How to brighten up a dark DVD rip?

[cosmo]

I have this rip of a dvd that is very dark, I need to know if there is any way to brighten this movie up. Thanks Cosmo

[deadsierra]

Crank the brightness up on your monitor. Thats the easiest way. You could alter the brightness in QT or something but thats a lot of work.

Is it just the rip thats dark, or is the original dark too?

[WiseWeasel]

Remember that your Mac's gamma is a lot darker than what the output will look like on a TV. Chances are it will look fine when you play it back on a regular TV set.

[mhar4]

I thought it was the other way around, that the default Mac gamma was lighter than a tv or typical PC monitor?

[deadsierra]

I thought it was the other way around, that the default Mac gamma was lighter than a tv or typical PC monitor?

I do believe that you are correct, although there's always a large chance that I have confused myself again. Apple uses a 1.8 Gamma, while TV's and PCs use 2.2. That should make the TV's output darker, unless I switched the numbers around accidentally. I'd check via the Monitors button on the System Prefs, but Laptops don't get that option.

[cosmo]

This dvd plays dark on a tv. It looks very dark and hard to see people in the film. All I want to do is find a way to lighten it up. Thanks

[WiseWeasel]

If you don't have the original uncompressed source for this DVD, you'll be losing a lot of video quality. You'd have to rip the DVD to DV format using something like Cinematize or DVDxDV. Then, I would use Compressor (distributed with FCP and DVDSP) to encode back to MPEG2, adjusting the brightness, contrast, highlights and gamma filters to get optimal image quality, and then master a new DVD using DVDSP or maybe Sizzle.

[mhar4]

A new (well, port of an old) mpeg2-QT program has been posted on Macupdate. http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7439

It includes an imge filter stage, so might be another tool which could prove useful.