New Video Editing Monitor

Question

Hi guys.
I regularly work with video editing and I'm looking for a new monitor, my budget is not very high so I need to do a good choice.
For me the most important thing is image quality, I need a monitor I can trust the colors.
I was thinking of getting a DELL monitor because I always heard good things about them.
I would really apreciate if you could help me.
Thanks in advance.
César

Answer 1

César_Sousa wrote:
For me the most important thing is image quality, I need a monitor I can trust the colors.
Depends on what your output will be. If you are only going to show your video on the web, then a computer monitor that you can get a good calibration on should do fine. Calibration buys you a defined working space -- a solid neutral axis, no color casts, known edges of gamut, proper contrast, etc. All monitors will vary from this to some degree, but your calibrated monitor will show you the median, which is what you want for WYSIWYG work. So the people looking at your web videos will see something pretty close to what you intended.
OTOH, if you output will be DVD / BD, or broadcast TV, few computer monitors will show you the correct working space, which for HDTV is Rec.709. If you want WYSIWYG, you'll have to have Rec.709, there's no real way around it. This will take a production monitor (or an expensive computer monitor -- a couple of the Eizos can do this, and the HP Dreamcolor if it's still in production), which is considerably more expensive than a computer monitor. Low end production monitors start around 10x your budget, largely because they are made in much smaller numbers than computer monitors, and have much higher specifications; they just cost more to make.
If you want to output for a film print, you're talking real money. It's been awhile; I don't remember what the "standard" film working space is called, and of course it will vary somewhat depending on the film stock and the film recorder being targeted. But making a film print for distribution is sort of a silly thing to do these days.
A better path would be to a DCP (digital cinema package) which requires the CIE XYZ color space. There are monitors that support this too, and way beyond most budgets, save those of post-production houses.
If you are stuck with your budget and still want to author DVDs, about the best you can do is use a decent computer monitor, use the sRGB (not Adobe RGB or any wider gamut working space), calibrate it (without calibration you've got little hope of WYSISYG), and bump your contrast up to approximate Rec.709. Then work primarily off your scopes (waveform monitor, vectorscope, RGB parade) and not primarily off what you see. Burn a DVD / BD, and iterate making corrections and burning discs until you get what you want. It's an imprecise and much slower workflow, but it's doable in a budget pinch.
EDIT: You might also want to pick up a copy of Van Hurkman's Color Correction Handbook. Does a much better job explaining what you need than I can possibly do. And it's a wonderfully accessible tour of color correction. Answers questions you haven't thought to ask yet. At least, it does for me.