Quickktime look variation?

[Stephen Eastwood]

OK, I have come to terms with the fact that the footage I shoot which in t end or to start looks amazing, bright, punchy, contrasty and vivid on a HDTV looks much darker/fatter and less saturated on a computer monitor when both are calibrated well, I knwo TV's are brighter and contrastier than a calibrated monitor and no mainstream program I have found uses anything to correct for this when viewing on a computer, so to fix this things that are going to computer viewing only I have a set of effects that brighten and contrast/saturate to look like a TV version. But now I find another issue which is driving me nuts........

I work a file and add effects to make it look great on a computer monitor, and to make life easy I use quicktime as a compressed format for viewing, I watch it myself often in VLC or mclassic viewer, it looks great, like what I made it to look like on computer screens, but then I watch it in quicktime and again its flat and dull..........

Same file, in vlc bright, in mclassic bright, in quicktime dull. Since many people use quicktime and vlc or mclassic the default woudl be to open in quicktime making it look flat,m so I have for now been using WMV instead forcing them to not view in quicktime.

But why? and how can I fix this? Is this just something that happens in quicktime? I am using PC's so is it a PC only issue or just in general?

If you do not understand what I am saying, take a bright .mov and watch it in vlc www.videolan.org free player, and watch the same in quicktime and tell me if its the same or not to you, I have tried on 5 systems and its all the same, (again all PC's) so I am curious your results? is it a setting I am doing wrong when rendering?

Sorry for the long post, its just anything shorter leaves so many questions on what I did or did not try, that it was easier to try to be detailed.

Thanks for any help.

[Glenn Chan]

If you've mucked around with your video card settings or changed the video overlays, that might cause a discrepancy between quicktime and the other players.

It could also be one of those Quicktime color management issues (where the color management sometimes does inappropriate things). I haven't looked into that deeply, but the solution involves changing the metadata in your quicktime files (e.g. changing the gamma metadata).

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

To add to Glenn's comments, various compression bitrates and schemes can play with perceived luma, as can differently sized players and decoders.