need advice: brightness / contrast settings

[relight]

using virtual dub with an old asus card. video always seems dark, so i boosted the brightness in virtual dub settings to 150.

but it still doesn't look the best. i'm looking for anyone else who uese virtual dub, and as many opinions as possible, can you recommend what settings you set for brightness, contrast, and the other 2 fields? my monitor may be slightly dark as well... it'd be most helpful if you've played with it and found out what looks good on a TV.

[deadpac]

What I've found using Vdub's default Brightness/Contrast filter is that with......

Brightness increase you get an overall increase in greyish haziness

Contrast increase you get an overall brighter picture without the greyish overlay on the output but sometimes too much increase in contrast will lead to a saturation of colors most notably red.

It depends on how dark your source is and sometimes what kind of output are you trying to output to, I know with the few DVD streams and many CVD streams I've authored that a contrast gain of atleast 5% is needed in order to come close to reproducing the lighting on the source.

There is NO ONE Brightness/Contrast setting that will give you good results all the time, it's just a process of trial an error. Maybe a few couple minute encodes with different setting will help you get the desired result.

[relight]

Thanks for the info! I'll try that. I'm capturing from a VHS taped SP - quality TV show. And my output will be VCD.

Anyone else have any comments on this?

[BJ_M]

set your monitor up correctly first - here are charts and how to : http://www.animeminers.com/calibrate.html


then compare with test mpeg streams .. you can download a whole bunch of standardized test charts and such here :
ftp://ftp.tek.com/tv/test/streams/Element/

[relight]

Nice, but not overly helpful, since it's not quite layman enough for me. (IE, either make it layman, or give the complete explanation for everything so that technically i actually 100% understand it)

i have configured my monitor with gamma tests... although my monitor generally seems slightly dark, especially when playing a DVD - this is also cause it takes a while to fully warm up. it's a 2-year old viewsonic 19" E790.

Thanks for the advice though, and I'll keep those links in mind.