Good point, John, about monitor adjustments.

Still, don't I remember someone (Spot?), stating that it was a good idea to decrease the dynamic range of video for web display (crush black, maybe?).

Also, wondering about audio sample rate . . .

Cheeers,

G.

You should have your monitor adjusted properly regardless of whether or not you want to crush your blacks.

If you are delivering for the web, it's a good a idea to apply the Black Restore FX with the streaming preset. It sets the threshold to 0.020. These are blacks that are not visible to the human eye but it makes a difference to the encoder. So applying these preset allows the encoder not to worry about this range of ultra-dark colors and save bits for the rest of the frame.

You could check that your levels are being converted correctly.

http://glennchan.info/articles/vegas/colorspaces/colorspaces.html

If you are shooting DV or HDV and working in a 8-bit project, then you need to manually intervene and manually add the right color space conversion for web output, e.g. nest your project in a new one and add a studio RGB to computer RGB color corrector preset.

Are you doing your own Flash encode or are you uploading it to a site like Vimeo or Youtube?

When I upload to Vimeo or Youtube, the best Vegas rendering option is the Sony AVC mpeg4 encoder. Color stays pretty much intact without any extra processing.

If you use wmv encoding, adding a Sony color correction filter with the Studio RGB to Computer RGB preset works wonders for keeping the color intensity.

If you are heavily downrezzing, say from HD to 320x240, a little bit of sharpening can really help keep you from losing all of the sharpness.

There are far more videos that are too dark on the internet than are too light. You need to lighten them more than what looks right on a properly calibrated monitor if you are rendering to Windows Media especially. It is not much of a problem when rendering to Quicktime, but most of the forum members here don't render to Quicktime as a preference. Thus the "go lighter" rule. In terms of the suggestion not to be too concerned about it because a lot of people have improperly calibrated monitors anyway, I disagree. The simple reason is that we worry about our videos being properly exposed for different televisions, so we should do the same for monitors. Lots of people have improperly calibrated televisions. They come that way from the factory in most cases.

John

Thanks, John . . . how bright do you think I should go?


115 IRE? How about gamma adjustment?

Thinking of the request the other day for an "algorithm" for tripod adjustment . . . it seems we should be able to come up with a "do this much of this, that much of that" for otherwise properly adjusted NTSC video when posting to the web.

Interesting what you have to say about .wmv v. .mov . . . I'll have to experiment with this.

Cheers,

Greg