Fascinating how different everyone's working patterns and behaviors are.
Just saw a very good review of the new Apple XDR display from a link posted on the LGG forum, by Vincent Teoh. Well performed, using a good tone generator and a Klein spectro device for measuring ... and properly testing for color dimming sections and behavior along with actual in-use contrast ratios. Checking DeltaE behavior, gammas, all the proper pro profile checks. And all done for several uses from SDR to HDR.
And yea, even with the 'new' fixes in the Mac OS for that monitor ... darks blooming is still way out of control, contrast ratio is not nearly adequate for HDR reference monitoring, but hey ... as long as the scene is overall pretty bright, it mostly works. You just cannot count on your shadows and blacks to be ... anything. They can 'move' so much depending on surrounding tonality. Not at all comparable to the high-end Sony rig that Apple chose to compare it to.
But I saw something very interesting in the screen-shots of the various settings for that monitor that you must make through the computer's OS, as there are no controls or settings available on the monitor whatever. A data point I've not been able to find elsewhere.
I've written an article and a tutorial for MixingLight on the color management of Premiere ... and including on Macs with the Retina monitors using Apple's odd Display-P3 color space. I hunted all over for the data on that 'space' ... and what is available says P3 primaries, D65 white point, "sRGB gamma" (which is ... unhelpful) ... and nothing about brightness. But the monitors clearly are fairly bright for white point.
In the screen-grabs of the color space/display options for the XDR monitor, there was an entry for "Apple Display-P3 (500 nits)".
Woa! That's SO far outta the park for pro video ... unless you're HDR, pro video is nearly all video sRGB primaries, Rec.709 including both the camera transform and display transform functions, gamma 2.4 and brightness 100 nits.
If you work within that pro Rec.709 setup, your work will look relatively the same as all other professionally produced media on any one viewer's system.
But there are plenty of Retina users running the Display-P3 "native" space of their monitors ... and then wondering why Premiere isn't working correctly on their machines, and why exports look so different on varying machines and viewing apps.
The Apple ColorSync utility is supposed to remap things on the "standard" Retina monitors for tagged images being viewed ... but that utility sees "Rec.709" and attempts to apply the color primaries change, only applies the camera transform function but does not apply the required display transform function, and the "RGB gamma" used then effectively works out to a slightly off-kilter 1.96 ... and it doesn't seem to match the 100 nits brightness either, perhaps leaving the image closer to the 500 nits 'native' spec.
Yea, that doesn't work so well. Way off standards.
The other very interesting thing about the review of the XDR monitor ... was that for SDR work, it came out nearly spot-on for following the proper Rec.709/Bt.1886 standards! Including both a white point brightness of 97.? nits, and a gamma of 2.35.
So ... the Retina's are difficult to get to a proper view of SDR material, but ... the XDR is pretty darn good at SDR, much better than a Retina ... but nowhere near good enough for a Reference monitor for HDR material.
Though he thought it might work ok for viewing much HDR material.
As a PC user, I do wish Apple made FinalCutX available for other OSs. It would be nice to work with it, and see how it feels. But ... Apple being Apple, ain't gonna happen. Sigh.
Neil
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