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Dark output solution

Captain Khajiit said:
In my opinion, the dark output that some editors have experienced has little or nothing to do with the compositing gamma. It's more likely a result of people's not keeping track of levels during their workflow e.g. editing in computer RGB and rendering to a delivery format without applying a levels adjustment. The result would be crushed blacks and blown-out whites. (I've seen this in a number of DVDs made by people rendering to MPEG-2 in Vegas and not rendering out a lossless AVI first.)
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Nice work CK. The only other issue I can think of that I remember seeing at some point in the past is with the preview window in Vegas. Maybe this has changed, but at least it used to always show as computer RGB, so if you are working in Studio RGB, then the preview window may not accurately reflect what your video would look like if rendered and viewed in a different program. Thus, this might lead someone to apply improper effect corrections.

Bottom line, it sounds like if you just stick to always using an intermediate lossless format for importing and exporting video with Vegas, you should be fine. Does that sound about right, CK?
 
geminigod said:
Nice work CK. The only other issue I can think of that I remember seeing at some point in the past is with the preview window in Vegas.
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The preview window in Vegas is known to be inaccurate anyway. That's why people use external broadcast monitors for color correction. Unfortunately, for us mere mortals, quality broadcast monitors are prohibitively expensive. All I know at the moment is that with gamma set to 1.000 the only way I could get the preview window to look right was to switch View Transform to off in project properties. With 2.222 it looked fine.

Bottom line, it sounds like if you just stick to always using an intermediate lossless format for importing and exporting video with Vegas, you should be fine. Does that sound about right, CK?
Click to expand...

It sounds right to me as long as people are aware of how they have converted to RGB and how they should convert back. I'll continue to report any findings in this thread, but I've just chopped my computer RGB test clip up into different parts in Movie Studio (which uses 8-bit, 2.222) and applied various random filters to the different parts, and the rendered result looked fine in terms of levels when converted with ConverttoYV12() in Avisynth.
 
One question I still debate about in my head is whether there is any benefit to switching to RGB24 (8:8:8) in virtual dub (using avisynth) when I am making my lossless source video file for editing. I have not been able to discern any issues with simply passing through the original YV12 values and working with that in Vegas off of a file size that is half as large.
 
I prefer to control the conversion from YUV to RGB by using Avisynth, which always does it correctly (as long as you get your script right). Being certain that the conversion has occurred in the way that I want it to more than makes up for the increased file-size, as far as I'm concerned.

I think that when Vegas converts YUV to RGB internally in 8-bit mode it converts it to studio RGB (i.e. the luma range is not expanded), but if you are using 32-bit full range it converts it to computer RGB (i.e. the luma range is expanded). This seems to be what these modes are for. If your video is already RGB, there is nothing to convert, which would explain why I could pass my test clips through unchanged, regardless of mode.

Vegas is really designed for people who are processing their own footage (e.g. camcorder footage) rather than for faneditors who are editing motion pictures that have already been color corrected and processed. The idea behind studio RGB seems to be to retain illegal values outside the TV range, which might conceivably be of use to a filmmaker editing "raw" footage, which is why it's the default setting. In our case, this simply doesn't apply because our source material ought not to contain any values outside the TV range (which is not to say that it never does).
 
Interesting. Maybe I'll play with converting on my next edit, though I think my next edit will be done in Premiere, so it won't matter. My understanding is that Premiere works better with YUV natively.
 
geminigod said:
My understanding is that Premiere works better with YUV natively.
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Maybe. But it will convert to RGB internally whenever you color correct or apply effects, and I seem to remember that there was a bug in Premiere at one point and it converted HD video back to YUV on export using Rec.601 rather than Rec.709 when using certain lossless codecs. Perhaps this has been fixed though. All NLEs have their quirks/ bugs, and Premiere is no different. Keeping track of which version of which NLE has which bugs is a full-time job.

Why are you thinking of switching to Premiere? If it's just to edit in YUV, I wouldn't bother.
 
Captain Khajiit said:
Why are you thinking of switching to Premiere? If it's just to edit in YUV, I wouldn't bother.
Click to expand...

I've got the whole cs6 suite and have to use after effects on my next project anyway, so I figure I might as well experiment with it and see if I like it more than Vegas.
 
geminigod said:
I've got the whole cs6 suite and have to use after effects on my next project anyway, so I figure I might as well experiment with it and see if I like it more than Vegas.
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Ah! I wondered if it might be because you had invested in CS6. Using PP if you're using AE makes sense. Let me know how you find editing in PP. :)
 
Curiosity to geek out on comparing the two is also a motivating factor. :)
 
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