Glenn, I sure wish I better understood your articles. Suppose I have a project that is using PNG images, DV video, and Quicktime Animation codec video. What do I need to do to preview and render this for DVD? For Vimeo?

Thanks,
Jerry

Well if I understand the problem as you describe it, you might begin by selecting "Levels" from the FX menu (if you haven't already done this) and opening up the waveform monitor. Make sure the blacks do not fall below 7, the whites above 100. This should help, irrespective of what monitor you're viewing on.

To double check this, though, you really need a studio monitor. What looks great on the computer monitor may look off when viewed on the studio monitor, and will look off when shown on a standard TV screen. Setting levels will help, at least assuring that the blacks aren't crushed, the whites clipping.

For me this has always been one of the great ironies of our profession: we knock ourselves out producing gorgeous video, then give it to a client who watches it on a ten year old television set with the brightness cranked up and the contrast turned down and complains about how terrible it looks.

Jack

"Make sure the blacks do not fall below 7"

Not that I do much with NTSC and anyone feel free to correct me but as far as I know there is no setup on anything in the digital domain. The player will add the 7.5 IRE setup on the analog outputs as required.
Also make certain the Studio RGB box is ticked in your scopes and the 7.5 box isn't.
Bob.

Interesting point, Bob. Are you saying that if I crush the blacks by setting levels at 0 IRE the player will restore blacks to the 7.5 IRE level, thus uncrushing them?

Jack

I don't know where you heard that CRT TVs have some sort of auto gain control, but that simply isn't true.

There are basically two issues; 1) computer monitors are designed with different "gamma" responses than TVs. 2) most people don't calibrate their monitors or their televisions. Without a calibrated reference monitor on your end, there is no way to judge what your final product actually looks like.

I calibrate my monitors and make my programming look good on them. Once I release it to the public, it's out of my hands and all bets are off. I can't be responsible for all the maladjusted TVs out there and I would never attempt to compensate on my end because not everyone has the TVs misadjusted in the same way. I will occasionally compensate for material that I know will only be viewed on computer monitors. They tend to be a little darker in general because their gamma curve is different than a television. I will apply the "Color Corrector" filter and adjust the gamma to maybe somewhere between 1.2 and 1.3 to bring the darker parts of the image up "out of the mud."

Now, all of this has been gotten somewhat more complicated with the advent of LCD and Plasma TVs and HDTV in general. The bottom line is that there is no way to get one piece of video to have the same apparent levels on LCD, Plasma and CRT TVs and computer monitors. At best, it will be a compromise.

You can calibrate an SD monitor pretty easily:

http://www.videouniversity.com/tvbars2.htm

I've got an excellent calibration file for HDTVs from the now-defunct IN-HD channel. I'll have to investigate the copyright ramifications and maybe I can post it to my web site.

Probably Glenn's article here explains it better than me:

http://www.glennchan.info/articles/technical/setup/75IREsetup.html

and yes I think what he's saying is that you can easily end up with 15 IRE setup. I'm pretty certain that my ADVC300 and other device of good breeding handle it correctly but then again I can't recall the last time I had to handle NTSC off or onto analogue.

If your camera is never showing black below 7 It'd check to see if you haven't got it setup wrongly. As Glenn points out turning on setup in some cameras causes them to do the wrong thing.

Bob.

Interesting thread. I'm off to do some experimenting.

Jack

Glenn, I sure wish I better understood your articles. Suppose I have a project that is using PNG images, DV video, and Quicktime Animation codec video. What do I need to do to preview and render this for DVD? For Vimeo?
Hmm... I'm not sure how to make the article clearer. (And anyways, this post will be a re-gurgitation of the article. But hopefully it'll help.)

So suppose you have PNG images, DV video, and quicktime animation.

Suppose you are in a 8-bit project. (My advice in this post won't work for 32-bit.)

So convert everything into studio RGB levels if they aren't in studio RGB already.
PNG: add color corrector preset, computer to studio RGB.
DV: Do nothing. (*You can bring the superwhites down if you want.)
Quicktime animation: add color corrector preset, computer to studio RGB

The DVD you can render straight out of the timeline into the MPEG-2 encoder (main concept) that comes with Vegas.

I'm not sure about what format Vimeo will accept. If it's like youtube, it'll accept MPEG-2 which is the same as above.

2- PREVIEW: You can use the windows secondary display as your external device, check the color management box, check "studio RGB". There are some other options; the Video preview window (in this particular situation) will be inaccurate.

Regarding using the waveform monitor and 7.5 IRE setup:

1- 7.5 IRE setup: These issues only occur when converting digital --> analog. If you are making a digital master, I would make sure that your digital levels are correct. You don't have to worry about your analog levels unless you are distributing on a analog master. So don't worry about 7.5 IRE setup as it only pertains to the digital --> analog conversion.

2- The Vegas waveform monitor can be confusing behave it doesn't behave like a real vectorscope and it's ambiguous. You notice how the waveform changes when you go into the settings and change things around? IMO it's dangerous because you only know if you have correct levels if the settings are correct. And it's difficult to tell if the settings are correct unless you go into the settings window (on real waveform monitors this is not an issue because they have indicators of what mode you are in).

It doesn't really tell you what's going on unless you know what's going on. That's a catch 22 right there. So I don't actually use the Vegas scopes to figure out whether I have correct levels or not (because you can't); I prefer to set them up in a way that's useful for the way I do color correction.

Thank you for your replies. They are very much appreciated.

I think I am using the right colour levels after picking up the gist in Glenn's articles in the past, not to mentioning plenty of times on here :)

The target formats are going to be PAL and NTSC, although I am primarily concerned with PAL at present. I'll cross the NTSC bridge when I come to it!

I think I am right in saying that IRE should be switched off for all PAL masters.

All my monitors and domestic tv's are calibrated as close to uniform levels as possible with the Digital Video Essentials DVD. Of course this is not a perfect solution, but it gets you in the right ball park. Also I have one TV deliberately left with very high brightness and contrast, as setup by a customer, just to see what it would look like on a poorly configured set.

I have also got a couple of tracks where we have stuck dvd rips of videos we like the look of, just to see if we can match the relative apparent levels by eye. The thing that gets me is that our print our print often seems a lot brighter than these videos on screen in Vegas, and it can look ok on the CRT TVs, but back on the very computer you rendered it on, the render looks dull both on CRT and LCD monitors. Yet on a plasma TV, it can look incredible bright, particularly on the bottom end.

JackW, when you say that the blacks should not fall below 7 and the whites not above 100, what scope should I be reading exactly? And what does the 100 figure refer to? O na PAL setup should I really avoid black hitting zero? I also find the scopes a little tricky to use. Setting the Studio RGB clause seems to make no difference to the information it presents.

At present on the master nested track I have a levels plugin which pushes and pulls the top and bottom a little bit, followed by a broadcast colour limiter that is pretty strict (and of course set to Studio RGB as the material is Z1E .m2t).

There is much confusion here for me. I wish they made a plugin or application that could just load in your Vegas project, analyse it and decide what needs to be done to make it fit the requirements of a range of playback systems. I don't think it can be that hard to do.

Setting the Studio RGB clause seems to make no difference to the information it presents.
It does for the vectorscope, waveform monitor, and RGB parade but not the histogram I believe.

2- The thing about the scopes is that they can't tell you if your levels are correct.

O.K., Glenn: I'm always happy to learn and your tutorials have been a big help to me over the years.

So: "The thing about the scopes is that they can't tell you if your levels are correct."

This being the case, what DO the scopes in Vegas measure, and what are we actually doing to the signal when we use the "Levels" FX? And if the scopes aren't telling me about my levels -- especially the waveform monitor -- then what will?

I understand about keeping broadcast legal, but from the discussion above it sounds like all I have to worry about is how things actually look to me on my studio monitor.

Jack

The levels FX applies math onto the RGB values that pass through it... you can use it to handle levels / color space conversions.

The scopes kind of tell you about your levels, but they don't tell you if they're correct unless you have the scopes setup correctly + interpret them correctly.

all I have to worry about is how things actually look to me on my studio monitor.
You should definitely try to monitor the end result. If you're making a DV tape, then you should watch it on a studio monitor (calibrate it correctly though first).

If you're making say a windows media player file, you should definitely do a quick check of your material in windows media player. (Unfortunately in some of those cases, there can be things in your signal chain that screws things up like video overlays... but the point still stands, you need to QC the end product.)

2- (Going off on a tangent here)
One quibble with watching things on a studio monitor is that you should make sure all superwhites are clipped/limited off first, as a lot of setups (e.g. DVD player, LCD TVs) will clip off superwhites but CRT studio monitors won't. So you don't want to see superwhite detail that the viewer won't see.

If you do some form of broadcast legal filter then you'll get this right... those types of filters will knock out the superwhites.