Video Overlays in Premiere/Aspect

[Steven White]

Last night I upgraded my video driver with the latest universal driver set from nVidia (I have an MSI GeForceFX 5200 128 MB card, running two 17" 1280x1080 LCD displays in a horizontal span mode). There were a lot of interesting improvements with the new driver - not the least of which is that I can now run my monitors at 72 Hz for working with 24p content.

What's interesting is that now in the Premiere Pro monitor window, the colours are a little strange. When I'm sitting on a still frame, the image looks normal (as it has looked for the longest time on both playback and video for as long as I can remember), but when I hit "play in the monitor window, I end up with a more saturated and contrasty look.

I went into the card settings and determined that this colour adjustment was definitely from the overlay settings in the video card... which I have manually adjusted to have a perfectly flat gamma from 0 to 1 and show everything with appropriate (0% or 100%) contrast, saturation, hue etc. The settings are identical to the rendering settings of every other monitor mode (desktop, fullscreen video etc.) The video playback looks better, but not perfect.

What am I missing? Is it a gamma setting? It seems the video looks closer to how it looks on a TV than it does on a computer, and I think I can see more information from highlights in the overlayed video - but I could really go for some consistency - How the heck am I going to be able to colour correct otherwise?

Also - Suppose I want two gamma settings... one for web-colour correction, and one for DVD colour correction. How would I go about this?

-Steve

[Tim Bucklin]

You're on the right track!

There are specific settings for the nVidia overlay surface to minimize/remove the discrepancy between scrubbing and playback. They can be found in the Aspect HD 3.3 Readme, and I've included them below.

Brightness: 109
Contrast: 110
Gamma: 1.16

I hope this helps a bit! You should also note that for the best color representation, you should be using either a broadcast monitor or at least a CRT screen.

Tim
CineForm Support

[Steven White]

Thanks a ton Tim! I'll try those numbers as soon as I get home :)

for the best color representation, you should be using either a broadcast monitor or at least a CRT screen

*sigh* and yet for some reason, neither fits within my budget, or on my desk. I'm at the stage where I'll settle for "consistent" over "best" ;)

Incidentally - why is this the case? Obviously it's good of nVidia to include the controls - but why are the defaults different? Which presentation will be more accurate? For example, if Aspect was displayed on a properly calibrated monitor with these suggested settings, would the resulting image be properly calibrated... or would the original nVidia settings be closer to the "truth".

Seems more complicated than it needs to be... and raises the question: How many people out there in the great blue yonder are watching stuff with default settings that make their displays look like crud?

-Steve