making your film viewable.

wahrez

wahrez

Well-known member
hey

I've ouput my film to DVD and when it plays back it looks too dark on some devices/players and fine on others. Is there anything I can do in FCP to insure the film is viewable across all platforms?

Is there some standardized protocol I should be following?

Thanks!
 
the short answer is no. but here's a turorial on teh subject
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/gamma_mac_pc.html
mac PC's and TV's have different gamma settings

the best you can do is look at it on all three and pick something in the middle that you can live with.


when I encode web movies for example I include a brighter gamma correction by lowering the control in compressor to .7 or .8 and sometims as little as .9 (1 being no adjustment) depending on how dark my overall movie is. A virtually blown out day at the beach might be .9, a tour through a torch lit cave might be .7
 
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So many distribution formats...

So many distribution formats...

Jack Daniel Stanley said:
[...] the best you can do is look at it on all three and pick something in the middle that you can live with [...]
Click to expand...
Certainly that's the easiest thing to do, however, for special projects where image quality is important, I like to put myself through the torture of making different MASTERS for each distribution medium, for example, SD Video (DV), HD Video (DVCPRO HD), Web/PC Video (H.264), and DVD (MPEG-2). For each of these I can tweak the color/gamma so it matches the distribution medium. Yea, it's more work, and only worth it for those special projects.
 
Thanks for that...have been looking around and some people talk about the MPEG compression making the video darker versus the original DV....I'm going to run a test on this too.
 
Jack Daniel Stanley said:
so are there standard adjustments for each of those?
or do you eyeball each and make your adjustments?
Click to expand...
For SD and HD video, I judge using a properly calibrated broadcast-quality monitor. I own an SD monitor and i rent an HD monitor when I need it for final color correct over a weekend. For computer video, since the majority of people out there have PCs, judge the quality of your video on a PC with a reasonably calibrated monitor, this can be accomplished with the Adobe Gamma plug in. If you're obsessed with perfection, you can use one of the fancy montor calibrators photographers use for a "perfect baseline" but be aware, the average viewer out there is seeing it on an out of whack PC or Mac most likely. So when it comes to PC and Mac display, it's really eyeball. The thing I've noticed though, if the video is "perfect" on NTSC video, it's going to look a little darker on a PC display, and there we go with the need for multiple masters. A universal color management standard? Those are the things that geek image maker dreams are made of.
 
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