A Day in the Life of a Hollywood Display Calibrator and the Tools He Uses

Color Talk with Tom Parish

If you’re from the Los Angeles area you’ve likely heard of David and his company Avical.com located in Burbank because he is the go-to guy for high-end video post production professionals in that part of the country. If I’m working at production or post house , and I need my most important monitors made as absolutely perfect as they can be made, I call Dave at Avical. What a fascinating clientele he must have and oh the stories that could be told. Let’s see if we can eek a few of those out in our conversations about the state of the art of display calibration for the Hollywood media houses. On a personal note I learned a great deal from Dave during the conversation. I'm keenly interested in display calibration and the impact it has on color correction and color grading. The two key points I was most curious to learn was why does he use SpectraCal's Calman software for display calibration and how does he set gamma. And finally what are his views on the evolution of adoption of the BT.1886 standard in the post production industry. I got my answers! If you want to jump to that section start at 36 minutes and I highly recommend you listen in. There is a useful writeup on the topic here. David has a fascinating job. I wonder if he gets a chance to see movies before we do?