DVD Saturation disaster: advice required

[Mike Smith]

It seems strange that your material can look fine on an external video monitor, and then grotty when encoded. How are you monitoring – Decklink, firewire, Aja – to a good pro or broadcast monitor (or to a consumer LCD – please say no!)?

If your stuff is good, then you might be wanting to look carefully at your encoder settings …

[Markp]

Mike –
Thanks for the reply.

The external monitor is a small, secondhand unit of unknown provenance; an old Panasonic – which is hooked up to the composite output of a Matrox Parhelia. (we’re strictly in home set-up territory here, alas)

I agree that it’s strange about the material looking good on this monitor.
Obviously I’m looking at the contents of the After Effects composite window; so everything that looks good is NON-encoded; it’s the encoded stuff that’s causing the trouble. So far I’ve viewed it on two separate TV’s – one an LCD – and it looks pretty dreadful on each – halos of oversaturated color.

As to encoding, I fail to see what else I can do, really. Subjectively, I’ve found the MainConcept encoder to be as good as any I’ve tried. I’m using the default, highest quality, DVD-compliant settings, so I can’t see why there should be any trouble there.

I know that the footage undergoes a colorspace conversion during encoding, I’ve been looking up stuff about keeping my broadcast colors legal (PAL). That’s what I currently suspect, anyway.

[Markp]

I should add that I’ve been looking at the comps with two of the commercial analysis tools out there – Color Finesse and Scopo Gigio, and as far as my untutored eye can tell, certain levels are way too high; some form of correction needs to be applied. But here, I’m groping in the dark a bit.

[Mike Smith]

Hi Mark
It sounds like the old panasonic monitor is not set up properly, or is worn out. This https://videouniversity.com/tvbars2.htm
may help – I think there’s a PAL link – or you may be able to find a better guide to setting up the monitor.

You’ll want some kind of a “reference monitor” to check your DVD playback on so you know the quality s good – people have their home screens (and computer screens) set up all kinds of strange ways!

Broadcast colours – I think saturation range is RGB values 16 to 235 for colour values (rather than the full 0 to 255 range viewable on computer).

The broadcast safe colours filter may help, though it might be worth a peek at these.

https://www.lafcpug.org/reviews/review_color_finesse.html

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/perfect_titles_phil.html

All best!

[Markp]

Cheers Mike – that’s much appreciated.
Yes, the importance of having a decent monitor as a reliable source of reference is starting to make itself clear….

[Markp]

Dave
Thanks for the tip

No, actually I’m authoring a DVD to be able to play the files as .m2v video streams. To add insult to injury, I’ve duplicated all the material as widescreen and 4×3 format, and the DVD incudes both sets with a menu option between them.

Which means that whatever corrective procedure I choose, I’ll have to copy and paste the remedial effect/filter onto its equivalent in the other aspect ratio.

Using the tip which Mike kindly supplied links to above, I’m about to try calibrating my rather old and suspect monitor and find out how far off it actually was. I can’t say I’m looking forward to finding out…

;-p

[Mike Smith]

Since you’re taking the trouble to set up a monitor, I should be nicer!

The Video / Broadcast Colors filter, like a limiter on an audio circuit, can do a useful job in clipping the signal to keep it “legal”; but it can cost quite a lot in picture quality, particularly when the signal is quite a bit out of legal spec, which I guess is your situation here.

You may not need extensive grading in Color Finesse, though, if your material looks good in RGB / computer colours. The Effects / Adjust / Levels filter will let you set input and output levels: you could set this to output black at 16 or so and white at 235 or so and see whether it does most of the job for you.

Some video edit software allows you to choose on import whether to treat graphics as having full RGB colour values or the reduced video-friendly set, but I’ve never found this option in AE.

On the encoder side,though, the CinemaCraft Encoder Basic version is cheap, fast, and produces very good quality output (so long as you don’t need Dolby AC3 or can do that in something else – for us in PAL land, it produces good mpeg audio.) And in its advanced settings panel it offers a choice of interpreting incoming signal as “16 to 235” or “0 to 255” – which just might be an alternative for you …

All best

[Markp]

Mike – many thanks, and apologies for having ignored this thread for 48h or so.

I went away and took a hard look at the monitor setup I was using.

Sure enough, the output monitor has definately reached the end of its useful life – I had been given it as a freebie anyway some years back, when it had already seen better days. To add insult to injury, my actual computer monitors are no spring chickens either. Hence the error-creep in my final output.

Your suggestions on remedial techniques are highly appreciated. Indeed, I’ve been playing around with levels, saturation, Color Finesse etc. Simply trying out the legal broadcast filter quickly showed up the trouble spots, although I note your point about its effect on picture quality.

Although Color Finesse is obviously a fine product, I’ve found it relatively unwieldy, with its separate interface tending to become a pain. A vectorscope like Scopo Gigio might be the way I go. Shame there isn’t one included with AE; perhaps v7 remedies that.

I’ve heard much about CCE; the only real reason I stuck with MainConcept was its integration with AE; being able to render straight from the timeline to .m2v without generating intermediate renders – there’s a fair bit of uncompressed material to handle. MC seems to give pretty good results, subjectively speaking. Don’t think CCE is available as a plugin other than for Premiere. And you can’t to my knowledge frameserve out of AE to standalones, like TMPGEnc or that new HC-Encoder. But I may end up biting the bullet and re-render all the source material color-corrected.

I’ll shortly be posting a new thread to see what people regard as the most cost-effective options for an accurate tv monitor…

Once again, many thanks for taking the time
– M