How to Setup A Color Grading Room On A Budget

The Insane Requirements of Grading

When I first got into grading and learned the requirements for both my room and related hardware, I was like, “Are you kidding me?” Nobody was kidding. If you’re an indie filmmaker grading your own movies, there are imperative details that must be addressed. Otherwise, your hard work will not be accurate.

Our Eyes Auto White Balance

Why can’t we just look at a screen and grade? Aren’t modern displays accurate? We’re not tackling hardware in this post. But let’s assume your display is 100% dialed in. That’s not enough. Why? Let’s say you have a window with ambient light coming in. As the day goes from morning to night, daylight changes color temperature. As humans, our eyes “white balance” on the fly. We go outside, we come in and don’t think about color temp changes.

This gift works against us when we’re trying to do an accurate grade on a movie. If you have light coming in and it’s changing throughout the day, your eyes will auto adjust and you won’t know it. And as this happens, your grade will begin to drift.

Let me show you something to drive this home—check out the image below: See the middle gray bar with the gradient on it? There is no gradient. Crazy right? Our eyes and brain play tricks on us. That gray bar is the exact same color from left to right.

The only way maintain an accurate grade is to control our grading room so our eyes and brain aren’t doing any “auto adjusting” on us. I’m going to cover what you’re supposed to do, and then I’ll show you what I actually did.

A professional colorist would take this much further. If you’re a professional colorist, you’d have thousands of dollars worth of gear. You’d have walls that are an exact N5 or N7 gray. A display like Flanders Scientific that rings in over $20K. That’s not independent filmmakers, right? So let’s see how to do this affordably:

Step 1: Room Lighting

There are three things to understand and address for your grading room to be accurate in regards to lighting. Otherwise, you might as well throw on a pair of colored sunglasses to do your grade. Okay, that’s extreme, but it’s not that far fetched!

Room Lighting – Daylight

First thing you must do is block out all outside light. No way around it. I went to Amazon and purchased thick blackout curtains—Just search for “WONTEX blackout curtains.” They’re like thirty bucks. And you want black ones. Do not get color—we’ll get to that in a second. Also, these curtains help by cutting down reverb which is nice for recording and/or sound design.

Room Lighting – Color Temp

Next we must control the color temperature our grading suite. Both consistency and actual temperature. A calibrated display has a D65 white point. This means when it shows white, it’s a D65 waveform—something like that. D65 is similar to a 6500K color temperature. They’re not the same thing, but for us indie filmmakers on a budget, 6500K bulbs are close enough. However, you do need accurate bulbs.

Light bulbs have a CRI or color rendering index. You want 90 and above or you’re just getting bulbs that say they’re 6500K but they’re something else entirely. A professional colorist might say 90 CRI isn’t high enough, but just shoot for that and you’ll be fine. I ordered HengBo A19 6500K bulbs off Amazon. However before you purchase bulbs, we need to talk about overall brightness levels.

Room Lighting – Brightness

The Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers (SMPTE) have guidelines for grading suites. And the document we’re going to reference below is an older one for Rec.709 grading. However, most of the time I’m monitoring in Rec.709 even with an HDR timeline. But if you are monitoring in HDR, they may have a newer one for HDR grading suites.

7.1 All light sources in use during picture assessment or adjustment should have a color quality closely matching the monitor screen at reference white; i.e., D65 (see A.5).

7.2 The ambient light reflected from the screen of a switched-off monitor should be the lowest possible level (see A.6).

7.3 Reflections on the monitor screen should not cause a perceptible impairment from the normal viewing position (see A.7).

7.4 The production desk and control consoles where a script is read should be illuminated to a light level of about 100 LUX (10 fc). The illumination on the general working surfaces of the production desks and consoles should be 30–40 lx (3–4 fc) (see annexes A.8 and C).

To conform to the SMPTE standards for a grading suite, the monitor should be calibrated to 35 ft-L (foot-lamberts) of light output. At this level, the surrounding light should put out 3.5 ft-L. (10%, or less, of the light output). 

Foot Lamberts is equal to 1 candela per square foot. A candela measures the brightness of the source in a way while foot candles measures the light hitting a surface. 

You might be thinking, seriously? Yep. BTW, the SMPTE doc mentions foot lamberts—this is just another way to measure light. One foot lambert per square foot is like one candela. And a candela is different than the foot candles we’re used to with our light meters. Light meters measure luminance hitting a surface as foot candles. A candela is measuring the source light in a different way. If you’re an indie filmmaker, you most likely have a light meter. That’s the easiest way to dial this in.

What I Did For Lighting

So we’ve got the elimination of sunlight. We have a 6500K color temperature to match the D65 white point of displays. And we ambient brightness levels that must be dialed in. What did I do?

Block Sunlight

First I purchased black curtains from Amazon (mentioned above) to completely block out any sunlight from coming into my room. Like it or not, post production as a filmmaker is a low-lit experience!

Control Color Temperature

For this I decided to do something a little different. I have multiple Aputure LED lights. One of them is the Amaran 100X with a CRI rating of 96 that allows me to set color temp. So I purchased a lantern softbox—which I needed anyway—and used that to light my grading suite.

For other various lamps in my suite I got the cheap HengBo A19 6500K bulbs off Amazon. Because the main Aputure light is so accurate (96 CRI) and it’s lighting my control surface, I wasn’t worried about the other various lamps in the background.

Set SMPTE Guidelines Brightness

Next I used my light meter to dial in the brightness. According to the SMPTE guidelines you turn off your displays and take the measurements. Per SMPTE, general ambience is supposed to be 100 lux. Lux is Latin for light and it’s yet another way to measure light—not sure why there’s so many ways!

So our light meter measures foot candles. One foot candle is roughly 11 lux. 10.764 to be exact. To get 100 lux in our grading room, we need to be around 10 foot candles. And the SMPTE guide said our control surface, which is the area our keyboard and mouse are, needs to be roughly 30 to 40 lux. So around three to four foot candles.

Don't get too crazy with this. If you get your control surface hovering around five foot candles, it's still pretty accurate. But remember, do it with the displays off. And make sure you're not getting any glare off of your grading display from any of your lights. It has to be nice and black.

Step 2: Display Size, Distance & Bias Light

Next let’s talk about display size and distance. The SMPTE group also has guidelines for the size of your display based on distance from you. They specify the height of your display should be one third the distance. My grading display is a 24 inch display, but that’s a diagonal measurement. The vertical measurement is roughly 12 inches. According to the SMPTE guidelines, this display should be three feet from me. I keep it about two feet away—not gonna worry about that. And then the other thing you’re supposed to have is what’s called a bias light.

BIAS LIGHT

A bias light is positioned behind a display. They help ease eye strain and also help you see colors and contrast more accurately. You can go crazy with bias lights and get D65 strips, etc. For my budget grading room, I just purchased a $20 adjustable lamp stand off Amazon. Then purchased an actual D65 rated dimmable bulb (the bulb cost more than the stand).

The bulb I went with is the Media Light MK2. I set it to the lowest setting and use that for my bias light. And it’s not exactly accurate—your bias light is supposed to be around 25% of your display brightness (I cover display brightness in another article). But I just go as low as I can and call it good.

Step 3: Paint Color

Okay, lighting is done! Now it’s time for the color of your grading suite walls. Why is this a big deal? Because colored walls will reflect inaccurate light back and your eyes will auto white balance and your grade will suffer as a result.

The technical guidelines specify a GTI Standard Gray Neutral 5 paint color for walls. And this is where I drew the line—I’m not repainting my office. Now with that, my office walls are black except for one wall that is cement. Is this 100% accurate? No. But I wasn’t going to redo everything.

If I was doing my grading suite from scratch, then you bet. I’d go to BH Photo and order the GTI Standard Gray Neutral N5 paint. I’ve also heard GTI N7 is good. Now, if my walls had been an actual color? Different story. If your walls are a bright, bold color, you might need to address this. If you had bright purple walls, for example, that’s going to mess with your grade. It would be like you’re Bono with purple glasses grading your movie—that’s going to affect it.

Off topic: The glasses Bono wears? They're not a fashion statement. At least not entirely. Bono has a type of degenerative eye issue. And he wears the colored glasses to protect his eyes from too much light. Just an interesting random fact if you like U2. Okay, back to filmmaking:

If you have bold colors on your walls, you probably need to fix this. And if you’re going to paint, you might as well be official and spring for N5 Gray! But if your room is large, N5 isn’t budget friendly. But you can probably talk to the paint department at a place like Lowes at get recommendations.

Grading Room On A Budget Summary

As I mentioned above, I was taken aback a bit when I first dove into color grading requirements. This is stuff we didn’t learn in film school. As a brief summary, here’s what you need to do:

1. Block sunlight in your room. All of it.
2. Use 6500K bulbs with a CRI rating above 90.
3. Keep the ambient brightness at 10 foot candles.
4. Control surface brightness around 3-5 foot candles.
5. Appropriate display distance.
6. Bias light—Here I def recommend D65.
7. N5 Gray walls (or close).

Once you have these things dialed in, the most important thing is to keep it consistent. Don’t change things half way through your grade. Or you’ll need to go back and review your grading again. And if this wasn’t enough, there’s a lot you must do in order for your grading display to be accurate. We’ll cover that in a future blog post!

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