Grading on a Cheap Monitor : The "Poor Man's" Guide to Accurate Color

I have to make a confession. This title is a total clickbait. But it comes from a real place of pain. You're an aspiring colorist, you're hungry, but you can't afford a $2,000 monitor. My advice, you should stop. Just kidding. If you want to find a workaround and tips to check your grade, this video is for you. If you're a nerd for stats, go check ratings.com for benchmarks. But if you want a quick real-world insight on how you can correctly grade using only the means you have right now, stick around. My name is Ollie. I'm a DaVinci Resolve trainer. On this channel, I share tutorials on DaVinci Resolve, color grading, footage restoration using the best tools and techniques. First, a disclaimer. These rules only apply to SDR content. If you're doing a true HDR work, a broadcast monitor is the only answer. Now, why does a pro monitor matter? It's about accuracy. Cheap monitors are like those original Beats headphones. Everyone loved them because they had that massive deep bass. Great for listening, but horrible for mixing music because they enhance the sound and mask the flaws rather than playing it back the way it's recorded. Cheap monitors do the same. They give you vivid colors and crush the blacks to make the image look pretty or make it worse, not accurate. There are four things a calibrated monitor gives you that yours doesn't. Contrast, your black points. A deep black on your cheap screen might look faded on a pro monitor because the pro screen has more steps or tones in the shadows. Exposure. This depends on peak brightness. The brightness is measured by nits. SDR caps at 100 nits.