Rendering problem: wrong brightness/contradt/levels to wm9 or Divx etx

[Fergus Anderson]

Hi all

Im having a problem with the contrast/brightness/levels when taking an HDV m2t file into Vegas and doing nothing but rendering.

The problem is that when rendering to WM9, Xvid, DivX or MOV the contrast/brightness/levels are higher than the original making the video look slightly washed out and grey. This problem doesnt seem to happen when rendering to mpeg2.

I just wondered if anyone else has this problem and if there are any easy workarounds?

I do not have this problem if rendering straight to divx using say Dr DivX.

Thanks
Fergus

[Fergus Anderson]

Anyone?

thanks

[Alastair Brown]

I can only relate my recent experience in rendering normal dv to wmv.It was a multi layer/track project I was getting all sorts of weird extra stuff showing that I wasn't expecting.

To sort, I rendered to an avi first, then rendered the single avi to wmv and it was as I had initially expected/hoped for.

Maybe worth a try?

[Brian Engleheart]

Fergus,

I actually noticed this yesterday. I Downloaded that New Years fireworks clip that was posted in the HV10 forum, which had already been encoded as an AVI file. I rendered it as an HD WMV file in Vegas 7 and the black sky became dark gray. I Have not tried it with an m2t file of my own.

[Fergus Anderson]

yes it just seems to be doing the same thing no matter what the source when you render as wm9

Perhaps Vegas sets the levels automatically incorrectly - could this be a bug?

[Marco Durando]

I found the same problem too.
I compared the same footage (captured from a canon HV10) rendered as HDV (MPEG-2) and as WM9: the latter shows a significantly reduced contrast, as if the dynamic range were compressed by increasing the black level to a sort of grey. Also the colors clearly look less vivid.
Has anyone discovered the reason for this behaviour or found any workaround ?
It seems to be a major problem for people who want to compress to an HD format to be watched on a PC.

Marco Durando

[Juan Oropeza]

Try this for a possible solution:

Add the Color Corrector (Secondary) event FX to the entire timeline. Next, select the Studio RGB to Computer RGB preset under the latter FX. And finally, render to your desired output.

Juan

[Marco Durando]

Thank you very much ! This really solves the issue.
To tell the truth, although colors and contrast are now OK, I'm not yet fully satisfied because I noticed that the WM9 compression introduces a considerable loss of sharpness. Maybe this is because it deinterlaces with a rough method (blend, discard a field ?), but this is strange since the MPEG-2 compressed file looks quite sharper on the PC monitor even with the deinterlace option on.

Marco Durando

[Marco Durando]

Hi everybody,

I’m still looking for a method to compress my HDV movies to such an extent to be able to fit approximately an hour of footage on a double-layer DVD, in order to distribute to people who don’t own a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player. The original format is 1080i and I would like to maintain quality as high as possible.
The solution seems to be a WM9 format, but I found the following problems:
- If I use Vegas 7 (with the color corrector), and compress to Windows Media format, I get a huge loss of sharpness: it’s not a compression artifact, it looks more like a “blur” filtering (the attached example shows a detail of a frame in a static scene)
- Alternatively, I downloaded and installed Windows Media Encoder, but if I try to convert a .m2t file, the PC “thinks” for a while, then states that an error occurred reading the file. The same happens if I convert first the file to an MPEG-2 Program Stream (.mpg).

I would like to ask if anyone succeeded in getting HD WMV files without loss of resolution.

Marco

[Marco Durando]

I’m writing to share my latest experience about the solution I’ve just found about the problem described in my previous post. Maybe most of you already knows, but I hope it can be useful to anybody.
I was trying to compress my PAL interlaced 25 fps movies into Windows Media 9 using Vegas 7, but the result was poor in sharpness. I realized that the problem was due to deinterlacing that occurs when compressing: then I tried to set the output velocity to 50 fps and, believe it or not, the result became incredibly sharp !
Moreover, the movements are much smoother and moving objects look even sharper than in the original .m2t file.
I suppose that with this setting Vegas interpolates odd and even lines in a better way to get the final 50p movie; surprisingly, the bitrate doesn’t increase a lot with respect to 25p setting, although there are twice as many frames, maybe because the differences between two adjacent frames are reduced.
The only drawback is that the rendering time is doubled, but I can live with it.
Using “Quality VBR” and Quality 79%, I get approximately 115 MByte per minute, thus a Double Layer DVD should hold more than 70 minutes of wonderful 1080p footage (playable on a PC) !