Brightness, too white huffy to mpeg2

[macjohn]

I've been trying various settings in CCE 2.7, TMPGEnc 2.5, Sony Vegas, and Adobe Premeire with no luck trying to reduce the whiting out in Hi-8 video captures I've been doing through S-Video into my All in Wonder 7500.

The Huffy AVI looks fine. I've been combing through the forums for the right setting to tweak to get the whiting problem reduced but no matter what I've tried (been trying for 2 weeks now), I can't seem to make it good enough.

To be specific, I've been playing with one scene of a grey and white cat. The white on the cats fur, no matter what I've tried, gets so bright after converting to mpg, that it is hard to see where the grey starts. The cats nose and whiskers blur into the whiteness of the fur around it. The AVI is crisp, still white, but not whited out... Maybe my problem in finding the solution is not knowing what this problem is called.

When converting to mpeg2 (for DVD), should I just accept that the compressed movie will never be good enough? Should I just darken the whole thing and be done with it? I see the quality I want in my AVI, and even compressing it with XVID leaves me with a decent copy... but I want my home movies backed up to DVD and I should be able to get the same quality.

Any and all suggestions appreciated, thanks.

John

[edDV]

Hi8 has 7.5 IRE setup in NTSC countries.

If you don't compensate, capture places black at digital level 32 instead of 16 causing overbright blacks. DV and DVD use level 16 for black and 235 for white.

Fix is to level set your Y capture from 32 to 16 while keeping white level at digital 235.

Additionally you may be capturing or processing your white levels incorrectly.

[macjohn]

hopefully this isn't a stupid question... but am am capturing NTSC and using VirtualDub, where do I change the white level to 235 in capturing with Vdub? Do I set the white levels on capture or conversion?

[edDV]

Depends on your capture hardware. Hardware driver setups.

[macjohn]

OK, so I assume my All in Wonder 7500 doesn't have such a setting? I seem to only have the basic brightness, contrast, etc settings on it.

It still just floors me that the AVI captured is fine, it's the mpeg2 file that has the white problem, seems there should be a setting in the mpeg2 compressor to handle this. There are several 'computer to video' and visa-versa types of presets in Vegas, there's a checkbox in TMPGenc, but I see no difference after compressing the file between the settings (all show significantly more 'whiting out' than the AVI.

[edDV]

For capture

Brightness sets black
Contrast sets white

But if the AVI is ok then true, the problem is the encoder.