How to tell if brightness/contrast OK?

[neily]

Hi,

I hope this is the best place to ask. Basically I want to archive my family camcorder S-VHS tapes to DVD. Ideally, I only want to do it once, as I don't want to wear out the tapes, and should my camcorder pack up in the future, I would go for a DV model instead.

What I want to know is how best to get the brightness / contrast / hue / saturation right. There are so many variables, like how my monitor is set up, how my TV is set up, how the codecs and capture card drivers are set up etc, I am not convinced that doing it such that it looks OK with my current set up is adequate when looking longer term. Are there any more qualitative methods I can take?

My normal route is camcorder > WinTV PCI > HuffYUV > AVISynth > CCE.

[communist]

Just record a scene where everything is involved and check if saturation / brightness etc. isnt messed up during your capture & convert procedure.

Oversaturation can easily be recognized - so can too much brightness (black no more black but grey...).

[IJM]

Hi,

Yes. There is a way. Have a look at this:

Luke's Video Guide - Video Tuning (http://www.lukesvideo.com/videotuning.html)

In short, it explains how to set up your capture using the histogram in Virtualdub to fine tune Brightness and Contrast.

I hope this helps.

Ian.

[ronnylov]

Originally posted by IJM
Hi,

Yes. There is a way. Have a look at this:

Luke's Video Guide - Video Tuning (http://www.lukesvideo.com/videotuning.html)

In short, it explains how to set up your capture using the histogram in Virtualdub to fine tune Brightness and Contrast.

I hope this helps.

Ian.

But Luke's Guide is made with the purpose of computer playback. Shouldn't the TV-scale (16-235 or something similar) also be concidered? But maybe it's just to check that setting in CCE?

[IJM]

Originally posted by ronnylov
But Luke's Guide is made with the purpose of computer playback. Shouldn't the TV-scale (16-235 or something similar) also be concidered? But maybe it's just to check that setting in CCE?
Good point. Luminance range is definately something you need to take account of.

The original request was for a more quantative method of setting contrast and brightness, which is exactly what Virtualdub's histogram is for. The Video Tuning section of Luke's guide does indeed tell you to use settings to maximise the luminance range. Naturally this gives you a captured AVI with a luminance range of 0-255.

However, I've checked CCE's manual, and while it isn't quite clear, I guess that it will assume that the input AVI will have a "computer's" luminance range (ie. 0-255). And so in this case you would need to select the "16 to 235" luminance level in CCE to ensure that it will output an MPEG appropriate for TV display.

I admit I've made some assumptions here, so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Ian.