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Black Levels Help! (for Broadcast)
Hello,
So here’s the situation (or “sitch”)…I produce weekly promo spots for a regional retailer. I serve as the producer/art director, my AE artist creates the project off site, sends me the AE project file which I render, then encode that MOV file into some high-rez specialized MPEG2 which I upload to a media distributor.Lately, I’ve been getting calls from the media distributor saying my black levels are too high. I can’t for the life of me figure this out. The problem mainly lies in the black between the slate and the spot, but I applied the broadcast filter in AE without any luck. What can I do to get 7.5 IRE blacks in AE? It has to be perfect because it’s an automated process. The spots are handled by a computer once uploaded.
Thank you for your help,
Jason -
4 Replies
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black levels too high or too low? are they saying the black levels are zero, or are they higher than 7.5?
if they are too high (above 7.5) the problem may be that you are compensating for the broadcast level in ae, and then the mpeg2 encoding is also trying to compensate… thus compressing your values further, making blacks about 7% lighter than they should be. try not compensating in the ae render prior to mpeg2 compression.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
I agree. When we started using DV and adding setup, the levels were too high. We didn’t have to add setup with digital files.
Anyway, try the Broadcast Video COW forum for more info.
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Jason,
Here’s a link to a very useful video tutorial about black levels.
https://pro.jvc.com/pro/attributes/prodv/clips/blacksetup/demo.html
I too have had problems getting my black levels in standard, but that’s in Final Cut.
Aharon also has a tutorial on the COW that provides another method of dealing with broadcast safe levels without using the broadcast safe filter. Check it out.Andrea Stewart
Germane Creative LLC
http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreastewartAndrea Stewart
Producer/Editor/Director – Owner
Germane Creative LLC -
That was it. I removed the “setup” and the problem went away.
Thanks,
Jason
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