The black bars are being placed there by the DVD player. On my Sony TV the brightness of the screen is affected by the video. If I have dark video, then the black bars get grey, if I have light video or a lot of whites, then the black bars are black.

This is an AGC type setting on the TV that I can't override. Chances are this is what you are seeing.

Dave T2

I think we went over this recently.
I'm still not 100% certain of the correct answer however I'm pretty certain it might relate to Vegas by default fading to superblack whereas the player is outputting legal black for the top/bottom bars.

What confuses me on this issue is I believed that the DVD players clamp superblacks to black. If that was the case then even though Vegas creates fades to superblack what comes out of the player at that point in the video should match the top bottom bars.

Simplest way to fix the fade problem in Vegas is to run a bottom track of generated media at 16:16:16.

Bob.

Bob,

I think that's the solution to the opposite problem (fades getting darker, not lighter).

More detail about the opposite problem:
In Vegas, the DV codec determines how Vegas' R'G'B' values get mapped to Y'CbCr (which is what DV and MPEG2 uses). The default Sony Vegas codec will make 16 RGB to black level, and 235 to white level. Other codecs will map 0 RGB to black and 255 RGB to white (these codecs can't generate superblacks).
Superblacks = values lower than black level.

In Y'CbCr color space, black level should be at Y'=16 and white level at Y'=235 (the luma channel Y' roughly represents the brightness in a signal).

Some DVD players clamp anything under Y'=16 to 16. And others don't... in which case, they will let superblack values through (this can be good or bad). You want the superblack values if you want to pass color bars to your TV set. In rare cases, superblacks can cause the picture to roll (as you've seen Bob) if the TV set isn't good at differentiating the superblack from sync pulses.

Glenn,
read the original description.

when the vision fades to black the bars top and bottom appear grey.
i.e. the fades are DARKER than the players generated black bars.

Those 'grey' bars are NOT coming from Vegas, they are coming from the player. The vision in the centre of the frame IS coming from Vegas and it is below the level of the bars from the player.

Hence the solution is to match the level of the blacks that Vegas is generating to that of the player.

You cannot easily fix this with a overall level shift in Vegas either. It's most likely that the footage from the camera(s) has it's blacks at legal levels, shifting everything up gets the visions black too high.

Worse still Vegas applies no FXs where there's no vision, i.e. at the end of a fade.
Bob.

Ah ok, I think I misunderstood the original problem. So perhaps the problem is:

A- The TV's calibration is off. Values that are too black will now appear as black, while proper black will appear grey-ish.
B- The fades are too dark, making the black bars appear grey-ish (since we judge black relative to other colors).

Or it could be that the DVD player produces grey-ish blacks??? (That would be silly though.)

my other comments, since this problem was cross-posted on other forums

You raise another issue that I hadn't factored in, the NTSC 7.5 setup!
However if the player was setup wrongly I guess both the bars and the video would be off by the same amount!

Without us being in front of the actual gear we can only guess as to which of A or B is the case. Throw into that the fact that TVs could well be doing dynamic adjustments and you have a real can of worms.

One could create a simple test DVD using generated media. A set of black vertical bars from say 0 to 20, add some text so you know the values. Play that on the TV/DVD combo and note which 'black' matches the top/bottom bars.
Then add that same black as the bottom track in the Vegas project, that way the fades will go down to the same level blacks.

Except I see a problem with this. It fixes the issue for THAT TV/DVD player combo, who knows what the next one will do or how the TV will be 'calibrated'.

My best guess though goes to B. Previous comments on this problem indicate that program content that has black in it matches the bars and most cameras seem to set the blacks to close the correct level. Based on that I think it's a good/best guess that the issue is Vegas's habit of creating fades that are actually composites to alpha which ends up as 0:0:0.

16:9 can be a bit of challenge overall even for broadcasters. Not only does it need to be monitored on a 16:9 monitor you really need to watch on a 4:3 set as well. Local stuff has gone to air with a single off pixel on the top line or else the CC data in view, you don't see it on most broadcast 16:9 monitors but those with analogue reception sure can.