From the course: Video Gear

Using a 4K studio monitor

From the course: Video Gear

Start my 1-month free trial

Using a 4K studio monitor

- You know Rich, the monitor that we have here, from Blackmagic, is kind of a studio monitor. What is the difference between a studio monitor and a field monitor? - Well this one was not really designed to go out of the studio. It actually has rack mounts, and is designed to be put into a rack, so this is designed to be the standard width of your typical rack unit. So we have these in our regular studio where we do a lot of Blackmagic switcher, and this is fine. It's not a huge 4K monitor, but for about $2,000, it's a nice, solid, reasonably priced 4K monitor. - So you could have it in a rack in your machine room or something like that for confidence playback, things of that nature, but as Rich mentioned, we just have it in this little yolk here, and then it becomes a field monitor. (laughter) - It's a great cheat. So this particular yolk is from ikan, but there are others out there, and essentially, it lets you take something that's meant to be rack mounted, and on the bottom, it gives you a plug to mount onto any standard c-stand. - Yeah and the other thing that I really like about this display is that it actually has quite a bit of functionality built in. So for example, if you were going to do calibration in blue only mode, we have a zoom mode where you can zoom in to see parts of the picture. We can do peaking, which is probably a little harder to see on the camera there, but this is putting a green overlay so I can see peaking there. We can even do things like put custom frame markers up on screen and even load LUTs for calibration or monitoring purposes. - [Rich] It's a very reasonably priced full-featured monitor and Rob, earlier you mentioned, there's not that many pro-quality 4K monitors out there right now. - [Rob] And that's the thing is, these days they're coming out every so often, but it seems like manufacturers are running into a manufacturing delay or that kind of stuff, and Blackmagic being the size of a company that they are, and known for affordable monitoring options, and affordable cameras, yeah, I think this is a no-brainer if you're shooting with, especially a Blackmagic camera, but any 4K compatible camera. Now Rich, just like we've mentioned with some other monitoring solutions, this is not meant to be the end-all-be-all of color accuracy, of things of that nature. In fact, the viewing angle's a little wonky, but if you go into it knowing that, this is great for things like focusing and things of that nature. It'll work great. - Yeah, and on the back, we have the ability to loop in two different SDI sources. So you can run in two different cameras or two different inputs. Got the ability to output. You can do a few other things, but this is really designed for pro video cameras. That's why it's got the SDI connections. - Yeah, and for studio situations where you might be running long distance, it even has optical fiber capabilities, so if you don't want to run SDI. A USB port for doing firmware updates and functionality. And I actually said calibration LUTs before when I talked about the LUT button. I don't think that's actually true right now. I think that's a future plan thing that will happen. - Depends when you watch this video. One of the things we've both learned about Blackmagic is they'll put buttons with cool names like LUT and you're like oh, and they're like oh yeah that's a planned feature. - Exactly. The same thing goes with the ethernet connectivity you see here for remote controlling the monitor and things of that nature, but for its form factor and for its size, I think, if you're looking for an ultra HD monitor, and that's actually an important distinction, Rich. That most of the 4K monitors that you're going to see out there these days, they don't have any 4K about them. They're ultra HD monitors instead of true DCI 4K. - Yes, which is fine. That's what most of you are going to be shooting. And to connect the computer here to this display, Rob what are you using there? - Yeah, so this is an SDI display, which we could just connect to camera, SDI, or out, but you could also use it as I'm using it right now for visualization purposes. So what I have is a Blackmagic ultra studio mini-monitor. It's this little guy right here, and we've talked about these on previous episodes, but basically what this box allows you to do is pipe signal out of your computer, hence the monitor portion of it, and it does that via Thunderbolt, so I have a Mac with Thunderbolt, but if you have a PC with a compatible Thunderbolt card, that will work as well. So I'm going Thunderbolt out, and then on this side of things, I have two output options. I have an HDMI out as well as an SDI out. And that's what we're looping out back to the monitor, SDI. - And both of those can be used. If you want to send that HDMI out to that Dell 4K we were talking about before and monitor both on a pro monitor and have a second monitor for the consumer, you could do that. And we also have the ability here to send out over the T-TAP, which is from AJA, although both of these are actually HD only. - [Rob] That's a really, really big thing to keep in mind. Both the ultra mini-monitor as well as the T-TAP are HD resolution only. If you need to do 4K resolution, well AJA and Blackmagic both have solutions for you via Thunderbolt. They're just a lot bigger and a lot more expensive. - But the nice thing about this monitor is not only can it handle a 4K signal, it can down-convert for HD signals as well, so even if you haven't bought a 4K camera yet, but you know it's in your future, this is a monitor worth considering. It's a little bit more than buying the HD only version, but it's going to be future-proofed. Well I hope you enjoyed this look at some different monitors. We're going to come back next week and talk about a few more monitors and things to look for when you're purchasing a field or studio monitor.

Contents