Jacob and Katie Schwarz

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Film and Commercial Director

Jacob and Katie Schwarz work together at Mystery Box, an award-winning digital production and design agency. Jacob is an American-based film director and cinematographer, and has spent most of his time traveling internationally to direct and shoot commercial content worldwide. Katie is the executive producer and CEO at Mystery Box, overseeing content development through post-production on everything ranging from commercials to feature-length films. As visual storytellers, they always strive to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, and they've never been afraid to experiment with new technologies and techniques.

"We're really discerning about our color grade," explains Katie, "and so it's important to us that we have monitors that can give us the exact color we want to display." Jacob continues, "What's really great about the ASUS ProArt display [PA32UCX-PK] is that it comes with an X-Rite calibration and all the technology built into the calibrator, so we can quickly and easily calibrate the display, and make sure we're seeing the right colors exactly to the specs that the real world should be seeing. The wonderful thing about the ProArt display is that I can go in and easily choose the preset that works best for the situation that I'm in. This monitor is great because I can just go right to the setting that I need." Katie sees the benefits from the client perspective, too . "Having an HDR reference monitor on set is really valuable for the client as well," she says, while Jacob also praises the connectivity. "It has so many connectivity options. It allows us to just plug it into any system or any kind of device we need to review our footage."

Mystery Box's output includes the acclaimed documentary Iron Cowboy: The Story of the 50.50.50, which chronicles the epic journey of a triathlete's attempt to complete 50 Iron Man triathlons on 50 consecutive days, in all 50 US states. Other productions include the quirky musical series The Anxious Taxidermist, the sci-fi short Kepler 138, as well as a broad portfolio of commercials. Jacob and Katie's own YouTube channel has over 600,000 subscribers and features a hugely popular collection of original 8K HDR, 4K HDR and 4K travel videos.

Unsurprisingly, a laptop's display is the critical component for Jacob. "The biggest thing I was impressed with on the ProArt Studiobook Pro 15 was just the display. Having a 4K display, especially the color rendition of the Pantone UHD, it's just been awesome." "You don't have to guess what your footage is going to look like when you get home!" adds Katie. Jacob continues "One of the things that really impressed me about the Studiobook was the fact that ASUS put NVIDIA® Quadro RTX™ 5000 Max-Q graphics cards in. Those are invaluable for most of us creative professionals to make sure that we have no issues on the final export." Katie adds, "Full resolution playback is invaluable. There's nothing worse than a jittery 8K timeline." Jacob also appreciates the portability of his Studiobook "Having enough RAM, especially in a notebook that we're taking around and traveling with us, is really crucial because it allows us to quickly — and without jitters — review our footage, especially in 8K."