Chroma too hot

[lcress]

I'm working on a half hour show that is going to DVD. I've burned a couple of tests to DVD and when I play them, the chroma on the video out of SE looks pretty hot. Especially on the on camera interviews. I have gone back into each of the interview clips and set the saturation to .75. So now it looks a little better (but still kind of hot).

My question: Is there a way to set the output of the entire render to a color saturation of .75?

Maybe something wrong in the workflow? The interviews were captured in Vegas and brought straight into SE. Didn't notice the chroma issue until I burned to DVD.

DVD's were burned by saving the SE project as an "stand in" avi (can't think of the right term - damn mental block). Then rendered out a wav file for the audio. Brought the avi and wav file into Encore and let Encore encode the DVD.

I have other footage I am using that was captured through Vegas and it looks fine. The reason I am capturing through Vegas is that there is no machine control for my deck in SE. Hopefully SE 2.0 has a solve for that.

[donx]

You could stretch the Colour Correction video effect, across the whole timeline before saving as an avi to send to Encore

[lcress]

Good idea. Thanks for the tip Don. Should have thought of that since I'm doing the same thing with the Time Code window. Makes sense.

Still kind of wondering why chroma is hot in the first place. It seems like chroma for the whole project is set at 100% somehow.

I quickly stumbled through the Perferences settings but couldn't find any settings for video output. Back in the day when we had wicked calibrated Ikegami monitors in the edit suite you knew what you were getting for output. (plus paying attention to the vectorscope and waveform monitor) Now working with digital video displayed on an LCD screen you really have no idea what it will look like in video land.

I would be interested in hearing what others are doing to calibrate their SE edit setup. I find that the workflow of using the avi wrapper out of SE in Encore works smoothly. Just want to know how to control what it looks like at the other end.

I guess what I will do is drop in the 100% color bars at the beginning, stretch the color correction effect across the project, then refer to the vectorscope while pulling the saturation down to .75. That should line up the dots in the boxes on the vectorscope.

After that I really won't know what i am getting until I burn another DVD.

[lcress]

Hmm... I went back and looked at the original capture footage and checked the camera color bars in the vectorscope. Sure enough, chroma was right where it needed to be. All dots in the boxes, matching the 75% color bars. So the capture footage is not hot. What I see in the SE monitor is accurate (enough).

So now I'm thinking my chroma problem is in the encoding of the avi wrapper in Encore.

Guess I'll start researching that angle.

[lcress]

Guess I get to answer my own question (or at least, do my own research).

A search of the list resulted in these facts....

"Avi wrapper not good enough and encore does not like The wrapper codec that newtek has made.
Pete "

link:
http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=91331&highlight=encore+avi+wrapper

"Since this thread may be used as education for someone I thought I should conclude that using Encore to encode for DVD from my .avi wasn't looking as good as the version I encoded to mpeg2, using TMPGEnc
I finally bought a copy and it has much more control, especially for fast moving dancers.

It took a few days to experiment but I think I now have a workflow. It takes Four programs to accomplish the perfect DVD
SpeedEdit
VirtualDub
TMPEGEnc
Encore"

Donx

link:
http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97787&highlight=encore+avi+wrapper

Conclusion: Sure enough, encoding through TMPEGEnc did the trick. Looks like the chroma issue is mostly gone. Except ... the on camera interviews are still slightly chroma engourged. All the B-roll shot with the same camera looks good. Is this because I bypassed the VirtualDub step?

Here's what I did. Save the avi wrapper out of SE, plus the .wav file. Fired up TMPEGEnc, pulled in the avi wrapper file, the wav file and ground out an m2v file. Of course TMPEGEnc wants to write out its own wav file in the process.

Launched Encore, pulled in the m2v and wav. Good news, no re-encoding of the video. Wrote out an iso from Encore. Burned that to DVD and wallah ... good looking DVD video.

But still the video is a little hot on the on camera interviews. By this I mean the flesh color is just a little too pink, i.e. hot chroma.

Is this the trick? :

"Using VirtualDub to make the .avi saved from Speed Edit into progressive, resized to 720x480 and sharpened with it's filters." Donx

This seems like an extraneous step. I'll give it a go anyway. Just thought I would update the thread for those that might be experiencing the same problems.

I sure hope SE 2.0 addresses the mpeg2 encoding issue.

[Pete Draves]

If you look in the SpeedEdit 3rd party folder you will find a (.vfp) plugin
called "VTTMPGEncProjectPlugin.vfp". Copy this file to the TMPGEnc main directory.

Now you can load the se or vt project file into TMPGEnc and get a clean audio and video encode out. Audio in TMPGEnc can ve set to mpeg1 layer2 or wave. Use wave.

The avi wraper has never worked correctly with many programs.

This will save you some time.
regards
Pete

[lcress]

Thanks so much Pete!

I'll give that a try. Getting the workflow to DVD has been a challenge. I really appreciate all the knowledge I've gotten from you and others on the list.

[lcress]

Hmmm.... I copied the VTTMPGEncProjectPlugin.vfp file to the main directory for TMPEnc.

However, I can't load the .vtp file of the SE project. When I look at file types in the load file requester in TMPEnc I do SE a file type for "Newtek SpeedEdit Plugin *.*"

Am I supposed to be able to load the .vtp file or am I still needing to load the .avi wrapper?

... oh, and I am using TMPGEnc 2.5.

[Pete Draves]

The vtp file should load unless something is different in the project.
3rd party fx or things. I even have had a bad project not load.
Sometimes a save as a new project has helped. when saving as an avi se also saves a project that is not right for TMPGEnc. So save as a new vtp project.
hope this helps
Pete

[lcress]

Thanks Pete.

I made a new project and pulled in some misc. footage. Wrote out a new .vtp file and brought that into TPMGEnc and it loaded no problem.

I then created a new project and loaded my .vtp file from my edit project, wrote that out as a new .vtp. That one wouldn't load in TPMGEnc. There are no third party plugins or weird stuff in the edit, just cuts, dissolves and still images with moves on them done through the control tree.

Too bad. Guess I'm stuck using the avi wrapper instead.

Still hoping SE 2.0 addresses the path to DVD workflow issue.

[Pete Draves]

Render out an avi, dv type 2 for dvd.
Then you have to make sure the encoder is set to lower field.
Encore likes avi files.
Pete

[John Perkins]

I think there will be fewer reasons to go to a separate mpeg encoder with SE2.

It is now much faster and higher quality than before and can also encode AC3 audio.

You should be able to go directly from SE2 to Encore.

[lcress]

Thanks for the come back, John.

That's good news. If I can output a clean mpeg that Encore doesn't want to re-encode I'll be a happy camper.