Leon Barnard, a certified Blackmagic Design trainer and host of Team 2 Films, a YouTube channel with over 76K subscribers, continues his track record of passing along bad advice and misinformation. Last year, he claimed that ARRI Log wasn’t suitable as a timeline color space and implied that commercial program material is mastered in BT.2020. Then, this year at a workshop at Scandinavian Photo, he said with a straight face that the ASUS PA32UCXR Mini LED monitor could attain 16,000 nits – not once, but three times! And during his recent review of the ASUS ProArt PA32UCDM QD-OLED monitor, Barnard recommended a picture setting that does not even exist.
Around a year ago, during a color management “masterclass”, in his zeal to promote an ACES or RCM/DWG workflow, Barnard claimed that ARRI Log was designed solely for camera capture and was unsuitable for grading, which might have been true of ARRI’s old Log C, but is certainly not true at all for AWG4. According to ARRI, “The new color space AWG4 was designed in cooperation with colorists for better grading results. Therefore it is the first camera color space which not only stores the captured colors of the camera efficiently, but also is designed for best grading results.”
AWG4 also happens to be larger than BT.2020. The Alexa 35 and REVEAL color science were introduced 1-1/2 years prior to the release of the video, so it would have been nice if Barnard had done his homework. Not only that, but commercial material is not mastered in BT.2020.
While hosting a workshop at Scandinavian Photo a couple months ago, Barnard told his listeners that the ASUS ProArt PA32UCX could hit unheard-of levels of peak brightness – and not a soul bothered to correct him!
“It’s got incredible brightness. It can do 16,000 nits peak 1,000 nits full screen so it can do 6,000, you know if there’s a small portion of the screen, it can push it as far as 16,000, but it will overload the monitor thermally if it runs the whole panel at 16,000 nits, so 1,000 nits, but what’s good as well, there’s headroom, so you know it can definitely do a thousand nits.“
During the same presentation, Barnard attempted to explain quantum dots but never even mentioned that they improve color gamut.
“Do you know what the QD means? Quantum dot, that’s basically something to do with the technology that’s used to emit the light. So quantum dot is a way of actually getting higher brightness out of an OLED panel. So fundamentally, it’s an OLED panel but it uses quantum dots to improve its brightness.”
And more recently, during a review of the ASUS ProArt PA32UCDM, Barnard told his viewers to set the picture mode to Rec. 2100 PQ/PQ Optimized for grading. Only there is no Rec. 2100 PQ mode on the PA32UCDM and you definitely do not want to use PQ Optimized, which applies tone mapping. The correct choice is HDR_PQ BT.2020/PQ Clip.
The Daejeon Chronicles 