H264 Quicktimes come out lighter

DaVinci Resolve

H264 Quicktimes come out lighter

Posted by Peter Berg on August 8, 2012 at 6:19 am

This should be an easy question hopefully.

Have my sequence graded and looking good. Did a render out as Quicktime H264. Looking at the resulting file, the black levels are raised and the file is much brighter than on my crt or plasma monitor (hooked up to my Decklink card).

This is happening on my Davinci Resolve 8.2.2 Windows system. I seem to remember doing the same operation on my Mac Resolve system and there were no problems. Could it be something with the Windows version of Quicktime? Are there any settings I could be missing?

I have done Avid MXF media renders and those have proper levels and things look correct. What could I be missing with this H264 quicktime render?

thanks,
Peter

Peter Berg replied 13 years, 11 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Margus Voll
August 8, 2012 at 6:54 am

I have seen it on mac also.

Som of us here use handbreak to make internet version of renderings that you output as full scale file.

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Margus

https://iconstudios.eu

DaVinci 8.2.1 OSX 10.7.3
MacPro 5.1 2×2,93 24GB
GTX 470 / Quadro 4000
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Rohit Gupta
August 8, 2012 at 8:15 am

Try rendering to full-range data levels? H.264 by default (auto mode) will render to video-range.
Peter Berg
August 9, 2012 at 6:32 am

Thanks Rohit. Is this different between the Mac and PC systems?

I do remember exporting H264 QT files from my Mac Resolve and don’t remember changing any settings. The QT files from the Mac Resolve didn’t seem to have this raised black issue.

So I did try the full range setting in the render window. While the black levels are improved, the still seem very ‘milky’. With the Auto setting they were VERY washed out, so this is in improvement. But it just does not match what my clients saw on my Panasonic Pro Plasma.

While I know a computer monitor is different than a video monitor, something still seems wrong. I checked the file on a few different computers and the black levels just look wrong. Even the black background on my computer desktop is darker than the blacks in my Resolve H264. When I did the grade, I made sure the blacks were at 0mv on my video scope.

Could there be something else going on? Is there a certain version of quicktime that you recommend? Also why would you render as video levels for a H264. Those are almost all the time viewed on a computer. How does the ‘Auto’ setting work for various renders?

Thank you,
Peter

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