After that she bought the cheap LCD HDTV and uses that as a final QA check and it has helped a lot.

I do agree with the need to have some idea about what people are seeing, so I simply create a calibration preset called "Torch mode". Basically, I throw my broadcast monitor WAY out of wack, cranking the backlight all the way, crunch the contrast and brightness, and increase the saturation a bit.

The goal is to simulate the way most LCD HDTVs come out of the box, so they look good on the showroom floor. 99% of people leave them like this, so it is a decent approximation of how people might see it.

But I have this really cheap, old-school analogue TV connected to a DVD player I proof things through if it's some sort of DVD material. And if there are issues, they ALWAYS show up there- it loves to show artifacts due to pushing colors too much or two little and it LOVES oversaturating everything.

But if it's ever going to get played through a projector, I run it through my HD projecter at home- and if it's going to have issues (usually too dark), it's going to shop up at 123".

Between all 3, I can find a happy medium for my target medium.

It's exactly as you said, when I was in radio, we mixed for 200 different stations that got our programs- we ALWAYS ran the mix through the 90mph with all the windows down car test…usually on some crappy set of speakers we had laying around.

Did we mix for those different channels? Well, no, but if our mix didn't show up well on those, we tweaked it. But the STANDARD was set on the original mix.

I haven't quite figured out how that translates into correction and grading, but so far my stuff is fairly consistent (I'm not broadcast though).

Rob, yes a Kona can play out AVCHD…but I am not going to compress something just to see what it looks like. Plus, AVCHD is not the format they compress to for over the air…it is an MPEG-2 variant.

And yes, it was direcTV, so satellite and HEAVILY compressed. Glad I cancelled cable so I don't have to see this stuff normally.

My thought is that the majority of viewers don't care about the picture as much as we in the business do(they would rather have a big tv than a quality tv). There is a minority who do care what the picture looks like, it is those people we strive to please.

The problem with getting a crappy HDTV for your bay is that there is an assload of crappy HDTVs…which will you choose? On top of that people tweak their tvs for their own purposes…some like crushed blacks, some think the picture has a green tint, some watch in a dark room, etc…and you still wouldn't solve the delivery/compression end of the problem.

Bob

Though no one but me and few others will see the product at its best, I've decided that I will still choose to honor my own standards. For my own selfish reasons, I NEED to adjust contrast, the different shades and tones, with all the other little tweeks just to satisfy myself.

Yet, it seems you want your product to look good to as many people as possible. My friend in the audio business said you "should work in the world you live in."

Maybe if you had the time and space, you could have both your awesome monitor and your crappy monitor. This also might show you the differences in the two.

p.s Love the blog!

Personally, I have FiOS at home and couldn't be happier. Great picture quality even on a cheap HDTV. Why? Because AFAIK Verizon doesn't recompress channels whereas most cable providers, DirecTV, and Dish do recompress them. I see far less macro-blocking and compression errors than I did when I had DirecTV.

I doubt you'll ever be able to duplicate the compression issues you see in your bay, but having a big client monitor won't hurt. You could always leave the picture settings as-is from the manufacturer. I would guess that a lot of people out there don't know how to calibrate a monitor or why they should.

But in reality, there is no point to doing this. You shouldn't worry about what it will look like on a crappy TV. This is why networks have delivery specs. And, it is why you always check your scopes to ensure that you are not only creating a valid picture, but a legal one as well. Make it look as good as you can within spec and don't worry about what happens to it after you lay it off. I don't think you can really use "TV speakers" as a comparison. Audio is far more subjective.

A while ago I was wrestling w/the same question and asked the opinion of one of our regular shooters and he basically said this. The people w/the expensive, properly setup home theaters will appreciate the images you create. The people w/the $300 TVs from Wal-Mart left at factory default settings don't care as long as they can make out what's going on.

Those speakers were made by Yamaha, and when they got wind of what he was doing, they repackaged them and gave them a new model number — the NS10. Walk into almost every major recording studio today, and many not-so major recording studios, and you'll see at least one pair of NS10s somewhere. You've seen them, whether you realize it or not. Those black speakers with no grill and white speaker cones. Those are crappy home stereo speakers repackaged as professional nearfield monitors.

Can a Kona card output AVCHD? I think AVCHD is the most compressed HD format. Maybe compressing to that and outputting as a test to see what it will look like on an average HDTV would help with this situation.

Or networks should somehow let us know how much our stuff will be compressed so we can see what our stuff will look like in the end.