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Footage Entirely Too Dark in Vegas During Transition Between Devices
Hello. I could really use some help with a brightness/color problem.
I’ve been editing a feature film on Vegas 20 for about two years now. I
primarily edit on my Windows desktop computer, but for the past 6 months
have been editing on a Zenbrook Pro Duo 14 laptop. The past 8 scenes
have been put together on the laptop, and I just recently copied the project .veg files back to the PC where the other 32 scenes are. Upon opening any of formally-laptop-exclusive .veg files of any of these 8 scenes, and viewing the edited clips on the timeline, the footage is INCREDIBLY dark. Like high contrast and absolutely ugly, where you cannot
see any detail. I checked project settings on both the laptop and PC files,
they all match. BIZARRELY, the very first time I opened these formally-laptop-exclusive .veg files on my PC, the footage looked as intended. It wasn’t until I hit save on the CPU copy and re-entered them did they look this horrible. I did some research and the laptop has a high-gamut
display, which may be the issue, but I’m really trying to avoid having
to re-do the color correction, color curves and leveling of every single shot for the past 8 scenes.
Switching the color setting of the formally-laptop-exclusive scenes from 8-bit to
32-bit in properties once they’re on the PC seems to do the trick, but
then any shot with color curves applied starts flashing bright light every few frames.Is there a fix? Why is this happening? More importantly, how can I
guarantee consistency across multiple devices? I’m submitting this film
to festivals next year, and I don’t want it to look perfect on the
laptop or computer only to have it look like garbage on the big screen.Thank you in advance!
replied 1 year, 2 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
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3 Replies
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Hey Zach,
Know it too well with being within reach of finishing a big project, and then there is a curved ball.
Is all of your footage from the same source?
You also mention that you are using different screens, which could make a difference.
But my first point of call would be to check if there is a wrong LUT or similar missing on the import?
I would also export those 8 last scenes out as a HQ flat file (ProRes or similar) to see how they look on import on the desktop PC? (Do check playback on Laptop before taking the file across)
Hope that this helps you get started on identifying the root cause?
Atb
Mads -
Okay, so after I posted this things got VERY interesting.
I copied and pasted everything inside these eight “formally-laptop” .veg files into eight brand new .veg files on the computer with the exact same project properties and SOMEHOW that worked. The footage looks normal and even renders normal.
However, I just realized today that the the other 40something scenes I haven’t looked at in awhile, but which never saw the laptop, also have the same issue as the “formally-laptop” eight did! I’m guessing this is because I did copy those 42 scenes from one hard drive to a new one on the same CPU just a few weeks ago.
I just tested the same fix (that I did to the eight laptop files) on a
currently high contrast scene that was born on the previous hard drive
(on this same computer) and IT WORKS. Copying and pasting the .veg file
into a brand new one with the same properties does the trick, but I
REALLY REALLY do not want to do that with 40+ scene files (mainly
because transferring the markers and track motion will have to be done
manually). There HAS to be an easier solution to this.WHY ON EARTH does copying a .veg file increase the contrast and lower the brightness of shots? It’s subtle, but absolutely noticeable and ruins the effort put into the shot. Shouldn’t the act of copying a Vegas file and the levels of each shot within be entirely independent??? Because now the laptop has been eliminated from the issue and the different monitors were not the issue.
The fact this is happening makes no sense to me.
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Hey Zach,
Way, way, way back, I observed similar problems on other NLEs – we are talking late 1990’s.
Where the video on the hard-drive, would go darker over time – could not explain why.In your case, are you using a HDD or SSD drive?
And what is the speed of the drive, including the connection (There is a difference between USB-2 and USB-C / Thunderbolt).
Could be that your drive is fragmented, and by copying the file into one space, that it will work as a faster speed.There are much smarter people around here who can explain it.
But either you meet “Can not read file” or “File is corrupted”, or it will depending on the file format, leave out details.
Who knows what made it happen, but happy to hear that you have found the issue.
Might be time to do a back-up of everything to a new drive?Atb
Mads
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