What Monitors to use for making 3d animated films?

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1

Hi,

I wanted to ask the community here for a recommendation. My goal is to make 3d animated short films after I graduate from college here real soon. I’m looking into buying some monitors but I am so torn up between color accuracy, black and white contrast, refresh rates, etc for monitors and OLED TVs to use for my PC. I’m going to be doing a lot of photo realism graphics using Cycles in Blender (to the best of my ability) and obviously a lot of post production work like video editing, color grading, compositing etc.

My dilemma is that I have the strong urge to see the best possible picture at all times so that I know what my final output truly looks like. I assume a pricey OLED TV will give me that best possible picture at all times although I don’t like the cumbersome of its 50in size on my desk. Color accurate monitors are better sized for my desk but it doesn’t seem from Rtings.com that any PC monitor would really beat a good sized OLED TV - in terms of quality picture - unless maybe it is a expensive color accurate monitor. What Monitors would you guys recommend? should I get both an OLED TV and PC monitors or is that just overkill?

Thanks,

2

I only have a standard monitor but I’ve never seen any colorist that recommend an OLED TV over a “color accurate” monitor.

3

I suppose then it would make more sense for me to get a color accurate monitor for things like color grading etc.

4

Would anyone else like to add anything?

5

I use a cheap arse 52" 4k flat screen TV …
Only because I really don’t care for micro accuracy at all. Everything I make is low sample 4k which gets translated into 1080p to hide all the BS that I didn’t wanna waste time on. Gets the job done and doesn’t break the bank.

However, I don’t recommend this to anyone that is serious with CGI.

6

You should use a calibrated digital monitor for everything.

7

My (almost certainly unpopular) opinion is that accurate color only matters when the consumer of that work is also using similar color accurate devices. This exists when you’re producing something that will go through a commercial pre-press and printing workflow, or if you’re working on a Hollywood feature film that will be professionally presented.

But for everything else, the consumer is probably looking at your work on a cheap uncalibrated TV or monitor, so honestly you can probably get away with any halfway decent display device, perhaps that you’ve invested a small amount of time setting up as well as you can (but one could also argue you should stick with all the default settings because that’s what most of your consumers are going to have done lol).

Besides, color grading is often the last step in the production process so you can always put it off until later without handicapping yourself very much.

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