Incredibly dark videos

[jashen]

I have started recording amnesia videos, and I noticed that the videos come out at least 10x darker than it was originally, I have the in game brightness up to max and its still almost impossible to see, I have tried many recorders such a Fraps, and Playclaw, none of them fixed my problem, I have even gone into Vegas pro and such to manually increase the brightness, it just made everything blurry and ugly to look at, I'm not sure if it records this bad for everything since I've only recorded on Amnesia, if anyone has or knows a fix for this problem, please reply I'll give any information that you need.

[Kein]

Well that's plain weird. Try to reset videodriver's settings on defaults? Or, better, do a clean uninstall (via DriverSweeper) and re-install them.

[Xanthos]

Using a video editor you can edit that.
There's usually a Brightness/Contrast Setting.
Change the Contrast as well

[Kein]

Such adjustments are quite lossy, Xanthos.

[Hunter of Shadows]

I have started recording amnesia videos, and I noticed that the videos come out at least 10x darker than it was originally, I have the in game brightness up to max and its still almost impossible to see, I have tried many recorders such a Fraps, and Playclaw, none of them fixed my problem, I have even gone into Vegas pro and such to manually increase the brightness, it just made everything blurry and ugly to look at, I'm not sure if it records this bad for everything since I've only recorded on Amnesia, if anyone has or knows a fix for this problem, please reply I'll give any information that you need.

It's just youtube, not you, if you look at any of ChaoticMonki's video's the exact same thing pops up, he can see fine, but to those of us watching the video it's difficult at time's to see what's going on

[JMFStorm]

If you render FRAPS videos to format like mp4, the pictire gets really dark. WMV videos don't get as dark though.

[Litronom]

Under Fraps, try the "Force lossless RGB capture" option.
Some Video Editing programs have something similar, so that you can edit it after recording.

[mattwestwick]

I'm getting the same just now.

Original recorded files play fine in windows media player but are dark in vlc.

Editing in vegas it looks fine but the rendered video is dark in both wmp and vlc.


Will try to solve before getting too technical.

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Hmm, In vlc player I found that if I go into, tools>preferences

I can disable YUV->RGB conversion and it plays the video like I expect it to look.


My rendered edits are still dark but I'll see if vegas has a similar option or if the lossless rgb stuff in fraps fixes it.

[mattwestwick]

Well it seems fraps records avi files in a wierd format that is often not recognised by video players and editors.

There's a discussion about it on the fraps forum here
http://frapsforum.com/threads/fix-dark-f...ideos.758/

and some sort of guide to fixing it here
http://peter.corrosivetruths.org/2011/09...-too-dark/


I'll let you know how I get on

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If you want to avoid the above fixes.

I used a video effect in vegas called levels. Using the prest "computer RGB to studio RGB" It sort of fix the darkness problem in my videos but I think it was just stretching the colour output values.

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Okedoke I did a little homework on this subject.

You can re-encode fraps avi files into more standard versions however here's the way I'm going to do it.

Fraps files seem to use the full range of colour values from 0-255.
However Vegas treats the value for black as 16 so the zero value for black in your fraps file won't be seen and higher values will look darker. You can check values by going into, view>videoscopes and then select histogram. You can see that your fraps file with have values at zero whereas most other video files will show values beginning at 16.

To Shift your fraps file values towards 16 you can use what I mentioned above with the "levels" video effect selecting the preset named "computer RGB to studio RGB".

I think this may not be a completely perfect fix as you are just shifting values rather than allowing the original to be used. On comparison it looks fine to me so give it a try.

[mattwestwick]

Using the comp to studio rgb setting will work but I found another thing you can try.


Under file>preferences

For pixel format try selecting 32 bit floating point (full range)

Just remember to disable any level effects you previously had on.