Calibrating PC monitors for a PS3 environment

jpaton

Hi Guys,

I have a kinda curious question. I’m working at a place that’s developing for PS3. We are developing on PCs with CRT and LCD monitors. Our target audience will be using TV monitors. I’m wondering if any of you have ever tried to calibrate computer monitors to match what an average TV monitor would look like. From speaking to sale reps it seems like it could be mainly a luminance issue between the two different types of monitors. Now I’ve used standard monitor calibrators for developing for PC games but this is a slightly different problem. The best solution I’ve come up with so far is to set a TV monitor next to my computer monitor try to match the computer monitor to the TV and save that data to something like Monaco Optix or Spyder 2 which I would then use to calibrate the rest of the company. It seems like a sloppy solution to me so if you have any suggestions I’d appreciate it

Thanks

Jonathan

Eric Chadwick

Use an actual TV as your 2nd monitor. Preferrably hook the TV to a live devkit, so WYSIWYG.

jpaton

Thanks for the quick reply. It’s a good solution if everyone had a Dev Kit, unfortunately we only have two for this site; one of them is being used in the conference room, for management, the other I’ve got so I can’t make PS3 builds for the artist. I will have a TV monitor hooked up to my Dev Kit but none of the other artists, the ones who are actually developing assets, will. I need a way for those artists to get a good idea of how the PS3 build will look on their PC build. But now that you mention it; there’s really no reason the artist need a dev kit. I could just get them all TV monitors that they could hook up to their computer. Mostly what the producer was worried about was color saturation anyway. I worked at a place that did that years ago I just forgot.

Good input. Thanks

thomasp

of course, there are also test kits available. these are what artists get at the place i work at. they are far more affordable than dev kits and are very close to ps3 retail hardware. might be worth investigating.

Ryan Clark

CRTs often have adjustable color temperature. To match a television, you'll want a color temperature of 6500k.

Eric Chadwick

I don't think you'll ever get with a CRT the fun and mess that is NTSC on a TV... reds bleed like crazy, interlacing does funny mojo (assuming your game is rendering 60fps), the fun that is moire, etc.

I wonder if UK uses PAL though. Might be easier, never worked with it. Something like 25 fps, no interlacing?

jpaton

I think you’re right about 50 interlaced field per second for PAL. I know that NTSC games that are converted to PAL run a little slower, or they used to anyway. I think they also used to letterbox the NTSC games to fit PAL resolution.

I talked to the producer and it looks like we're getting a bunch of TVs for the artists. I was kinda amazed I thought I'd be tweaking the settings on the existing LCD and CRTs to try to emulate a TV, my lucky day I guess.

Thanks for the help

Jonathan

allyx

I just thought I would post this here than starting a simiar thread.

I am looking for a monitor calibration tool for Windows Vista 64 Bit.
-I have a dual monitor LCD (2 different type of monitors) on my system setup and would like to be able to calibrate both monitors? Is it possible to have 2 profiles for each monitor?
-Printing is not a necessity, but I may need to in the near future.

The only options I see that suit my needs at this time are Colorvision Spyder2 Pro and Pantone Huey Pro. They both appear to support multiple monitors according to the website specs, but I'm not sure if it'll work in the way I was hoping. Are there any other tools I missed?
Is there anyone out there that has used any of these programs?

Eric Chadwick

Some info here.
http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=121133&an=&page=0&vc=1

jpaton

This is one I've used before. It was kinda a pain cause I had to use it calibrate several people monitors but the device worked well. Technically it’s supposed to save the initial setting to your video card so that you only have to go through the set up once, but for some computers I had to go through the whole process every time. Generally speaking it's a lot easier to get in contact with knowledgeable people at Colorgear then Datacolor. After speaking to people at both companies I think they do the same thing. I remember the Optix being able to save 2 settings, one for each monitor.

http://www.chromix.com/ColorGear/Shop/pr...e&PID=11713

Good luck

Jonathan