Finishing Beanz: diary 02

Yay! My adapter arrived today! geek blog alert!

So to some this may seem a little weird to be getting excited about a little piece of plastic & metal, but i'm stoked. The adapter in question is a MiniDisplayPort to HDMI adapter that i ordered from a company called Monoprice in the USA.




So whats so great about it then?

Well to provide the answer for that requires a bit of background info on the setup i am using for adjusting the color grade for the movie.
I am working on a 2009 model Apple Macbook Pro. Anyone who uses these computers are probably aware that if you want to be able to output an image from one of these babies to an external display, it has to be output via it's Mini Display Port.

The display i am using for grading is basically a Panasonic plasma television. These plasma screens are better than their LCD equivalents for this sort of thing because of their superior contrast ratios and wider colour gamut. The problem with it being a television screen and not a computer monitor is that it does not have the usual DVI style input/s you would expect from a modern computer monitor. It does have VGA input though, however thats an analogue connection and for the purposes of image accuracy i am aiming for a digital to digital signal connection.

So this is where the new adapter comes in. Previously i only had the option of using a combination of adapters that i purchased from Apple. One being MiniDisplay > DVI, then another cable that went from DVI to the HDMI input at the back of the Plasma. I found this not to work very well as all sorts of weird image artifacts would appear on the outputted signal. Upon research online i found that i was not the only one and others have encountered this issue.

So yea, top tip! If you need to connect your Macbook pro to a big screen TV using this method, avoid! Buy a proper MiniDisplayPort to HDMI adapter. :)

Now that we have a decent 1080 digital feed into an external display, i can now start on working to achieve a good colour calibration for the screen to allow the image grading to commence. Because Beanz is shot using (mostly) older footage shot on "standard-def" DV video, the aim here is to try and get as much as possible out of the lower resolution images so that they gracefully translate into the now ubiquitous high-definition format. I will cover this in a bit more detail in a later post.

Next post: finishing Beanz: diary03