YouTube renders too dark

BittenByTheBug wrote on 8/1/2009, 9:27 AM

Hi all,

When I rendered a short movie to YouTube, the color is lot darker than it is inside VMS Platinum 9.0. Quite some details are lost because of that. Do you have any suggestions on how to make it better?

I used the following settings:

PROJECT
Video rendering quality: Best
VIDEO
Video format: AVC
Frame size: (Custom frame size) Width 1280 Height 720
Profile: Main
Entropy coding: CAVLC
Frame rate: 29.970 (NTSC)
Field order: None (progressive scan)
Pixel aspect: 1.0000
Bit rate (bps): 5,000,000
AUDIO
Audio format: AAC
Sample rate: 48,000
Bit rate (bps): 128,000
SYSTEM
Format: MP4 file format (.mp4)

The link for the movie is provided below if you want to see what the problem is.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 8/1/2009, 11:07 AM

Not much you can do. Different players ,encoders, decoders use different gamma. You just have to live with it. Or, use one of the Color Corrector templates to wash-out your video, so it comes better on youtube.

BittenByTheBug wrote on 8/1/2009, 11:43 AM

Hi Eugenia,

Thanks for helping again. I believe I got the above setting from you. It has worked well for my other videos. The movie in question is all night scenes and with richer colors, so it poses some difficulty and I was wondering if there are other coding schemes that work better. Guess not.

What are the Color Correction templates? I'm pretty new to video/movie making, so forgive me if I ask for something that's obvious.

Eugenia wrote on 8/1/2009, 10:52 PM

How you encode does not change the gamma/contrast. So if you see differences from other decoders/apps it's because how they interpret the video. If you use other apps, you will see other looks too, so it's never 100% what you see on Vegas while editing.

Now, regarding the template, you load the color corrector plugin on your footage, and you select the "computer rgb to tv" template, or something like that it's called. This will wash out your video, so youtube at least doesn't over-contrast it.

BittenByTheBug wrote on 8/2/2009, 7:13 AM

Thanks for the explanation, Eugenia. I was mistakenly thinking there maybe some encodings that handle extreme dard colors better.

By the way, the above rendering setting that you gave me works the best in YouTube. Before that I had tried some other ways that didn't work out well.

I will give these color corrector plugins a try.

Byron K wrote on 8/3/2009, 12:30 PM

Another method to quickly find what contrast and color settings look good for your specific video is to do a sample test with each setting on a specific key frame.

This is cross over from my film development days where we used a test card and expose the paper to different exposure times.

What you can do find a short 10 -15 second section of video or screen capture (will upload and render on youtube much faster) and place keyframes with different color and/or brightness/contrast settings at 3 second intervals and assign a number when each keyframe is hit. Upload to YouTube and see which setting looks best.

BittenByTheBug wrote on 8/6/2009, 12:11 PM

That's a good idea, Byron. I will do that in conjunction with trying on the color corrector plugins. Thanks.