Premiere monitor much brighter than output

[Paul R Johnson]

Premiere works on the principle that it takes in the material and displays it based on what it is. If the scopes tell you it is 100%, then it is. Premiere then exports it as what it is - which is what you're seeing. Suggesting that the problem is with your video setup so fixing it is outside of the software. What people are suggesting is that you tweak the general display to match the output and display on other devices. Premiere doesn't need to change the monitor settings because that would allow people to unbalance premiere and produce odd output - that looked ok on the screen. The reverse of what you have.

[Mike Beckett]

I know this probably doesn't help, but I had a similar problem in CS5 on Windows 7, 64 bit. It was specifically the h264 rendering that would come out darker. It also suffered from bad noise in blacks and other dark areas, no matter what bit rate or other settings were used. It was probably something with my setup (drivers etc.), but I was never able to get to the bottom of it, and I consider myself reasonably technical.

All other export types were fine, such as WMV.

I ended up rendering uncompressed to Cineform, then using TMPGenc to render to h264, and got a nice, clean output, with no problems.

Now I have CS6 there's no problem at all, and I no longer use TMPGEnc.

[Rafael Lopes]

What format/codec do you guys advise for best compatibility with general media player devices? What do blue ray discs use to encode a 3 hour movie that is compatible with everything?

[Rafael Lopes]

I´ve just recorded a 10 second video with the NEX5N and copied the stock MTS file to my laptop:
Premiere monitor - bright
Windows Media Player - exactly like the premiere monitor
VLC - darker
Media Player Classic - Darker
55 Full HDTV - doesn´t play MTS files

This is messed up :-(