Brightness Problem With Captured Video

[PSYCHO!!!!]

No matter what source I use( Cable TV, VCR or Game Console), all my captured videos appear significantly darker on my computer screen.

I have a Toshiba "Laptop" and am using a PixelView TV Tuner Box with a USB 2 connection. The main cables involved in my connections are a 4-Pin S-Video cable and the red, white and yellow A/V cables. The program I'm using to capture my stuff is WinDVR 3. I have absolutely no problem establishing the connections and capturing the videos, its simply that everything is too dark once its on my computer.

I'm open to any and all suggestions for fixing this aggravating problem. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[MrMungus]

Posts: 1

[redwudz]

Simple cure. Don't look at it on your computer! Play it on a 'real' tv and call us back. :P

[MrMungus]

OK, the answer is, video on your computer will always look darker than the same video on your TV.

Edit: This should be a sticky thread in the Capturing forum.

[non-linear]

This is one lesson that i learned when I started capturing for DVD. Since I use an ATI AIW setup, it's a pain in the a** to eyeball the video levels (especially the black levels) to make sure that they will look okay when playing on a DVD player. When I started capturing and burning, I would always get high blacks (more like grey) when I started, until I realized the video levels are way off from what they are on my TV).

I wish there was a good software waveform monitor out there that could show the levels of incoming video, as well as videos played back off the computer.

[MrMungus]

This is one lesson that i learned when I started capturing for DVD. Since I use an ATI AIW setup, it's a pain in the a** to eyeball the video levels (especially the black levels) to make sure that they will look okay when playing on a DVD player. When I started capturing and burning, I would always get high blacks (more like grey) when I started, until I realized the video levels are way off from what they are on my TV).

I wish there was a good software waveform monitor out there that could show the levels of incoming video, as well as videos played back off the computer.

If you have an ATI, can't you output from your card to your TV to see how the video looks?

[non-linear]

If you have an ATI, can't you output from your card to your TV to see how the video looks?

It is possible, but I don't trust the overlay levels to be accurate (I've seen levels look different in video playout from normal size to a full screen view). levels recorded end up being different than the levels in the live video. I've pretty much got the guestimation of the levels on my system down pat. Occasionally I have to reencode, but that's why I use rewritables.

Also, with the video out, I don't know if ATI has made any improvements, but I run a 1024x768 resolution. When I had my old AIW 128, the desktop would have to scroll to see what was not being shown. Big PITA.

[trevlac]

Although this seems to be a candidate for a FAQ, I find the real answer to be more complex.

The black level (brightness) on a well adjusted monitor/TV should be the same. Same story for the White level (contrast). The gamma however is unlikely to be the same. So things would appear darker because the color range is actually shifted so that a PC shows a wider dark range.

One could adjust their PC monitor, but I would expect that if you were going to watch on a PC, the software player should take the difference into account. IF you are previewing for post production, you can just get a commercial DVD and match the gamma of that.

Generally, I've found the black/white level of my various sources to be all over the place. I just make the correction in post (where I can see what I am doing to all of the footage), and cap with the defaults of my driver. Getting a proper Hue and saturation is a whole different story.

Another tidbit is that YUY2 captured to MJPEG is output as RGB differently than you may expect. For YUY2, black should be 16 and white 0. For 8bit PC RGB black is 0 and white is 255. MJPEG codecs seem to deliver RGB (from YUY2) with black 16 and white. Encoders generally give you the option to deal with this, but you have to know. So, this will make what you see on a PC and your DVDs washed out.

I, like non-linear, am not sure TV out does not mess with the signal so much that it's worth using it.

I also wished I had a wfm to check source. So I wrote a plugin for virtualdub. You can't really use it until after capture, and I would not call it 'good', but it is free.

http://trevlac.us/colorCorrection/clrtools.vdf