NAB 2023 is a wrap!

For myself and the Tao Treasurer, it was a quick 2-day event. On Sunday, I spent most of my time scouting for Monday's 'Monitor Crawl' event. I worked out the most efficient path between booths and decided which to include or exclude. At the end of the day, I unexpectedly spent almost 90 minutes chatting with an old colleague of mine, Michel Suissa, who has been running The Studio at B&H Photo operation for almost a decade.

At the B&H Photo The Studio booth, they had a virtual production setup - including overhead and side-lighting using 'motion-based lighting' tied into the Unreal images displayed on the LED wall. Michel became a terrific source of information on a topic I was curious about heading into NAB: The colorist's on-set role in virtual production.

Are there on-set opportunities for colorists in virtual productions?

Michel's answer: 100% yes. There are two distinct bottlenecks in virtual productions where knowledge of color science, combined with the craft of color grading, provide opportunities for professional colorists.

Then, we chatted about the video walls themselves; how are they constructed and calibrated? He introduced me to Tucker Downs, a PhD candidate at RIT who works for Roe Visuals - one of The Studio's LED wall suppliers. It was a terrific discussion.

In fact, at the end of the Monitor Crawl, I introduced everyone to Tucker. After a 15-minute discussion, Tucker took us to Brompton Technology's booth, which demoed their TrueLight RGBW LED lighting panels; that smooths out the spiked color response of most modern LED lights. If you've wondered why primary colors tend to pop so garishly on modern digital cameras - this demo had you thinking it's not the camera's fault and the LED lighting fixtures are the first place we should look.

What about the announced Sony HX3110 display?

Sony's BVM-HX3110 had colorists at the show chatting, what with its claimed 4,000 nit output (and November release date). Here's my TL;DR:

Unimpressive.

They were running it side-by-side with a 1,000-nit BVM HX310 from the same video feed. The 1000-nit / 4000-nit test patches were the' tell' that something was wrong. At 1000 nits the 3110 was much brighter than the 310. The calibration was wrong. Very wrong. A few colorists felt the 3110 also had slightly lifted black levels - which could have resulted from the 3110 being driven much too hard.

As I said. Unimpressive. And disappointing. With the calibration being off, it was hard to judge the 3110. Yes, it showed detail that the 310 was clipping. But I wouldn't call its images particularly pleasing. And others in our group generally agreed.

TV Logic was also showing a prototype 4K, high-nit reference display. Similar to the Sony, it looked as if it was being overdriven. But it could have also been an overly aggressive color grade. Hard to tell.

But both prototype displays look like they'll be in the $25,000 - $35,000 US price range.

So in that sense, NAB 2023 was a bummer for those of us spending our own money on reference displays. The industry is status quo, and there aren't any down-market options for reference HDR displays in the 24" - 32" form factor.

I'll have more to say in the Mixing Light write-up. When that write-up is released, we'll keep it in front of the paywall for a week or two for this Newsletter's readers.

That's all for now. I'll see you next week.

Happy Grading!

Sincerely,

Pat Inhofer
Colorist & Publisher

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