The assumption I made for these tests is that you've done your basic cuts editing inside of Vegas and that you export those events in need of stabilization using a lossless full range codec (I used uncompressed AVI). In most cases (V2.1 being the exception), I found that Mercalli applies a conversion back to studio levels upon render. As I recall from my testing, if you sent an event that was already at studio level, it would still apply the levels reduction down to 32-216. In all instances, a levels expansion was required. So in this scenario, I really don't think that camera brand or codec would make a difference since the decoding has already been done when imported into Vegas.

However, if you import directly from your camera into Mercalli, then it could very well make a difference. That is a good question and one that you could easily evaluate. I might try that as well and compare results.

In some sense, the entire point of this exercise is that the user needs to test for himself to insure that what's coming out of Mercalli is the same (levels and color) as what's going in. In my tests, I found they were quite different. Whether or not it's a practical difference is a matter of opinion. Some have argued that the resulting color differences are trivial and can be ignored altogether. Again, that's a judgment call.

I still think that the best solution is to simply use the Mercalli plug-in, thus avoiding these color and levels issues, unless you have extreme CMOS distortion in which case V4.0 works very well although it is very slow.

wwaag

Thanks for taking the time to do this.
Dumb question, but how do you do the 601 to 709 color conversion in Vegas?

Dumb question, but how do you do the 601 to 709 color conversion in Vegas?

Not dumb at all. I searched for a very long time to find out how to do this. A little background. My interest in this stemmed from using Proshow Producer for slideshows where I export a high bit rate MPEG-2 for import into Vegas. A look at MediaInfo revealed the color primaries, transfer characteristics and matrix coefficients to be BT601, those used for Standard Definition video. My understanding is that, when Vegas decodes MPEG-2 files with a vertical resolution of 720 or greater, it assumes the file was encoded using BT709, the high definition set of coefficients, the result being, the colors are off. I found that applying a 601 to 709 conversion filter in Procoder fixed the problem and then began searching for a fix in Vegas. Eventually, I found this article http://www.personal-view.com/faqs/software/sony-vegas-pro, which referenced a thread at DVinfo http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/what-happens-vegas/115239-mixing-hd-709-sd-601-... wherein the originator calculated the coefficients for such a conversion that could be applied in the Vegas Channel Blend Fx. Some slightly different coefficients were suggested by Glenn Chan, which I also tried but couldn't see a difference.

Here is a screen shot of the actual coefficients.



If you have Vegasaur, you can import these presets here. https://www.dropbox.com/s/zvb2tengg52rbcl/Channel%20Blend%20Presets.vpb?dl=0

wwaag