Blackmagic Forum

Hi there fellow BMCC users!

I'm desperately trying to calibrate my Ikan D5 SDI Monitor with my BMCC. Since the BMCC has no function to display color bars, is there any workaround to let the camera display them?

How do you usually calibrate your monitors? The Ikan D5 has a "Blue Gun" feature which can be used to calibrate the monitor...

Best regards
Lou

Send bars to the Ikan through your editing system, if you can connect it. Usually you can if you have a proper monitoring/capture card.

You could try the generate bars in Resolve 10, export as prores, then put the file on a SSD and playback on the camera.

You could also get a red, green, blue and 40-60% grey cards at most art stores, set up and shoot with BMCC, then adjust the Ikan monitor to match the BMCC monitor, to get a fairly accurate setup to judge color and exposure with. I would do,this in a studio setting if possible, with camera set at 3200K-3500K, or to match the lights you are using. You can also buy a NTSC Color Bar chart and use it.

You can use three different color bar generator sources, and get three different results, so this is as accurate as any, unless you have a wave form monitor/Vector Scope and set a "broadcast" reference.

Using a chart with your camera, you can at least get a close setup, with camera "coloring" of signal taken into account.

The colour on the BMCC display is not great and if you use the 709 display lut reds tend to go more orange, but if you trust that display then it's an option.

Its a bit of a workaround but if you put a ProRes422HQ file of color bars on the BMCC's SSD you should be able to play it in camera.

Scrolling through could get annoying though if you have a lot of shots on the drive

What are you trying to achieve? A calibration of just the D5 monitor or of your entire capture workflow?

If you're just profiling the monitor, then as others have mentioned, just plug it into any device that will output color bars and you're good to go.

If you want to profile the BMCCs output, then you need to film colour bars and profile from that output signal. This wouldn't give you an accurate image of what they BMCC is recording per say, but you would see the signal with a correction already applied (in the monitor). This option might be better if clients will be viewing your D5.

CaptainHook wrote:You could try the generate bars in Resolve 10, export as prores, then put the file on a SSD and playback on the camera.

Thanks a lot, will definitely try this!

sean mclennan wrote:What are you trying to achieve? A calibration of just the D5 monitor or of your entire capture workflow?

If you're just profiling the monitor, then as others have mentioned, just plug it into any device that will output color bars and you're good to go.

If you want to profile the BMCCs output, then you need to film colour bars and profile from that output signal. This wouldn't give you an accurate image of what they BMCC is recording per say, but you would see the signal with a correction already applied (in the monitor). This option might be better if clients will be viewing your D5.

Thanks for the information! When I first connected the monitor to the camera I did a few little tests. I saw that there was a strong orange / red tint on the monitor. On the same Kelvin settings the Ikan Monitor looks crazily different than the the BMC Display. It wasn't really displaying the image i filmed. The display from the BMC looks was more accurately displaying the situation.

The ikan d5 is going to be my main monitor on the rig (the internal display will be blocked by the battery solution). My main goal is to have the Ikan to be looking fairly accurate.

Recorded a prores clip in camera, dragged to a FCP7 sequence then added the bar generator, spit it back out to SSD and calibrated a TV Logic 5" and a Panasonic 17" =]
all are matching camera now!

I have written a how-to and supplied some color bar files for your convenience:
http://laufbildkommission.wordpress.com ... umonitors/

Unfortunately the how-to is German only ATM, but you can use a translation engine - it should be understandable at least. Took me few hours to prepare and write - so sorry I did not find the time to do that in English again.

So here it goes with Google translate:
http://translate.google.at/translate?hl ... onitors%2F

EDIT:
I am surprised how well the auto translation worked - most of the text is understandable. So at least translation into English is really usable, because other way round is often quite - ahem - funny.

Robert,

thanks for your write-up and the download of color-bars.movs - great!