Help! Recording Game Footage | 601 vs 709

AveSatanas wrote on 11/17/2019, 6:09 AM

My story starts off like this:

One year ago I started recording my gameplay footage in 601, and when editing with VFX i would have to use alot of saturation/Levels/Brightness and Contrast to get it looking good visually and to appeal to broadcast safe ect whilst making the RGB parade and luminance values look good

However i switched to 709 recording yesterday and whilst editing the gameplay....the luminance values and rgb parade are looking spot on and i dont need to saturate or edit too much to get it looking good....to be very honest i dont need to do anything except to color correct with no saturation or contrast as the rgb par and waveform look like they have already been corrected

The videos saturation and luminance values are spot on whilst recording with 709, while recording with 601 i have to do alot of tweaking...Does 709 record more detail or is it Sony Vegas reading the file better? Or is 709 superior to 601?

 

Comments

Musicvid wrote on 11/17/2019, 9:34 AM

The only difference is a slight shift in the green primaries, 99% invisible to the eyes. I only recently saw my first example of an apparent visible shift. Something else is causing you to need to correct; sounds more like an RGB/YUV colorspace mismatch. 601 and 709 are both YUV. If there is AVI media anywhere in the chain, this is more likely to happen.

By definition, SD is 601, HD (at least 720 pixels wide) is 709. To show you how irrelevant it is, all the early Canon DSLRs shot FHD at 601, and the consensus among producers was not to try to "fix" it.

Both 601 and 709 require luminance clamped at [16,235], with a little chroma slop tolerated for practical reasons. Some broadcasters require hard clamped chroma limits, as well.

AveSatanas wrote on 12/10/2019, 1:54 PM

Thanks @musicvid thats all i needed to know, cheers for the help! :)