Post Production Services With a 4k Monitor

March 16, 2018 | Andy Linda

When you’re working in the post production services business there’s nothing like having a big desk to work on. Sort of like having the corner office, although with a big desk you get more work done. I’m not sure the same holds true for the corner office.

A big desk lets you spread out. Work in style. Post production services is all about organization. After all, you bring in a ton of raw footage and distill it down to a very potent, very concentrated elixir. Suppose we’re providing post services for a music video. There could be multiple cameras, multiple takes. It all needs to be sorted, classified, organized. For that you need to lay it out before you so you can move things around. A big work surface is a must in post production services and I always edited with at least two computer monitors in addition to the program monitor.

Since we now shoot in 4k, we got a 4k monitor. But I use it mostly as a computer screen. With a 42-inch, 3840×2160 pixel desktop, I can really spread out my work, even when jumping between Premiere Pro, Photoshop and AfterEffects. What a difference in productivity, even from the days when I worked with the two small computer monitors. They showed me only 1280×480 pixels combined, and I had to put up with a huge bezel in the middle!

eIMAGE edit suite with a 43″ 4k computer monitor.

The new monitor had one drawback which I had to deal with: it is so huge I was craning my neck to look at the top of the screen. And it blocked my view of the program monitor. The solution was to cut into my work desk and sink the 4k monitor down by 5½ inches. Now all the sightlines work perfectly and I’m a happy, productive video editor.

One more thing multiple monitors require when used in a post production services business: they have to match in terms of image quality. Back in the old days TV studios used to have only a single color monitors, all the others were black-and-white. It wasn’t just a cost-saving measure, it was to prevent the client saying, “why does it look a little green here and a little red there?” Matching monitors was virtually impossible. But now we have a gizmo called the Spyder5 Pro. It’s a monitor calibration probe which looks at each monitor in our edit suite with a sensor and uses software to tweak the colors to a uniform standard. So even though we have monitors of slightly different vintage and very different resolution, they all look the same and we can depend on them being true. It’s one of the small things that makes us a high-quality, solidly professional post production services business.