Super Black

[Mike Kahn]

“Make sure to choose full range and not SMPTE.”

Where do I choose this?

[Rafael Amador]

[Aaron Neitz] “super white and super black both get clipped on export from FCP”
If would be so, the “Broadcast Legal” filter would be unnecessarie.

[Aaron Neitz] “I have a feeling After Effects will automatically clip the Quicktime coming in.”http://www.nagavideo.com

[Bret Williams]

If it’s ok on external scopes, why not play it back out to tape, then capture the tape with the Avid?

[Steve Oakley]

blacks below zero just can’t happen in digital. in analog they can, and really shouldn’t be.

in NTSC, with 7.5 IRE for black, 0 IRE super black worked for keys because the gear would pass it thru provided no where in the chain was something set to force setup on ( like some DV decks and cameras ! ).

in pure digital (HD) land, there are no sub zero blacks. the codecs don’t have negative numbers !.

in 8 bit, if you could go negative, that would mean all values over 127 would be negative, starting at -1. that wouldn’t work. so the codec’s are doing anything wrong, niether is the hardware, but the bars generator you got the signal from is fouled up and should not be putting out negative black levels. the only way that could happen is in analog component, anything digital would clip it up to 0 as it should.

[Rafael Amador]

[Steve oakley] “blacks below zero just can’t happen in digital. in analog they can, and really shouldn’t be. “
You are absolutely right Steve.
In Analog we work with a “1 Volt Peak to Peak” signal. Your signal could go from 0 to 1 Volt or from 999 to 1000 Volts.In this case, everything below 999 would be called Super-Black. You can make really Super-Super- Blacks this way bringing the signal to Sync levels.
8b (0-256) Digital Video set the Black level at 16 and the White at 239. The values from 0 to 16 are called here Super-Black and the values from 239 to 256 Super-Whites.

In analog NTSC the values between 0 and 7,5 IRE can not be considered Super-Blacks and I doubt they can be used for keying. The key would be triggered by mistake very easily. If you bring your Super-Blacks to Sync levels, no chance of mistakes.
Cheers,
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Aaron Neitz]

Did some research

After Effects CS3+ will read super-whites (and I assume super-black) in certain codecs. HDV, DVCPROHD, and 8/10bit uncompressed. (not prores, DV, DV50)

But you must be working in 32bit (float) color depth.

[Mike Kahn]

This is what I think I am going to do.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Interesting. Nice research. Thank you.