Scopes & settings
 

Hi,

I'm in PAL land. I've been editing some footage and using the waveform scope to set the black and white levels to avoid clipping. I ticked the Studio RGB box and left the 7.5 IRE setting blank.

I have now viewed the footage on DVD played on a TV and everything looks washed out. The blacks look greyish. Should I have left both settings boxes blank as I have noticed that when I do this, the waveform base line moves up
meaning there is more room to darken the footage. If this is the case and I have used the wrong settings on the scope, would a simple correction to the edited footage be to apply the studio RGB to computer RGB levels preset as this brings the base line back down again.

1- The studio RGB setting:

This should be set based on what encoder you will be using. If you are using the Vegas default codecs, then the "video" codecs (DV, HDV, main concept MPEG2) will want to see 16-235 studio RGB levels.

If you are using the Vegas defaults, you should have this checked.

2- The 7.5 IRE setting:

The scopes emulate what an analog scope would show. But Vegas cant measure your analog signal so you need to tell it what levels you are outputting. But its screwed up because it doesnt have a 7.5 marking like analog scopes do... so that is not very helpful + potentially very confusing.

Anyways it doesnt matter too much since you are in a PAL country, leave this box unchecked.

3- I am not exactly sure what you are doing that makes everything look washed out. You might try burning Vegas color bars (not other color bars) into the main concept MPEG2 codec, along with corrected + uncorrected footage and see how that plays back on your TV. Do the colors appear washed out then?
For the color bars, you should not be able to see all three PLUGE bars (though some DVD players will always clip the blacker-than-black bar and thus regardless of your TVs calibration you will never see all three).

After all my colour correction work I remembered I should check the black and white levels were not clipping. It turned out they were. Using the scopes, with Studio RGB ticked, I adjusted the Levels settings in Vegas to bring the whites down to 100 and the blacks up to 0. I really wanted to crush the blacks in the many dark scenes. However, I have a version of the DVD prior to this change and it looks so much better on a calibrated TV than this version in which black and white have been adjusted to digital black and white. The former version is darker and richer.

I read somewhere that camcorders recorded black slightly lower than digital black due to compression and that this should be left as it is. Is this correct or should I adjust to digital black because that might explain why my DVD looks washed out.

Apart from the fact that I don’t understand why the illegal version would look better, is there any reason why I shouldn’t just use the original version when it’s not going to be broadcast.