I do my 'confidence monitor' or program monitor transmit on a Dell Ultrasharp model, 1920x1080, and calibrate weekly. I've colorist friends who are ... well ... mildly irritated to horrified at this. My editing "suite" is our old b-w darkroom from when we ran a pro portrait shooter's lab for 20+ years in our facility, so the room was painted a neutral gray all round with white sound-absorbing tile ceiling, and is naturally very light-controlled.
I follow the specs for suggested room brightness (really, moderate darkness!), and also use a MediaLight screen-attached LED dimmable 6K lighting of the area in view behind/around my monitor so my wall around the screen shows up at the correct percentage of white on my screen. It's a very controlled setup.
And, importantly, for a check, I've had bits of my work looked at on systems with the fully calibrated Flanders monitors ... and it's been within specs.
"Neil ... you just can't do that, for work ... and for Heaven's sake don't tell anyone you're doing it that way!"
I heard that ... again ... just a couple days ago at NAB. Point is, I don't do enough net profit on video post to justify a $3500 monitor and another $2500 at least of calibration gear. I can justify that kind of expense for the Tangent Elements panel sitting on my desk, because that really amps up my capability for production speed. That monitor/spectrophotometer setup ... not so much.
We've been in business over 40 years now. For all the years we ran that lab in the back of our studio building, rooms of gear & employees working away, I had to get production value from my facility and people equal to the labs with the newest automated gear, but out of the manual gear that was a bit outdated. And I did. From careful study and exact application of work patterns & practices. It's how we stayed profitable and therefore still in business.
For that production, we geared our whole setup to producing work that would look the best in the venue the users would see it ... on walls in their homes, all lit by tungsten bulbs. That's what portrait work was designed around. So you'd think I'd agree with the idea expressed above to set up your work patterns to best looks in YouTube via a browser on your system.
I don't. It's ... bad thinking. It's an idea that looks good, but doesn't end up so good.
Why not? Same idea, right?
Not at all. Back in those earlier days, nobody lit their living room, dining room, or bedroom with fluorescent ... only with tungsten light bulbs. You knew exactly what color their user-environment was going to be. The only question was how much light there would be, and well ... we picked what seemed to be a middle ground and went with it.
But web use is very different. Every monitor out there will have a different color space, response, and brightness/contrast/gamma combination than any other monitor, not even counting the viewing situation. Or the player used. Or the "carrier" if over a service like YouTube & Vimeo.
So there isn't any apparent standard, right?
Wrong. There is a 'standard' ... to look professional, your work needs to look like the professionally produced material carried over that service on the user's system. As then, in relative terms, your work looks Good.
Note, that is not at all to say that you will get your content to look like it does on your screen on any other screen in the world. Ain't happening. This is back to every flipping screen being different. None of them match your setup to begin with!
So give up that rather insane idea.
Produce as close as possible to the appropriate pro video standards, and let your content show as it will in the wild. In relative terms, for each user, it will look 'pro'. It will never look like it does in your suite.
And realize, this is exactly what pro network broadcasters go through every day. They know you can't fix gramma's green tv, nor can you out-guess the way users screw up the viewing situation.
Neil
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