How to get true black color when rendering?
 

When I render to mpeg2/4 or Quicktime, I don't really get true black color when play the clip. The letterbox which is supposed to be black look dark Grey instead. This also affects the black contrast in the video which make the color more washout then it is supposed to be. Can anyone advise on what render setting I should make to make it true black.

Kenny

are you including a color bar pattern with your render?
some NLE's don't handle the RGB color map properly and will clip true black and true white. the only way to validate your workflow is to run a pluge thru the workflow and codecs to see if it conforms to standards.

Are you making this judgement based on a calibrated monitor?

Are your whites also not as bright? It sounds like you need to convert from studio levels to rgb levels to play correctly on your computer monitor. I always need to apply this to captured footage for it to play correctly on my monitor. I use Vegas which has a preset in the Sony Color Correcter which allows this conversion. Now you need to know if you plan on burning this mpeg back to a dvd, you must not apply this conversion or else the colors will look really saturated and dark. It took me a long time to figure this out. It seems alot of people don't know about this.

As Roy pointed out, rendering to Quicktime will usually require a studio RGB to computer RGB conversion.

http://glennchan.info/articles/vegas...lorspaces.html

I'm planning to send the video to both DVD (PAL) and also for internet viewing. I did not use the preset, everything was in default. When I played back the DVD using my DVD player and LCD TV monitor, it was simply too saturated that it appear reddish and I had to tone down my LCD TV settings.
When I view the video using my PC, it looks ok except for the "not that black" issue.
I tried to apply the studio to computer rgb. But it will reset when I tried to do white balancing using the high and mid color wheel, does it matters? After applying the preset, the result is still the same. The letterbox is not as black as what I see on the empty area of the media player.

I'm using a consumer LCD monitor and vegas 7d.

Use the histogram video scope. Cut one version with black at 16 and white at 235 (TV) and another version with black at 0 and white at 255 (PC). It's not such a big deal if the whites aren't perfect, but the blacks are really critical.

I'm going to get a TV on top of my pc monitor. May I ask if there is a difference between getting a CRT or a LCD/Plasma TV. I intend to use it as a secondary display for my editing so that I can accurately adjust the color instead of using my PC LCD monitor. Is there any calibration needed for the LCD TV as I'm using the 2nd dvi output of my graphic card. Thanks.