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Why so dark?
Friends,
This workflow is going to sound screwy, but I had to do it this way for extrinsic reasons. The question I have is not about the wisdom of the workflow but about an issue that I’ve encountered in the process. I know the workflow is no good.
Started out with 720p/60 onlined on D5 and nicely color corrected. Dubbed to DVCPro HD. On a 1200 downconverted to DV and sent it via FireWire to a Panasonic 755 DVCPro/DV deck. I did this to make miniDV dubs for a guy who had to do an SD offline. The miniDVs looked fine when played back on the 755 and also on the 1200. The guy ingested the footage into Final Cut, did his edit, and output a QT movie. It looks terrible when viewed on a PC, so dark that you can hardly see what’s in it. On a Mac it looks better, but still too dark.
I tried to replicate the issue on my system. The Quicktime I generated looked fine on the G5 but looked too dark on a PC.
I know that PC and Mac gamma are quite different. But I’m wondering whether the miniDV dubs themselves are the problem. It can’t have helped to go from DV 100 to DV 25. Would I have been better off going straight from D5 to DV?
Not to mention deeper darkness when I try to make a DVD from the Quicktime.
It’s just a dark day here in DC. Any ray of light would be appreciated.
Many thanks,
Fred
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1 Reply
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You’re right about one thing… it’s a funky workflow. But that said, sounds like normal… i.e. you need to adjust the gammas for a PC playback… but shouldn’t have to for a DVD if color correction looks good externally on a properly setup video monitor… Course there could have been some darkening done somehow in all the dubbing you did, but I’ve never experienced a darker picture becuase of a digital generation loss (Noise? yep!) , so sort of think that isn’t what caused the problems you see.
only place I could see a real darkening injected in the dub was from the HD to DVCPRO… was it done digitally? If so, don’t think it got darker thru SDI… I suppose about anything can happen in an analog dub though…
Jerry
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