THE DIGITAL INTERMEDIATE - CALIBRATION
FOREWORD
If you ever ask who is responsible for the calibration within a facility, chances are the person you ask will turn pale before your very eyes!! If they do, I'd suggest maybe you look for another post production facility to take your project to. Let me be brutally honest here, ultimately if the calibration is not exact, your film won’t be either. It does not matter how beautiful it looks on the monitor you are viewing, it will not look like that on the final print. It sounds obvious but you put your trust in the post house to take care of it for you. It really should be something you don't worry about, however take it from me, you should.
Talking about calibration sparks fear in the eyes of anybody working in film, either that or a look of bewilderment or the eyes just plain glaze over and start to roll in the back of the sockets. It's an emotive subject though, one that tends to get the technical people highly excited and the creatives bored senseless but then in their preoccupied mind they should not have to worry about these trivialities but in honesty they should too. The problem though, it is rather an essential part of DI. Without it you might as well throw your work away, because it'll never be right without an accurately calibrated viewing device or display.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Moving images from one colour space or bit depth to another requires the use of a "look up table", commonly called a "LUT", which accurately remaps the data. LUT's are employed to accurately display the image to match the output of the film. There are a number of manufacturers and clever people around who have worked to take the technical and often tedious work away from calibrating devices - specialists have arisen within the field that for a price you can employ to make sure the colour(s) you are looking at will be exactly what is produced on the final film. Companies and manufacturers have developed ways of calibrating and producing LUT's for 'most' monitors and projectors out there. I say 'most,' because every projector or monitor will have different profile and has to be treated differently. No two LUT's will be the same and cannot be used between different monitors, even if they are the same make and model!