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Sharpening Focus Pulls & Working With The HP Z27x DreamColor

April 1, 2016

The Team answers a member's question about sharpening quick focus pulls. Plus they discuss using the HP Z27x DreamColor display.


Series

Episode 31: From The Mailbag

How Do You Sharpen Quick Focus Pulls & Advice On Working With The HP Z27x DreamColor

It’s April already!

NAB is just a few short weeks away.  If you’re attending NAB and see Patrick, Dan or myself on the showfloor or sitting at a bar (highly likely) please stop and say hi!  We love meeting members in person and spending a moment to talk shop!

The 4th Annual NAB Colorist Mixer is Sunday Night 4/17.  Tickets are sold out (in less than a week!).  If you’re going to be in Vegas and didn’t get a ticket be sure to get on our waitlist.  The past few years some tickets have freed up at the last minute.  The waitlist is first come first served.

Remember, if you have questions that you’d like to get an opinion on please use the contact form.

Your questions can be aesthetic, technical or even client related. We’d love to hear from you, and your question might make future episodes of From The MailBag.

In this MailBag episode, we take a look at a question about dealing with those quick moments when a shot sometimes goes out of focus and different approaches to sharpening.  And then in Part 2 we discuss some considerations for working with the HP DreamColor Z27x Display.

Sharpening Quick Focus Pulls

First up we explore a question from MixingLight member Marshall who asks:

“On occasion I get material where there is a focus pull and the focus is missed for just a second. Recognizing the obvious limitations, do you guys have any techniques that have worked for you to “soften the blow”?

Great question!  The momentary missed focus pull is something we all see alot of these day – sometimes it’s for effect – the searching focus look has become a popular creative choice.  Other times it’s completely unacceptable and must be fixed.

From regular sharpening, midtone detail, keyframing and even roto work of faces and eyes from adjacent frames we take look at how we approach making this fix & sometimes that means not doing anything!

Working With The HP Z27x DreamColor Display

In Part two, we field a question from member Fairlie about a new HP DreamColor display he’s purchased.

“Unfortunately I couldn’t afford a $5,000 monitor, but I bought the HP Dreamcolor Z27X. Completely confused on how to set it up for proper color correction. It has several presets from sRGB D65/sRGB D50 to BT.709 and a few more. I have been searching online trying to find answers, but there’s nothing on that topic or at least maybe nothing that I understand. I just ordered an X-Rite Color Monki to calibrate it, however that is also new to me.”

Fairlie goes on to say:

“I’ve always used Apple monitors that are glossy so I’m used to that, and the HP is matte and it looks really dull no matter what setting I put it on.”

It used to be that when it came to computer monitors we always had the same answer – buy a reference monitor!  Of course budget then was always an issue.  To be honest, high end computer monitors in many ways are reference monitors these days – 10bit displays, support for popular gamuts, gammas, etc.

So in this segment we praise this monitor, talk about its calibration capabilities, but also explore some things to be careful about (especially cheap meters).

It’s worth noting, one thing not discussed in the episode was the native resolution of the monitor which is 2560 x 1440, which is a popular resolution for 27in displays, but not really a native size for any video standard.  So, Fairlie, that’s something else you’ll need to explore – how the monitor is scaling.

As always, enjoy the MailBag and please use the comments below if you have more to add to the conversation or have other questions. 

-Team Mixing Light

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