Best Monitor Ever Just Got A Little Better

Best Monitor Ever Just Got A Little Better

I've had my Leader LV5330 for about a year now and I've become painfully attached to it. Even to the point of operating handheld with it on-board for extended hours much to the chagrin of my back and shoulders. It's not a big piece of gear but honestly, it's a little too heavy for handheld. If you like to operate ENG cameras with a small on-board, those new Marshall 6.5" monitors are a much better option.. I digress.

The Leader is great because it does everything. You have total image (and even audio) evaluation for HD production and it fits in a  tiny pelican case. Considering what it is and what it does, it's slightly stiff price of around $6500 is actually a real bargain. In earlier posts I lamented several missing features in the 5330 that have now been remedied by a brilliant new firmware upgrade! My biggest gripe with the scope was that it didn't have "Blue Only" It's a very sharp SDI display with about the same resolution as a Panasonic 17".  It has chroma, brightness, and contrast controls but because there was no "Blue Only" feature, really no way to precisely calibrate it. That was a big head scratcher so I blogged, and bitched, and emailed. Though I can claim no credit for this, they listened and now there's not only a Blue Only feature but you can view any color channel independently as well as Red and Green minus Blue, Red and Blue minus Green, etc. Very cool.

Also of note - unlike the previous version, your picture calibration settings are now brought over to the Multi displays - Pic and Waveform, 4Screen, etc. And a new function that is quickly becoming my fav is you can assign "SCREEN CAPTURE TO USB" to the "Short Cut" button which makes saving continuity stills incredibly fast. In addition to these, there are a whole slew of new features and once Leader posts release notes for the upgrade, I'll be sure to link to them here.

You can get the firmware upgrade by emailing Sales@LeaderUSA.com

Leader's CINEZONE

Leader's CINEZONE

A fairly recent addition to Leader's product line is the CineLite II software which encompasses both the CineZone and CineLite applications, both extremely useful tools. CineLite basically lets you pick pixel sample positions on the SDI image and display the value in either % (IRE) or F-Stop - very useful for locating the precise value of something within a scene or if you're setting exposure based off a grey card. I was hoping to share some screen captures to illustrate how it works but for some reason the "capture" feature on the Leader LV 5330 does not work with CineLite. CineZone is very similar to the False Color viewing mode on a RED One but a little more intuitive in my opinion. IRE values from -7.3 to 109.4 are mapped pictorially using simple colors to represent the IRE values. Values over 100 IRE are displayed as white, values under 0 IRE are black and everything in between is represented from blue to red with green representing 50 % reflectance.  As I've mentioned before on this blog, CineZone is very intuitive and particularly useful for maintaining contrast ratios on faces and also great for working in bright conditions when the picture display is too washed out to evaluate.

To demonstrate, the following images where captured from my Leader LV 5330. The camera was a Panasonic HDX900 with a Fujinon ENG zoom. This crude test was done in my dumpy hotel room at the Holiday Inn Express Miami International Airport.

So here we've got your basic grey card and macbeth lit to key.

Here it is viewed in CineZone to verify. As you can see, the gray card is pretty evenly green. Note the scale on the right side of the image. It shows you exactly what each color represents on the scale from -7.3 to 109.4 IRE (%)

Here it is on the waveform, note how the colors correspond to the values. All CineZone is is a more directly visual way of displaying a waveform. Since using this product on jobs, I've stopped showing people the waveform and started using CineZone as my explaining tool. It's amazing how fast people can recognize specific areas of the frame that need more work.

And here is the beautiful scene revealed at last.

And the CineZone version.

Now let's have a closer look at the grey card. Here it is around the middle of the zoom range. Note there's no F-drop at this point in the range so it's pretty even across.

And on CineZone.

Now see what happens when we pan the light away.

Here's something else that's pretty interesting. Here's the same grey card but viewed from the end of the lens' zoom range. You can really see the vignetting you get on these ENG lenses.

There you have it - CineZone. Pretty cool!

Leader, please.. "Blue Only"

Leader, please.. "Blue Only"

I recently bought the Leader LV 5330 Multi-SDI Monitor. Having this much image control riding on the top of the camera has totally changed the way I approach my work. With it, there's never any doubt about the integrity of my HD images and that peace of mind was worth the price of the unit alone. The waveform and vectorscope are top notch. Sometimes when running and gunning with only a black and white viewfinder, you're never quite sure if your white balance is the best it can be or if you're too low light. In those low light situations you start gaining up and lifting the gamma and it looks acceptable in the viewfinder but when you look at it on a color display it can be a little shocking. With the trusty LV 5330, all the tools you need to create the best possible image with the camera are sitting right on top of it. The picture display is equally brilliant. It's incredibly sharp and makes focus evaluation instant. It does have a few shortcomings though but more on that in a bit..

The new Cinezone/Cinelite tool is incredibly powerful (look to this blog soon for a separate post on it.) I'm finding Cinezone to be particularly useful when shooting outside or in places with a lot of ambient light pollution. Looking at a washed out picture display in the sun, it's very difficult to tell what you've got. With a flick of the Cinezone switch, all of your IRE values are converted to corresponding color (like False Color on the RED but better) and you can immediately tell where all your values are. It's also useful when lighting an interview or a close up because you can very quickly work out your contrast ratios. To be honest, you can do the same thing on the waveform but Cinezone is just so much more intuitive.

All of the other features - status, audio, multi displays, screen capture, etc. are great but I want to address what I consider to be a pretty major shortcoming and this feature is kind of a no-brainer which is why I'm surprised it was omitted. That missing feature is a "Blue Only" switch on the SDI picture display. Someone at Leader told me that the picture display on this scope doesn't need to be calibrated because it perfectly displays the SDI signal as it is. This is not the case. If that was so, then why are there brightness, chroma, and contrast adjustments? Out of the box at its default values, the LV 5330 is a bit bright and WAY too desaturated. It's really not accurate. If there was a Blue Only switch you could quickly see that the display needs adjustment but there isn't so I devised my own method. I doubled up a piece of Congo Blue gel - the bluest of the blue gels with the highest transmission loss. This gel when placed on the face of the display only passes blue light and as I expected, the color bars were way out of alignment. By turning the Chroma up to about 120% they finally lined up and the display's colors were as accurate as you'd expect from a small monitor like this.

The LV 5330's big brother, the LV 5380 has a blue only. So why doesn't the 5330? It's a critical feature. I don't mind carrying around a bit of blue gel but to be able to do it in the scope would make so much more sense! I don't know if this is something that could be done with a firmware upgrade or if it was something that was cut to keep cost in line. For 7000 dollars, this is an incredibly powerful tool. It's a real bargain for sure but it sure would be nice to be able to properly tune the picture display.

Also, the viewing angle is a little tight. If you stand over it, it looks brighter and greener. You really have to stand right in front of it to read the picture display properly. A few other minor gripes are that when you switch to Picture-Multi display like Picture / Waveform, you lose your brightness, contrast, and chroma adjustments leaving you with the de-saturated, slightly brittle, default picture display. Additionally there's no 16:9 switch on the composite viewfinder feature. This thing has the ability to display an analog composite image from any source but there's no way to correct the aspect ratio. Annoying. My list of improvements is vastly small however compared with all the things they got right with this monitor. It really is a game changer and the price is just right. It's not cheap but with it, you've basically got an engineering tent riding on top of your camera. The technology is just incredible.