I've been making vids for a while now, using Read ErMaC & AbsoluteDestiny's Friendly AMV Guides since the beginning. Everything works fine, but one thing still bugs me to this day: XviD seems to turn all footage darker.
In Premiere 6.5, the image is perfect. After I've exported my vid with Lagarith, I can open it in VDM and it still looks perfect. But after I finish exporting to an XviD avi, then the image will always be a couple of shades darker than it should.
Most of the time, it's not a problem--after all, the same amount of "darkening" is applied to the whole vid, so it's not that obvious. The problem comes up in darker scenes--night scenes for example--, where the image gets so dark that it's sometimes hard to even make out anything.
Mostly, I get rid of the problem by applying a gamma correction either to individual clips (if there are only a few coming out too dark) or to the whole vid. But that solution isn't really satisfactory: I lose quality and depth, especially for live action, which I don't like.
I've always thought that it might be due to colourspace conversions, but I'm not so sure anymore. Could it be an export setting I'm not using correctly? I'm using the Guide, so I expect not. Or is there an Avisynth filter I can apply to force VDM to keep everything as bright as it originally was?
It's not a huge problem, but it's annoying me nonetheless and I'd like to know once and for all whether or not I can do something to help it. I tried searching here before posting this, but haven't really found anything about it--though I don't know if it's because the subject wasn't mentioned before or simply because I wasn't able to find the right thread.
Thanks for your help!
S.



