount of obscure professional features (like color management) keep working.

[hughsient]

Apply hasn't cared about ColorSync for years. Every release they break something.

[muzfuz]

To be fair, the pro market doesn't care about ColorSync.

If you need color accuracy then you're calibrating your monitor hardware.

[jacobolus]

Everyone needs to characterize (not “calibrate”; that term is highly misleading) their display. The question is just whether you keep the characterization provided by the manufacturer, or measure the display yourself using a hardware device. Either way, the result is a display “profile”, which is basically a lookup table used by software to map color coordinates so that they will appear as expected on the display.

People using Macs certainly do care about ColorSync. That’s the name of the software which uses the display characterization to keep colors looking as expected throughout the operating system and most applications.

[muzfuz]

In many professional environments the preferred route is to use specialist hardware to send an RGB signal at a high bit rate and do any colour transformation in the monitor hardware.

Using LUTs either at the application or OS level to adjust colour information is a big no-no, although that doesn't stop some people from doing it. You simply don't want to change your colour space[1] until you absolutely have to.

The point of calibrating your monitor (which is a hardware + firmware level problem) is to see how your RGB image will look on a colour space restricted piece of hardware (for example in video this is often 12-bit RGB --> Rec709).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space

[jacobolus]

If you have some image data stored with reference to one color space, and you want to convert the data to a different color space (e.g. because you are targeting some particular output device), that is a gamut mapping problem. To learn about different trade-offs involved in choice of gamut mapping algorithms, I recommend Ján Morovič’s monograph, https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Color+Gamut+Mapping-p-9780470030...

Same story if you want to show your image on a display with a different gamut.

Most gamut mapping algorithms used in practice (whether on a display or in software) are actually pretty mediocre in my opinion. It would be possible to do substantially better by writing your own code, at the expense of being a bunch of work. Alas.

P.S. The Wikipedia article about color space (and articles about many other color-related topics) is pretty terrible, but I’ve been too lazy to rewrite it.

[52-6F-62]

Anecdotal, but:

I currently work for a media conglomerate where colour tends to matter a lot to both the print and digital channels. I'm not sure which monitors they use as I tend to work rather separate from that group, but they all work on Macs—that's been the case since the late 80's early 90's in publishing and there seems to be no move to stray.