divx brightening - whether to do it and how to do it best

[canadian_fbi]

i'm doing a rip of some sopranos episodes now and i've got sort of a problem... the original dvds appear to be quite dark, but when brightening them (using the levels function in the avs script), the colors seemed washed out. i used a gamma of 1.2 so it's not like it was that dramatic a change. so i have two questions:
[list=1] in a case when the source dvd is rather dark like this, do you feel it's best to attempt some sort of brightening, or to simply leave the original as is, unaltered? this is more of a philosophical question than a practical one, since you obviously can't see the original sopranos episode i'm talking about (unless you've ripped it before). i know some people prefer leaving the source alone and not taking out noise or anything, whereas others want to modify it. i generally lean towards sticking as close to the dvd as possible, warts and all.

if brightening, which method works best? as i said before, adding a levels function to the avs script before encoding seemed to wash out the colors. when previewing the vdub filter, it didn't seem to do it to that extent. i'm not sure if this is a yuv color space issue or not, because i'm relatively new at this. but i am curious as to how colorspaces affect things like this.
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[diji1]

Hi there,

Firstly what a great series the sopranos is don't you think ? :)

I say leave the original unaltered because you can adjust levels during playback using the codec to your hearts desire.

Also its very important to have ur monitor setup correctly when you make judgements about these sorts of things. Theres a rough guide in nickys guides somewhere about how to do it ( i think, been ages since i visited that site ) - i use the photoshop gamma setup utility. Sorry if this is irrelevent to your situation.

As for question 2 i couldn't say.

[MaTTeR]

I agree with diji1...post processing will give the best results. It's just a fact that DivX4 is just dark. I have my theory why but I'll hold my tongue;)

[canadian_fbi]

yeah, the sopranos is great :)

i took out the avisynth levels filter and did it in virtualdub instead.... i'm not exactly sure if these are two different things since so many avisynth function calls seem to be related to vdub, but if it was that or turning it from fast recompress to full processing mode, it solved my problem of the colors bleeding out. still, i'm inclined to go with you guys and just leave it as-is. one reason why i hadn't done the post-processing so much is that i've got wmp 8 with windows xp and it doesn't seem to have the same buttons in the properties tag to change codec options, and whenever i change brightness, etc., it seems to reset them the next clip i play. so i downloaded bsplayer and have been having a lot easier time with modifying the brightness.

and as far as adobe gamma is concerned, thanks for the tip. now that i've changed my calibration of course i don't notice too much of a difference, but switching between "before" and "after" after modifying it was very dramatic.