Movie horribly dark/Gamm Correction?

[iromeoi]

I was just ripping my 30th movie, Prophecy 2, but encountered a new problem. [I'm using GKnot 0.23b and divx 4.11.]

I set everything for a 2-3CD Rip, and was caught offguard when the movie size with AC3 audio was 650MB...so I went to check the video out...and its 99% black, you can faintly see motion, but not enough to tell what it is/what is going on.

The movie is a dark and dreary movie, but even as I fast forwarded through it...I had maybe 20 minutes of visible video...everything is too dark to be seen.

How should I correct this? Is it a gamma issue (if so, how do i correct it), or are there other settings that will make the video watchable?

[manono]

Hi and welcome to the forums-

This is the first time you've noticed the problem, right? So it has nothing to do with your overlay settings? Maybe go and play it on a friend's computer to see if it looks the same way.

Then there are two solutions. One is to brighten it up during playback. Most players and decoders have brightness settings (try ffdshow (http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Filters/ffdshow-20020617.exe)).

The other is to reencode with the brightness jacked up. If you frame serve with an .avs, then you'll want Donald Graft's Tweak Filter (http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/tweak/tweak13.zip) and set it to something like Tweak(Bright=1.3). And if you frameserve with a VFAPI, then you can use the Brightness/Contrast filter in VDub.

[iromeoi]

i do frameserve with .avs using GKnot (which, of course, uses nandub/vdub). Directly from the GKnot interface.

I downloaded the Tweak.dll (although I don't know what to do with it) b/c the tweak site only explains how to use VDF files (directly from within vDub). So I downloaded his VDF version of "brightness/contrast" filter also.

How do I use either the Tweak.dll or the VDF, with GKnot?

----[edited addition]----
since i posted the above reply, i went back and took a peak inside an AVS file to familiarize myself, as to hopefully save you time explaining. And I think that explained how to use the DLL. Is there someway to preview the DLLs brightness settings before undergoing the entire 11 hour encoding? And is there some kind of drawback to applying the brightning filter?

just for curiosities sake, now that I've figured out how to use the DLL version...if for some reason I wanted to use the VDF format how would I go about doing that?

[manono]

Hi-

As perhaps you've discovered by now, there's quite a complete help file that comes along with the Tweak.dll.

As for setting it up-put the .dll in with your other .dlls (if you use GKnot, throw it in there). Load the plugin like loading all other plugins. And then Tweak(Bright=Whatever) in the body of your .avs. To see how it looks, open the .avs in VDub-Nandub and scroll around-either that or put in with the Edit button when setting up the .avs in GKnot, and hit Preview to see the results.

As for the VDub version, put the .vdf file in the Plugins folder of VDub-Nandub. Then, when you open VDub-Nandub, make sure you're in Full Processing, and go Video-Filters-Add, and scroll to it and double-click. With the VDub version, you'll get before and after views on the two screens.

I'd recommend using the AviSynth version as you can stay in Fast Recompress and the encoding will be faster.

Drawbacks-the movie will be less compressible-far outweighed by being actually able to see it now. If you use the automatic 2 pass GKnot method, you'll be unable to use Full Processing and the VDub version. You'll have to run the 2 passes manually.