Fixing Grey Blacks

[Captainfearless]

As a big ELO fan the other night i pulled an all nighter and captured their first concert for 4 years on Vebut the blacks are horribly washed out. I downloaded a lower quality version from YouTube and the blacks are perfect, see screenshots.

Is their anyway to correct the black levels of my larger file? It appears to be an issue with Game Bar.

[poisondeathray]

You can adjust the black level with a levels filter in just about any editor , or use avisynth or some GUI for it

[Captainfearless]

Thanks that’s good to know. Which video editor would you recommend?

[poisondeathray]

You can use virtualdub for simple levels adjustments, or shotcut for a full editor

Changing the levels requires re-encoding, and that generally means some quality loss . If you use high enough bitrates you can minimize that loss

Another option is to apply a levels filter on playback

[Captainfearless]

How can i adjust the blacks in virtualdub?

[Sharc]

With the 'levels' filter.
Something like this:

[Attachment 75006 - Click to enlarge]

[Captainfearless]

Thanks, it actually works brilliantly using the brightness filter. The original file is an MP4 around 10GB in size.

So i'm ready to process now, what's my best way to proceed without losing quality and using this filter?

Doesn't have to be MP4, but i know that i need to add a codec if it is.

[Alwyn]

The Virtual Dub plugin/filter "Colormill" is excellent for adjusting the brightness/contrast levels because it allows separate adjustment of the Lows (ie darkest), the mids and the highs.

Get the VDF file here (32 bit "Win32/Release" and 64 bit "x64/Release" available):

https://github.com/Bassquake/ColorMill

Drop the VDF into your appropriate (32 or 64) plugins folder in the VDub folder.

Thanks again Bassquake.

[poisondeathray]

Thanks, it actually works brilliantly using the brightness filter. The original file is an MP4 around 10GB in size.

So i'm ready to process now, what's my best way to proceed without losing quality and using this filter?

Doesn't have to be MP4, but i know that i need to add a codec if it is.

You will lose some quality unless you use lossless compression, but lossless encoding reduces compatibility (most hardware players, many devices, some software players will not play it) and the filesize will be several times larger than the original

vdub2 comes with x264 and can export MP4 . If you use CRF around 10-16 that's considered good quality . Lower values result in higher bitrates, larger files. QP 0 is lossless mode

I would do a short test like 1 minute with one value like crf 16 or so to see if it meets your needs in terms of quality/compression trade off. You can mark in/mark out to export a selection. For audio, use audio=>direct stream copy so you don't degrade the audio

[Captainfearless]

Thanks PDR.

[Captainfearless]

Where do i adjust the CRF?

[Sharc]

Video -> Compression..... -> Select the codec (x264) -> Configure