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Great material turning dark on DVD – I know, I know…
I know, this is not something I’m alone in. I’m researching and experimenting and trying but I don’t seem to be able to come up with an answer to this problem. The original material looks great (DVCPRO50) – but any conversion done by Compressor (version 2.0.1 or 2.1 – can’t remember – w/ FCP 5.0.1.) runs my blacks down, and things don’t look real great on DVD. I’ve tried 2-pass, 1-pass, exporting directly from the timeline, letting DVDSP do the encoding, I even downloaded and tried the BitVice demo (which, by the way, produced some snazzy looking video, quite a bit better than Compressor I felt, but still a bit dark). I’ve tried raising my black level in FCP before hand, raising the black level with the Compressor filter, and have tried different codecs (I tried rendering down to DV before export just for kicks and giggles – currently I’m rendering to Uncompressed 8-bit first before export, we’ll see if that helps at all).
If anyone has any advice to throw to this ignorant soul, I would much appreciate it.
Thanks,
Nick
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11 Replies
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Turn the brightness up on your viewing tv.
Seriously, how are you watching the DVD and where? Is that monitor calibrated?
You can add gamma/brightness corrections within Compressor if you feel that it’s compressor doing the dirty work.
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Yes, sigh, it’s a calibrated monitor. I’ve viewed them on one of our Sony PVM-14M2Us from a Panasonic real-time burner/player, as well as on one of our “home” sets from a “home” dvd player.
My co-worker across the hall has the same problem with entirely different material and different machines. He captured his footage from Beta SP via SDI, Uncompressed 8-bit, looks great on the timeline, but too dark on dvd.
We’re stumped.
Nick
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Dig into compressor and change the settings until you find something you like. We had to do this with Media100 back in the day. We then setup a M100 template in Compressor.
Jeremy
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Nick,
Funny!!! Here at my place, good video levels on the way in when encoding to MPEG2 using Compressor are just as good on the way out.
DRW
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You haven’t upgraded to 5.1.1 by any chance have you? I’m wondering if this would help fix the problem…
Nick
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Nick,
I am in fact updated to 5.1.1, but I’ve not had the issue you speak of even with earlier versions.
DRW
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Perhaps it’s due to 7.5 IRE setup?
https://www.glennchan.info/articles/technical/setup/75IREsetup.html
A lot of professional equipment will put analog black level at 7.5 IRE (which is correct for non-Japanese NTSC). On the other hand, some DVD players sold will put analog black level at 0 IRE, which is incorrect and will make your image appear a little darker if you have your monitor calibrated to 7.5 IRE.
It could of course be something else.
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My Panasonic DVD player has a user-selected setting for this, although they call it something different, like “ultra-black” or something like that.
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[David Roth Weiss] “Funny!!! Here at my place, good video levels on the way in when encoding to MPEG2 using Compressor are just as good on the way out.”
Wow, you mustn’t be as picky as me, or something is different in our quicktime/os configuration, because everything I do at default settings comes out washed out and pretty blocky, unlike what the BitVice demo gives me. And I’m not the only one getting gamma shift from compressor, so what’s your secret?
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I hate to say this, but our temporary fix is to take the thing over to the PC, import into Premiere, and burn it out to DVD from there. The blacks look great, and the compression’s not bad either. At least until I can get to the bottom of this. Time for some color bar comparing…
Nick
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