Consumer Displays: When Your Client is David Fincher

Part I: The iPhone 12 Pro Max as a Consumer Reference Monitor

Part II: iPhone 12 Pro as a Consumer Reference Display (cont’d)

Part III: iOS Devices as Client Reference Monitors

Part IV: Consumer Displays: When Your Client is David Fincher

Dolby Vision calls for calibrated consumer displays in the grading suite but what is one to do when the color departs from that of a $35,000 mastering monitor? During a discussion in which Eric Weidt talks about his collaboration with David Fincher on Mindhunter, the colorist raises the question of how to deal with flagship consumer displays whose color inevitably will not match that of a professional reference monitor like the Sony BVM-X300.

Grading with consumer displays in mind

“Once he [Fincher] came into Los Angeles, he would stop by because the grading suite is just.. his office is right there.. stop by, pop in. But really, you know, to him it always looks amazing on the BVM, right? He’ll say, ‘God, it looks great in here, but on my monitor, this gamma is stretching too much and it’s making it too saturated’. And he hates too much saturation. So, he really does want a consumer device to look decent. He does not trust the fact that this [the BVM-X300] is what everybody in the world is going to see by any stretch, and I think he’s right, actually. For me, grading, it’s really a little bit frustrating because I’m looking at this all the time and it’s really tight and it’s really compacted and sometimes it feels a bit flat but he’s right – if you put it on an LG OLED it’s gonna stretch out, it’s gonna be really contrasty, colors are gonna come up and I think it travels well, his approach [disliking over-saturated colors] and I do have an iPad that I render everything out to before I send it to him because I want to see what he’s seeing”.