CCE Brightness Problems?

[bluespot]

I'm not sure if this post belongs here or in the CCE forum, but since it applies to everyone using the IFOEdit/CCE method, I'm posting here...

I've noticed with some of my CCE encodes, that the output is a good deal darker than the original. It dosen't happen on all of them, so far I've done 2 that came out OK, and one where the darkness of the picture is unacceptable. The movie is Star Wars, Episode 1. Here is a side by side comparison so you can see what I am talking about:

http://www.eng.fsu.edu/~kudo/CCEBrightness.jpg

The CCE encoded frame is on the top, the source frame is on the bottom. The screen shots were both taken out of DVD2AVI and the final picture accurately shows the problem.

My CCE settings were done according the the Robshot/Doom9 guides. My first encode was done with the Luminance Level at 0-255. I then started from scratch with a new DVD2AVI project, and encoded with Luminance of 16-235. No difference.

The problem does not lie in the frame server...I opened the VFAPI generated AVI in VirtualDub, and compared it with the original. They were identical. This means that CCE is the source of the darkened output. I'm at a loss here, CCE dosen't really have any options that control the output brightness. Also some of the detail is permenantly lost, simply applying a brightness filter cannot recover it. The robe on the left (Qui-Gon's robe? Can't remember his name) is a good example.

Anyone else had this problem? Any ideas on how to fix it? I'm stumped.

bluespot

[moosy]

I had the same problem with a number of movies.
My luminence settings were 0-255 as the guide says.

[Scrapps]

The original robshot guide suggested using 0-255 setting, I followed this guide when re-encoding Pearl Harbour and I also found that the output was much darker than the original film. I have a television set that is calibrated to correctly show tones and colours so i'm confident that the problem isn't related to my setup.

I encoded Pearl Harbour again using the 16-235 setting in CCE and the video now matched the original.

I have noticed that, despite being based on robshot's guide, Doom's own CCE guide suggests using the range 16-235. So i'm guessing that this issue has been investigated and 16-235 is the correct setting to use.

[bluespot]

Well, I was able to clearly see the difference on my PC monitor between the source and the CCE re-encoded video, for either Luminance setting. I could not, however, spot the difference between the 2 different Luminance settings. I encoded at 16-235 for the time that I actually burned and watched it on my TV. Much darker than the original, and hard to watch at some points.

I used CCE Version 2.5 for my previous encodes, so I'm going to try CCE version 2.62 and see what happens. I'll post my results later tonight. Hopefully this fixes the problem.

[bluespot]

OK, started from scratch again and used CCE SP 2.62 this time. No brightness problems! The outout was identical to the input. Did everything exactly the same as before, and I used a Luminance of 16-235. But I have a feeling if I were to start from scratch and reencode with 0-250 I'd get the same results.

So there you go. If you're having brightness problems with CCE 2.50, get 2.62 or better.

bluespot

[Scrapps]

For the sake of clarification I used CCE 2.62 for both of my encodings of Pearl Harbour.

The output from setting luminance value to 0-255 was definetly darker than the original, whilst using 16-235 matched the original source.