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Author
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Topic: AWESOMELY crappy video clips -- how to fix
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 10-10-2006 07:22 AM
While I have always proclaimed to the world my disgust at anyone who would watch the godaweful images that are produced from internet downloads, and that no one but Philistines would actually watch a MOVIE on a computer screen, I actually broke down last night did just that because I was interrupted by a long phone call after watching only 10 min of the new show STUDIO 60 (NBC), and I wanted to see the rest. I heard the announcer say that it would be seen in its entirety on line. So I sat meself down in the wee hours of the morning to watch it.
I found an image that was so dark and devoid of contrast that I could barely see anything in the dark scenes. It jumped and jittered, stammered and stuttered, and worst of all, had horrific strobing on any movement enough to give anyone an epileptic seizure. I figured all the stuttering and jittering was because my older computer hardware, which was high-end 4 years ago is not anymore. But as for the lack of brightness, surely that should be correctable with some sort of controls in the player, yet, I have not seen an media player that actually has a brightness or contrast controls, something even a $60 TV will have. There aren't any media players that have such a basic control...or are there? Surely NBC who is streaming this stuff must realize that Windows Media Player and the rest of them have no way to do make the image watchable. It certainly isn't what they are looking at when they send out the signal, where does the brightness get lost -- everything around the video image on the screen is perfectly bright, but the video box is not. Is there no way to adjust the basic video parameters to get a decent picture.
BTW, not having any experience watching video on my computer, I looked at other sources, even played a DVD and it's ALL the same -- terribly under lit images. What's the fix?
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Wayne Keyser
Master Film Handler
Posts: 272
From: Arlington, Virginia, USA
Registered: May 2004
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posted 10-10-2006 10:23 AM
You're a brilliantly technical guy, so I apologize for an untechnical answer, but ... it's a monitor thing.
I've made several DVDs from video I edit on the computer, and after countless hours of looking at the same video on the computer monitor and later on the TV, I can tell you that the computer monitor displays video just as you described. UNLESS (I hear) you have some high-end monitor designed and ajusted for exactly that use.
That doesn't address your reasonable complaint: if they're gonna serve up video to watch on the ol' IBM, couldn't they serve up WATCHABLE video or make a player with that capability? Heck, it's all 1's and 0's, so let's make it happen, people!
I do find that the Quicktime movie trailers downloadable from the web tend to be more watchable (though they still are pretty dark) - maybe they take the "monitor factor" more into account, though that doesn't explain why it's not obvious to other video creators.
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Robert Minichino
Master Film Handler
Posts: 350
From: Haskell, NJ, USA
Registered: Dec 2005
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posted 10-10-2006 12:36 PM
The fix is correctly calibrating the black and white levels of your monitor (poorly named as brightness and contrast respectively), and gamma correction.
The classic test pattern for calibrating the black/white levels is a gray-scale step from pure black to pure white. You decrease the brightness control until the darkest gray block disappears, then bring it up until it just comes into view. Then you adjust the contrast control so that the display is acceptably bright but the pure white block is neither blooming (CRTs only) nor indistinguishable from the just-below white block. You may have to go back and forth between the brightness and contrast controls .
You can try using this SMPTE test pattern: http://brighamrad.harvard.edu/research/topics/vispercep/smpte/smpte.gif
You should be able to see the difference between the inner and outer blocks in the 0/5% and 95/100% in the center of the test pattern next to the 0 and 100% blocks respectively.
As far as gamma correction goes, that's not available on all systems and the means of adjusting it differs; getting the white and black levels right is a good start, though. In any case, a higher value of gamma correction (greater than 1) will make things more "washed-out" (lighter mid-tones) and a lower value (less than 1) will make things more "contrasty" (darker mid-tones).
EDIT: Windows Media Player 10 (and maybe other versions) does have brightness and contrast controls: View menu, Enhancements, Video Settings. Depending on how you have the player configured, you may need to right-click on the title bar to get the menu.
[ 10-10-2006, 02:09 PM: Message edited by: Robert Minichino ]
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