Ok
your clouds loose white color, will be grey.
what about while play back?
mine still looks grey :(

After render, the TV looks "normal" when played from a Blu-ray.

For that particular scene, your camera levels are somewhere between 0-255 and 16-235, which is a good place to start, but are neither Studio RGB nor Computer RGB.
The dark and light shoulders in your histo have the dominant effect.

So, if you are missing highlight detail in your render, adjust your levels filter somewhere between default and Studio RGB, allowing highlights you can live without to clip. Honestly, I would leave the blacks pretty close to where they are now. Then, apply a modest gamma adjustment (+/- .05) and you should be good to go. When you have mastered this technique, you should make the personal transition to curves.

Yes, your Vegas preview will look flat, and you can TEMPORARILY slap a second Computer RGB Levels filter on the preview, and remember to remove it prior to rendering.

My main problem is, when i render a 0-255 timeline to mpeg2, and import back to vegas i lost detail and cannot have it again on the timeline.
But on the mpeg2 file detail is present, i can see in mediaplayer.
So why cannot interpret Vegas back that file, which was created by itself?
It interpret wrongly as 16-235.

"

Don't do that.

The Vegas preview is not meant to view your native mpeg-2 video at playback levels.
This is the most important thing to know.
It is what other people call "wrong."
It is a tradeoff so we can see full camera levels in the preview, as you have perfectly illustrated above.
So I call it "right."

To PREVIEW your correctly-leveled (16-235) mpeg-2 video at correct PLAYBACK levels, play it in VLC media players, or with the Computer RGB filter on the Vegas Preview, as described in my previous post.

The same is true of MP4 and most MOV in the Vegas Preview. They are called 709, or Y'CbCr, or simply YUV codecs. In order to Preview these on the Vegas timeline at playback levels, you must TEMPORARILY add the Computer RGB filter to the Vegas Preview.

The simpler, and more foolproof way is to follow the relevant section of the Vegas to Youtube video tutorial published in 2011, which has been embedded here many times, and can be found by doing a Search of these Forums.



To Summarize:
You can either:
a. Put a Computer RGB filter TEMPORARILY on the output to preview at playback levels: or,
b. Edit in Vegas' native preview space and PERMANENTLY place a Studio RGB filter on the output to render.

Your choice, but doing neither will not work correctly.

HTH

musicvid10 :
thank you, but i already saw that video years ago, and know that.

If i import back a 0-255 level mpeg2 video, Vegas wrongly interpret that as 16-235. Why cannot change it at properties to 0-255?
Now i simply lost the details in highlight, and cannot have back with any fx.

Sony (or I) make here something wrong.

You are not seeing normal behavior.
So you need to check ALL your filter effects at the media, track, event, and bus levels.
If you import 0-255 back into a project that already has a levels filter somewhere in the chain, you will see the wrong levels in the preview.

If you import 0-255 source to a fresh Vegas 8 bit project (this is important!), you will se 0-255 in the Preview.
Vegas preview is natively same-as-source, not necessarily same-as-output.

If you are importing 8 bit video into a 32 bit float project for precision effects grading, you will need to adjust accordingly, as i think I mentioned in your other thread.

MPEG-2 video renders should always be 16-235, lest they clip undesirably on playback.

No filters, i'm sure.

Here is my test file: https://goo.gl/33jV02

Open Vegas, import it, open video scopes and focus
on the first 10 seconds. You can see levels 0-255 are used.
Render the first few sec to fullhd MPEG-2 program stream file.
Play with mediaplayer. Details are ok, right?
Import it back to Vegas new track, place frame accurate above the original.
Now you will see Vegas thinks levels are from 16-235 (which is not)
Thin lines in the center disappeared. Mute/unmute this track to check.

How can i have details back?

I was able to maintain good detail by pulling the whites down from 255 to 235 with a color curve filter and setting gamma to 0.83 in a Color Corrector (Secondary). I let the blacks go a little low, but you can suit yourself.

You could probably get it all done with just the Color Corrector (Secondary) filter.

ok, i can

but still: why cant i have that detailt back to Vegas which is visible with mediaplayer?!

Does this video look different from your original?

It looks like exactly, and levels are 0-255 in Vegas.
How do you render it?

I applied no filters and rendered to the Mainconcept MPEG2 Blu-ray 1920x1080-50i 25Mbps video stream. I rendered the audio separately and muxed video .m2v and audio .ac3 to .m2ts with tsMuxer.

I think we've been going in circles. Vegas should be (is) able to output a file identical in quality and color levels, but that's always limited by the encoder, bit rate etc.

What's with the render to "program stream"?

Yeah, very interesting. I also can reproduce this. With bluray 50i template and tsmuxer, i can have correct levels, details in Vegas.

As soon as i change this template to Program Stream, the rendered file wont have correct levels when importing, and details lost :(
WHY?

I need PS, because of smart rendering..

I'm not seeing the problems that you do when I render with an MPEG-2 program stream template customized from the Blu-ray template I used earlier.

The workflow I followed is . The template I used is here.

Thanks for your effort.
I followed your method, but the result is different, i lost highlights.
I also tried your template and render with tha, again without luck.
I use V11. Yours is 13. This is the problem? :(

Looks like my importing DLL (mcplug2.dll) works bad.

edit: i tried in V12, and works good!

i think this was the issue:
◾Fixed a bug when rendering MainConcept MPEG-2 files that caused YUV color values from the source file to be changed in the rendered file

So mpeg2 CAN be 0-255 at whole workflow, and remain good as long as i play it from PC.

Thanks!

Mpeg-2 PS is designed for REC 709 encoding and playback levels, not RGB encoding and playback levels.
Despite any speculation, that one is carved in stone.

If you are encoding 0-255 .mpg and you are certain you are seeing full range playback on your PC, then my guess is you have a ridiculous "dynamic contrast" switch turned on somewhere in your graphics or monitor. That is the only possibility I can imagine. Normal, legal playback levels, however, have absolutely nothing to do with Vegas preview levels, as has been abundantly demonstrated.

Since john_dennis is getting the correct results, and I trust his experience, I suggest resetting all graphics and monitor settings to default, and following his direction. That's all I can offer.

Here's a freebie for verifying your monitor levels:
http://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-mik7_akeTkcC1ESkdyNFBsMVE/view?usp=sharing

Best of luck.

"Mpeg-2 PS is designed for REC 709 encoding and playback levels, not RGB encoding and playback levels"

Ok, i know i should use 16-235 with levels filter, but my cams recorded in 0-255, and i will not distribute this video, just playback in 3D with my projectors. So if not needed, i don't want to loose anything. And it seems its not needed, just have to use Vegas12, which fixed a bug, confirmed by Sony itself ;)

What should i see on the freebie levels picture? I see every columnin both cases, and 255 above is whiter than 235 below. Also 0 is darker above, than 16 below.

thank all of you

I've posted this several times before, but I don't think anyone believes me. Vegas actually stretches the levels on some types of footage. On my Panasonc GH4, if I shoot in mov format, Vegas will show that footage as though it was in the 0-255 cRGB range. If I do nothing other than change the camera format to AVCHD mode, shooting the same thing will show on a Vegas timeline as 16-235 sRGB range. Now if I use a different editor like Davinci Resolve, both AVCHD and Mov footage will show up on their timeline as 16-235 sRGB range. This also happened with Mov footage from my Nikon DSLR.

No big deal, you might say, just put a cRGB to sRGB corrector on the cRGB clips. The problem with that is that there are highlights that are being clipped in the process. Since the footage is actually being shot in the sRGB range, there are some over-235 peaks, and when Vegas stretches 235s to 255s, all of these peaks get clipped.

By the way, you can see the same phenomena in some media players. For instance, if I play back a GH4 or Nikon Mov clip in WMP, it will look like sRGB. If I play the same clip back in VLC it will look like cRGB (with clipped peaks) just like Vegas. I believe both programs are accessing the same Windows code.