I can understand that, I checked another 'scope letterboxed video, Lady Ga Ga's latest, and it does the same thing. I'm pretty confident whatever it is it is not because of the content, it has to be either something in my setup or the player. As I said it is not predictable, at first those grey bars are there, then if I change focus to another app and back to IE they've turned to black and no way to get them back to grey without closing IE and starting again. Also the content doesn't change levels as far as I can see.

Bob.

Warning & caveat: The following does not imply what is correct or incorrect. There is no intention to spread FUD. Nothing was done in Vegas. These are merely some screen prints from my computer that

The following are direct screenprints from my browser & this forum:



The following is a direct screenprint from my browser & YouTube:


I recognize the the last screenprint is not fullscreen, but I couldn't get Snagit to capture the color picker panel in fullscreen mode. I can atest that it was also 0,0,0.

Also, the eyedropper values were captured before my Snagit captures.

...Jerry

Jerry,
I haven't the remotest clue as to what is going on with this issue and I don't intend to loose much sleep over it. YT is a moving target and I can barely hit the side of a barn at 10 paces.

It is interesting though the values you are reading, my eyeballs initialling read much the same and I thought the production had gotten something mixed up. That was until I saw the grey bars turn black and then saw the same thing happening in another video.

Personally if I was going to send something to YT in an oddball AR I'd be adding my own black border to a standard 16:9 frame, less chance of YT stuffing around with it. Some fo the things YT do make me wonder. My Bach piece caused them to tell me I might be in breach of someone's copyrright, hello YT, the copyright expired before copyright was invented. Or was it because I had shots of the sheet music, that is copyright?

By the way, a bit of a tip on a YT trap. You can delete a video. You can upload another one of the same name. Good luck getting your audience to be able to view it though. In my case YT kept saying the video had been deleted, despite YT giving me a different link for the new version. Make certain you use a unique name for every video you upload, don't reuse names. Even after I added a "-1" to the end I still had issues for a few hours and then it came good.

Bob.

As I recall, there can still be copyright in the performance of a piece, belonging to the performer, even if the composer's copyright in the music itself has expired.

Munster1, I should have listened to you. The 275.36 driver that the NVIDIA auto-identifying applet gave me started giving me BSOD crashes with Flash Player 10.3. I rolled back to the 266.58 version that you referred to and so far all is OK again, but I still have the 0-255 option in the NVIDIA control panel. Maybe my computer needs a notebook-specific driver and the applet didn't identify it as a notebook.

I think the 275.36 driver is a Quadro desktop driver and the 266.58 is a Quadro notebook "Verde" driver. I Imagine that the notebook driver has extra power management features. It's a bit poor that the NVidia driver widget can't make the right choice. Hopefully no lasting damage was done.

Nick said:

"As I recall, there can still be copyright in the performance of a piece, belonging to the performer, even if the composer's copyright in the music itself has expired."

Absolutely correct. Both myself and all the performers signed waivers assigning copyright to the church..

Bob.

Ok, these discussions are getting ridiculous. I keep telling everybody what the correct answers are.

Musicvid and Nick Hope: Your method leads to the wrong results. if you go to Nick Hope's Youtube channel, you will see some amazing video. But the black level is too high in those videos.

return just what they saw on the Vegas preview before adding the final filter for rendering. Just what on earth is so wrong with that?
You will get blacks to be brighter than they should be. / The black level will be too high.

What you see in the Vegas preview window is often incorrect.

--------------------------------
Here are the correct answers again:

Almost all video cameras will record values above legal white level. This is wrong but common practice. With no color correction, these values will usually be clipped (there are some situations where they won't be clipped). If you don't want this clipping to occur, then read the the following and use the preset in the .veg file:
http://www.glennchan.info/articles/vegas/color-correction/tutorial.htm

For proper levels, follow the example workflows here:
http://www.glennchan.info/articles/vegas/v8color/vegas-9-levels.htm

I know that none of this is intuitive.
The camera manufacturers screwed up when they made their cameras record values above white level. (In my opinion.)
Vegas is screwed up... it doesn't handle this stuff for you. Almost every other editing program on the market will handle this stuff for you.
I know that the table in my article is pretty ridiculously big and doesn't even cover every possible codec out there.

But that's the way it is.

Time to debunk some myths:

Youtube expects 16-235

No. It expects a properly encoded file.

For example, convert all your levels to 16-235 *RGB*. Encode it to MPEG2 with a codec that expects studio RGB levels (e.g. the default one in Vegas... main concept). Upload this. The levels will be correct.

Do the same thing expect for a codec that expects computer RGB levels, e.g. Windows Media. The levels will be incorrect.

Youtube expands your levels

No... it simply decodes them correctly.

Rec. 601 calls for 16-235 levels
Rec. 709 calls for 16-235 levels
Rec. 709 calls for 0-255 levels

No. If you read the actual standard, it specifies Y'CbCr values. In Vegas, you have no way of specifying Y'CbCr values. The only way to get the right Y'CbCr values (for formats which are Y'CbCr internally) is by feeding the encoder the levels it expects to see. See the example above. Sometimes 16-235 RGB will yield the right results, other times it won't!
Y'CbCr is not the same as computer R'G'B' or studio R'G'B'.

^^ thx Glenn -rob

Glenn,
in fairness to Musicvid his YT video was never meant to be about doing it correctly. It's meant to be for those who don't care about "correct" and by doing what he says they will not get a grossly horrible outcome due to serious clipping regardless of what camera they've used. The idea works within the scope of the original intention.

One problem that does seem to arise is those who can't be bothered to learn how to do "levels" correctly probably can't be bothered downloading and installing two 3rd party pieces of code and following all the instructions on how to use them either.

Bob.

>> if you go to Nick Hope's Youtube channel, you will see some amazing video. But the black level is too high in those videos. <<

That's ironic since all of those videos were done before any of this discussion of levels filters came along. Those videos are just Sony Z1 HDV or VX2000 DV footage, rendered (in most cases including all the HD ones) to H.264 mp4 and uploaded. The only color correction applied was a bit of Sony Color Corrector wheels on some of the underwater clips. No C-RGB-to-S-RGB filter or anything like that, and no CC at all on the topside footage.

Glenn, can you please give me a specific link/time code for one where you feel the black level is too high?

Hmm... I made assumptions about your method (e.g. that it is http://www.bubblevision.com/underwater-video/YouTube-Vimeo-levels-fix.htm) and I am probably wrong there.

What codec did you use?

Glenn, can you please give me a specific link/time code for one where you feel the black level is too high?


In the very first shot, I would expect the background to be black... closer to 0 RGB than about 14. I am using the freeware utility TakeColor to grab values and looking at the video in Firefox.

For some reason the background fades up to around 23. I don't understand why that happens.

Firstly, brilliant tip on TakeColor. Thanks for that.

Secondly, apologies if anyone's eardrums are ruptured. I know the audio is too loud.

OK, so in the opening shot, the Sony Z1P shot the "black" water at level 23. If I knew then what I know now, I would have pulled that down close to 16 in post. For the first 3 seconds I reduced the opacity of the video track down to 60% with an opacity envelope to darken the squid behind the opening title. Seemed like a good idea at the time but in hindsight not the best way to darken. I didn't use any legal black underlay as I didn't know about such things then.

The video was frameserved in RGB24 with the Debugmode Frameserver to an AviSynth script for deinterlacing and resizing, then opened in MeGUI and rendered with x264 in a .mp4 container. In the AviSynth script, the signal needs to be converted to YV12 which the deinterlacer requires. The line to do that in the script should be this, which keeps the full range of levels:

ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true, matrix="PC.709")

However in those days I didn't know about the "matrix" option and I was simply using this:

ConvertToYV12

Unfortunately by default that uses matrix="Rec601" which scales from PC to TV range (and wrongly uses the 601 coefficients), hence the black levels come out too high in my existing YouTube HD videos. I had forgotten about that workflow error so you are quite right Glenn. The net effect is the same as if I had applied a C-RGB to S-RGB filter in Vegas. On the positive side, that error will have prevented clipping of the highlights in the videos rendered that way.

Most of the earlier SD videos on my channel were rendered with Xvid .avi in VirtualDub and should have more correct black levels.

Hmm I never actually tried the better/best/more complicated methods for Youtube upload. Now that I re-read one of the original threads, I see all the ridiculous stuff that were giving you problems.
e.g. Rec. 601 Y'CbCr luma coefficients are not the same as Rec. 709 Y'CbCr (there's no way that a normal person would think of this), levels, etc.

Glenn said:

Rec. 601 Y'CbCr luma coefficients are not the same as Rec. 709 Y'CbCr (there's no way that a normal person would think of this), levels, etc.

OK, I ain't normal :)

Following on from another thread on a similar topic I had recorded the ARIB Multiformat bars using my EX1.
Checking these as best I can with the Waveform monitor and Histogram in Vegas they line up so close it is within the +/- 1 bit error of measurement.
Specifically the 0% bars read 16 and 0% and the 100% bars read 235 and 100%. The 75% colour bars also align so close to the reference markers on the waveform monitor you'd think I'd rigged my tests. The "Y-ramp" also goes in a straight line from 0% to 100%.

There's only one thing on these bars that I'm uncertain of. There's two 0% swatches with notes "Black set signal for HDTV monitor" and "Black set signal for SDTV monitor". There so small they're hard to isolate but bith seem to read 0%. I expected a small difference??

Only caveat I can add is these were recorded as 1902x1080 XDCAM EX mpeg-2 @ 35Mbps, not HDV. It'd be an amazing blunder on SCS's part if they managed to get that codec decoded correctly and not HDV.

I think I can safely say Vegas gets it correct but....as always very happy to be told otherwise, perhaps there's some basic error in my test methodology.

When I get some more time I'll try encoding this pattern to DV etc and see what Vegas makes of that.

Bob.

http://www.arib.or.jp/english/html/overview/img/arib_std-b28v1.0_e.pdf

page 2 seems to describe what the bars should be?

Shouldn't black by 0% in both HDTV and SDTV?

2- To isolate things on Vegas's scopes, you could use pan/crop to zoom in on particular sections of the picture.

Dear Sony Guys,

Just in case you happen to be monitoring this thread and you're concerned about how much confusion there is regarding managing levels in Vegas Pro, a good place to start might be making the Video Preview Window display levels correctly, in the same way that the Secondary Display does.

That way, the Preview Window would actually be...a preview window.

For inexplicably legacy reasons, you could even make this an option, as in, a checkbox saying, "would you like the Vegas Preview Window to display levels correctly?"

Yes, I would!