Matching Sony Bravada 1080p Color with Final Cut

[Tim Palmer-Benson]

I've just got KDL 32S5100 Sony Bravada hooked up to a Black Magic Intensity Pro Card in a MAcPro running Final Cut 6.05. My Apple Cinema display is calibrated with Spyder. What I am noticing is that what appears to be the gamma is much brighter on the Sony TV than it is in the Final Cut windows. I have noticed this before when playing back my Blu Ray DVDs on a Samsung 54". At a wedding I did recently, there was very little light and the picture on FCP looked dark, but when I play this stuff back through the TVs it looks okay..maybe a little on the over exposed side.

I do a lot of web video as well, so I am wondering what actions I should take. The Sony is running out of the box, default, with no messing with the controls. The picture is stunning and as memory serves me, my video exposure/gamma looks just about right on other HDTVs I have tried..so what to do...if anything :)

My apologies if this issue has been covered before...I did a search I didn't find a post on this issue.

Tim

[Chris Soucy]

The TV manufacturers aways run their sets "hot", 'cos that's what looks so stunning in the sales areas.

As I have been at pains to point out in numerous posts, is that you can fiddle and tweak all you like on fully calibrated setups in the studio, but unless you see it on "Mom and Pop" setups, exactly as they appear in the average living room, you have absolutely no idea what they're going to look like in "real life" after transmission.

Go with the best picture you can get on a real world TV set, 'cos that's what 99.99999 % of the population is actually watching.

The only advisory to this is:

If your doing video for the web, most viewers won't be using TV's but PC monitors, which are not usually required to have the colour gammet of a normal TV, so you have yet another difference.

If doing both, you have two different sets of parameters to work to.


CS