 Welcome to the Crimson Engine. My name is Rebidium. Today we're going to look at how to take your video monitoring to the next level. So I have made a lot of upgrades to my filmmaking, materials, equipment, workflow over the last couple of years. But my post-production process hasn't really changed. I'm still editing and grading on a 2015 iMac and outputting to YouTube in 1080p. And I felt like it's kind of time to start changing that and beginning to upgrade my post-production pathway as I have my kind of production pathway and lighting and cameras and all that stuff. So I did some research and tried to find what was the best place to start. Yes, I need a new computer, but I don't want to do that until Apple has either announced a new iMac or the Mac Pro. I concluded that the place where I get the most bang for my buck was in the monitor, specifically visually monitoring in HDR and 4K, which is coming right around the corner. Don't get me wrong, the iMac screen is great. It's 5K, but it tends to drift in color over time. You need to keep recalibrating it. And if you're working on a timeline or your node system in Resolve, you can't really see your image full screen, which is what you want to do if it's going to be played back full screen on a, you know, lounge room television or full screen in a cinema. So I started looking around for a Thunderbolt 3 HDMI compatible computer monitor that was at least the size of the 27 inches of the iMac to let me start looking at the images as I was delivering them. I finally came across this guy. This is the Asus ProArt 32 inch PA32UC. It is color accurate. It is HDR, high dynamic range. It is 4K. It is a really, really nice image. I didn't want to go with the Sony or the Canon professional grading monitor because, quite frankly, I didn't have $20,000 or $30,000 to throw around. And I felt like the Asus was at a nice midpoint between their quality and the resolution and HDR capacity. So a couple of main ways you can set up your grading monitor. The first one is just to connect it as a second display and then put your second Premiere window onto the monitor. In this case, you just have to connect the monitor to the computer via HDMI or Thunderbolt 3 or a display port if you're using a PC. This monitor has all of those things as well as Thunderbolt 3 in and out as well as four HDMI ports. So that's the first way. This means that your computer and iMac in my case is working pretty hard all the time to drive two monitors for all the tasks that you're doing. And that might not be the most efficient or the best way to do it. Resolve where I do the bulk of my grading and a lot of my post-production finishing doesn't support a second external monitor as a full-screen display. They want you to buy this guy, the Blackmagic Ultra Studio Mini monitor that connects via Thunderbolt 2 for a display port and outputs both an STI and HDMI to an external monitor that lets you then view full-screen in Resolve. These guys are pretty affordable at around $100 and it lets you drive this nice big monitor, but only in 2K resolution. If you want to go up to a 4K and HDR capacity, you'll need to get the newer version of this, but it only comes as a PCI card. It doesn't come as a standalone little plug-in box. Now, to deal with that, you'll need to get an external PCI case. You can do it with this little guy here, the Little Brother PCI case. Then you can basically insert up to two of these things, connect it via Thunderbolt 3 and drive it through the computer. Now you can grade in beautiful HDR 4K on this monitor. It just looks absolutely stunning. So at a thousand nits, this is a lot brighter than my iMac. You can use it in a pretty brightly lit room. It comes factory calibrated for Rec.709, Rec.2020, Adobe RGB and two different flavors of high dynamic range video. Placement was a little bit of an issue for me. I didn't really want to put the monitor to the side where it would have to constantly be turning to look at it. I also didn't really want to make a two-monitor display because grading, while it's something I do a lot of, it's not something that I do every day and I didn't want to have to split up my monitors into two displays when I was just sort of, you know, posting things to YouTube or writing emails, which unfortunately is the bulk of the filmmaker's day. I saw Tom Antos' video on how he set up his calibrating monitor and found this guy. It's the Vivo single monitor extra tall desk mount. It clamps to the back of your desk and gives you this wonderful like 33 inch lift. So you can place the monitor on top of one another like they do in professional color grading studios. This has the advantage of letting a client who might be sitting behind you on a couch look at the image that you're working on without having to, you know, physically, you know, be a backseat driver and watch you work the controls. I really like this. I've had people come over and look at an edit or look at a grade that I'm doing and they're able to give me a little bit of space while I work, able to sit in a couch in the back of the studio and watch the image as it evolves. This monitor also rotates 90 degrees if you wanted to work on a portrait photo in Photoshop and have it really, really large. That would be great. There's also a lot of editing vertical video now for Snapchat and Instagram stories that a lot of brands are doing. So I guess you could use this to preview vertical video for people. Another big reason that I wanted to put it on this stand is that if the Mac Pro does come out towards the middle or end of this year and I sell my iMac and get a Mac Pro, I can just drop the display level on this particular mount and use the Asus Art Pro as my main screen again. All you need is a hex wrench. I was a little bit nervous because the monitor is exactly the same weight as the maximum capacity of the stand, but it turned out fine. I've had it up for a couple of weeks now. I keep checking to see if the screws are coming loose or it's moved around a lot, but I haven't had any issues. Thank you very much for watching. This is my take on beginning a HDR4K monitoring environment for your color grading and filmmaking. I really recommend this monitor. It's beautiful. It doesn't mean you need to go out and spend $2,000 on a monitor to begin this. I put some links in the description to other monitors that aren't as big, maybe aren't as bright. Maybe you don't have HDR, but will still allow you to have a whole separate display that you can use to monitor externally with one of these cheap little Blackmagic breakout boxes. Leave your questions in the comments. As always, the links are in the description. Thank you very much for watching and I will see you next time.