How dark is too dark?

[John Dickinson]

The best way is to monitor your project on a broadcast monitor as you work and adjust your output to that, rather than the Cinema Display.

JD

John Dickinson
Motionworks

Making it Look Great 1
Design and Production Techniques for
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[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

I assume your problem comes from the fact that NTSC monitors (excluding those in Japan) treat a pixel value of 16 as black baseline. This translates to 7.5 IRE on a waveform monitor. Full white is a pixel value of 235. You lose any details in any levels below 16 or above 235. An RGB monitor will display detail for the full range from 0 to 255.

The way this is normally dealt with is to work with the full 0 to 255 values in the computer, but then add an adjustment layer on top of everything as your last step before rendering with a “levels” effect where the output levels have been set to 16 and 235 for blacks and whites.

This will make your image look flat and muddy on a computer monitor, but will look right when displayed in NTSC. The good news for you is all you have to do is add the levels adjust and re-render specifically for NTSC output and you should be good to go.

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Steve Roberts]

If you’re talking about the face, that wasn’t lit properly. At least, it needed a rimlight to show the form of the head. Don’t depend on seeing detail at the threshold of visibility, that is, in the shadows at dark, dark, gray — you’ll get buggered at some point in the workflow. An old shooting trick is to squint on set to make yourself lose detail in the highlights and shadows. Then you expose or re-light to bring up the shadows where you need detail.

My 2 cents, for what it’s worth.

[Ian Corey]

Yeah, a big part of that Sin City effect has to do with stark rim light.

I wasn’t bothered by the darkness of the image on my Apple Display, but I know it will be too dark on a TV. There was something slightly suspenseful about not being able to see well.

[Darby Edelen]

[Ian Corey] “I wasn’t bothered by the darkness of the image on my Apple Display, but I know it will be too dark on a TV.”

Well it was incredibly dark on my display, which might be a factor of my LCD (PowerBook 15″) and my sRGB profile.

There are color proofing options in AE CS3, these are not as accurate as working with a broadcast monitor, but they might help you get a better idea of what’s going on.

https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/WSD9C5F454-55AD-4654-A60D-A20AC91259D5.html

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Ryan Shovey]

OK, great. Thank you all for the help.

Unfortunately I do not have a regular monitor to simulate a TV. I basically created a file to throw in a dvd player, but you all know how time consuming that is.

Is there a certain brightness level, like a standard, that I should follow? Like Black level should be x; white level should be x; gamma should be at least x…. something like that?

It’s my first big project, and I really want to do it right.

ps… the scene I posted earlier was suppose to have that Silhouette from lightning flashes look to it. That’s why there’s no detail on the face.

-ryan

[Ryan Shovey]

Thank you very much, Lars! I applied an adjustment layer to my complete footage and used levels. Then, I simply set the Output Black to 16 and the Output White to 235. I tested this on my tv monitor and it looked perfect!!! The blacks still looked crushed and and the gray and white areas looked crisp. Amazing. I’m assuming that this will look the same when projected onto a screen in an auditorium as well.

One quick question, though…. When the video plays back on a computer monitor, will it look muddy and washed out? Because it really does look that way my cinema display. If someone watches my movie on the computer or internet, will it look muddy? Or will the dvd program convert it to where it looks right all around?

Thank you
-ryan