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suggested black level for web?
in Final Cut Pro, i know that the black level according to their built in waveform monitor is “0”, however, i’ve noticed that a lot of times if i adjust my black levels in my videos (DV NTSC) to this level it can sometimes make the video too dark when viewed/delivered via the web.
does anyone have any suggestions for a “happy-medium” black level target on FCP’s waveform monitor to give decent results (that take into account how various monitors and platforms will show the videos via the web)?
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8 Replies
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Joshua,
How are you exporting or encoding?
Have a wonderful day.
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You also have to take into account that Mac gamma is 1.8 and PC gamma is 2.2, so whatever you set black to is going to look different on a Mac than on a PC.
I master from FCP as if it’s going to broadcast, then adjust gamma and other levels when compressing. If you know what you edit is only ever going to the web then I guess you could export from FCP with the levels pretty much optimized, but for what, Mac or PC gamma? WMV, QT, or Flash? They all compress differently.
Ed -
And, no two computer users have their monitors (CRT or LCD) set to the same black level.
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i guess that’s exactly my question:
i realize that everyone’s monitor and gamma is going to be a little different, so i’m wondering if anyone had any suggestions/strategies for setting a sort of “universal” black level for video that will be used on the web, so that it will look fairly decent on the majority of people’s computers, whether it be a mac, windows, lcd or crt etc..
fyi: exporting via quicktime conversion, “medium-broadband” H.264 .mov
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I find H264 always looks darker than say DV or 8 bit uncompressed. I output using the latter, and you can adjust your gamma etc. in Compressor or Episode if you have that.
Have a wonderful day.
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Even though QT is more common on PCs now that it’s installed with iTunes,
over 90% of the world uses PCs, and so WMV is more “universal”.We do a couple of things:
-One, we don’t usually have a single “universal” file. We usually create
a WMV for PCs, and compressed with gamma for PC. And we create a
QT (mostly H.264 these days) with gamma set for Macs. The tricky thing
is that with so many people on PCs having iTunes, and therefore QT installed,
some PC users will look at the Mac-optimized QT.
-We also sometimes create a single FLV (ON2VP6). We set it slightly dark for PCs and it
looks slightly light for Macs. Can’t wait to start doing H.264 for Flash!
-In a corporate environment, firewalls sometimes prevent users from installing things to their own PCs, so even though QT or Flash (or Flip4Mac on Macs) are free and easily downloaded, they’re not always allowed. So we don’t count on a corporate client having the latest codec player. That used to mean encoding to MPEG-1 (thankfully those days are over for us).You can either have 2 files available with a user selectable format button, or you can have
your server ping the user’s to determine if they have a PC or Mac and serve the appropriate format.
Ed -
i like the idea of having the server ping the user’s. what’s the easiest way to do that?
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I’m not sure which of the many programs out there my web guy uses, but we have Nmap
on our computers, so maybe that:
https://insecure.org/
We also have Angry IP Scanner, so that could be it too. There are tons of them. But the
main thing is that I think you need to be serving from your own server. I don’t think it’s
easy when you have a host server that also has hundreds of others using it too, like 1&1, etc.
Ed
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