After spending 2 years on our feature film, we had our premiere in a cinema on the weekend. The projector made the whole picture dark and contrasty (so much so that the night scenes were virtually unwatchable). Clearly we don't want to have the same problem at film festivals. We tested the movie on 1 LCD, 2 CRTs and 1 plasma, and they all looked perfect.

What settings should we use in Premiere? "Broadcast Colors"? Change the gamma?

Hi Colin,

Congrats on finishing your movie.

We tested our film at a Dendy here in Sydney, some dark scenes too dark and bright scenes too bright (we exported a few seconds from some selected scenes, burnt onto SD DVD).

Was a pretty cheap projector though - do you know the price range or type of projector they used for you? Upshot is, don't always blame your film - if they don't often exhibit using digi proj, then chances are, it's not a great projector and the projectionist won't have the experience to tweak the settings to get the best out of it. (e.g. not enough lumens, and you'll lose any details in the darks)

In the next couple of weeks we'll be off to another cinema that has a BluRay player and a 2K projector - so we should see 'best case' projection there.

You could go through the 'problem' scenes, and check the RGB Parade, then tweak brightnest to compensate - either making sure all 3 colours are below 1, or increase to bring out details in darks (watch for gain artifacts).

I use Magic Bullet Looks to grade check out redgiantsoftware.com

Cheers, Doug.