For a relatively recent project, I had a dickens of a time finding someone with a colorimeter that could profile an LED screen and the know-how to use it.
In fact, I found, after calling every XR / virtual production stage on the West coast, exactly two people who could do it, nationwide: Angel and Smokey. And Angel was busy. VERY busy.
When I called those stages and asked how they calibrated their screens, every single one of them said “oh yeah … you know we don’t? We really should but we don’t yet. Let us know if you find someone!” 🤯
To be fair, this was 2021, and virtual production was new to a lot of these places. The Mandalorian had just come out and Epic were just releasing their VP tools for Unreal.
Many of these places were probably soundstages or AV rental houses a month before I talked to them, and were just figuring out the gag, but truly I was shocked to hear, in a discipline as unforgiving as virtual production, that there was no color science happening and nobody plying the trade to boot.
I’d imagine the situation is a little better now, but I’d still wager that if you have about $10k to spend on hardware, $4k to spend on training, and a drivers’ license, you could make a nice little career for yourself cold-calling VP stages and shaming them into flying you out to make a LUT.
Disclosure - I am an ISF Level II certified color calibrator but I received no compensation for suggesting you should get into calibration 🌈
Smokey plying his trade
My workbench and camera candidates and my trusty chip chart