The colourists at the busiest post-production studio in Hollywood have no interest in going over 1000 nits. Tom Parsons finds out why
Brightness is thebig battleground in TVs these days. Panel manufacturers LG and Samsung are embroiled in a oneupmanship contest that involves squeezing every last nit out of OLED technology (via MLA and QD-OLED respectively). Meanwhile, Sony is so convinced that an avalanche of super-bright movies (mastered on its new 4000-nit monitor, of course) is on the way that it has developed a new TV backlight that is seemingly designed to shine brighter than it believes OLED ever will.
There is just one problem with all of this: no one seems to have told the people producing the movies.
The visit
During a recent Panasonic-organised visit to the LA studios of Company3 – one of the film industry’s leading post-production specialists and a company that exclusively uses Panasonic OLED TVs as its client-facing monitors – I was given the opportunity to speak to two extremely experienced colourists. These are the people who take the raw footage of a movie or TV show (or advert, trailer, company promo etc) and turn it into the finished article, primarily (though far from solely) through the tuning of colours and contrast.
While I was ostensibly there to see how these busy colourists work (and, of course, be impressed by the fact that such perfectionists choose Panasonic OLEDs to display their efforts – which I was), the subject of ever-brighter TVs also came up. This happened during the presentations but the topic was also later forced into the conversation by a nits-obsessed journalist (me). To cut a long story short, neither colourist had any interest in producing content above 1000 nits – and that’s putting it mildly.
The colourist
The first session was with Siggy Ferstl, whose official title is ‘Creative Post Council Co-Lead’ but who is more regularly referred to as a ‘Supervising Colourist’ or ‘Finishing Colourist’ – essentially the top rung of the colourist ladder. He said that he was currently working on two titles (both for Netflix), one of which he had set to 250 nits and the other to 750 nits. The latter, he explained, was a “modern space thing” that Netflix wanted to be “clean and sharp”, yet he felt that 750 nits was plenty to deliver the required look: “Not everything needs to be 1000 nits,” he said.
When I asked him whether any clients were a
