Video not being as dark.

[iGREASE]

So basically in Virtual Dub my project's colors are perfect.
Black is Black.

But when I save it with the h.264 codec and replay my video, the black is no longer "black".
It kind of turns to a dark grey. And I do not want that.

The one on the left is in mpc player and the one on the right is in Virtual Dub.




The settings I use are:

Singlepass Ratefactor-based (CRF)
Max quality.

And everything else is whatever it was cause I don't know wtf any of that other stuff means.

Anyone got a solution?

[iGREASE]

Why is there not edit button?

Anyways.
Forget about this thread, I've already figured it out by myself.

[mirkosp]

Just to put it out there if anyone is having the same issue: it's about the output renderer used in the media player. Setting Haali Renderer for the output in mpc-hc will work fine.

[DualShax]

it looks the same to me, the black looks the same, only that the one on the left is a bit flat

[mirkosp]

it looks the same to me, the black looks the same, only that the one on the left is a bit flat

Perhaps you are using a CRT. On LCD the difference can get pretty noticeable, albeit it is rather slight here.

[Qyot27]

Only thing I noticed was that the right has nasty gradiation. But that could be from VDub being set on 16-bit color.


(and yes, I do use a CRT, and I keep my brightness level at 60%, contrast at 100%, color 9300)

[Fuki]

Vdub is displaying luma range of 0-255 (full range), whereas your player is outputting 16-235 (limited range). That's pretty normal. The video encoded in h264 is YV12 (planar YUV), and YUV video has native levels of 16-235. The uncompressed video was probably RGB (or lossless, such as lagarith, and the decoder was set to output RGB) which has native levels of 0-255. PC monitors display full range (that's why full range is also called "PC levels"), wheres HDTVs display limited range (that's why limited range is also called "TV levels"). Therefore video meant for TV (YUV video) is going to appear washed out in a PC monitor. It's natural, an pretty useful for professional editing. Regardless, you can "fix" this by forcing your decoder to output RGB levels, or configuring your graphic car to force RGB levels to all videos.