Incredibly dark videos

[Yuhaney]

I believe that you use setting in the recording program that compress' the color space, so in the end, it comes out darker than it really is.

Take a look at the Fraps' settings and see if you use the "Force lossless RGB capture".
If you have it off while you record, the recorded video look very dark in playback.

[mattwestwick]

Lossless RGB made no difference for me as fraps would still record using the full colour scale of 0-255.

Vegas uses 'studio' colour scale which is 16-235. So when you work with fraps files in sony vegas it comes out missing the darkest colours and the highlights at the other end (less noticeable than darkness).

You can get encoders that will shift fraps files into more standard values however really it's just vegas not using the full spectrum by default.

Like I said there's a few solutions in vegas.

Use 'levels' effect with preset 'computer RGB to studio RGB'

or

Go into File>preferences, and change the pixel format to 32 bit floating point (full range).


Done

[Yuhaney]

I do understand what you are explaining and you are correct about the colors.
But try to render a video into lossless format with both of Fraps' settings (without any color correction) and you see what I meant.

Since in 99.9% of cases, people render into lossy format instead of lossless.
And because the lossy format compress' the colors, the final video ends up being dark. That's why you need to do the color correction, that you are suggesting, to correct the colors so that the final video would look normal.

So, here's my current scenario to sum it up:
If you record with lossy RGB setting in Fraps (as I am afraid he might do), then render it once (without color correction) and upload it to YouTube, the color space of video is compressed three times (record>render>upload).
No wonder the video ends up being dark. But, if you set the setting in Fraps into what I said, and do the color correction that you said and render into lossy format, the the video is going to look normal.

However, I haven't recorded in lossy RGB with Fraps for years, so I don't know what color correction setting you need to use to make it look normal so that is why I say to use the lossless RGB.

[mattwestwick]

Yup 3 times compression will suck hard. I always have lossless RGB in fraps by default, I mean, why would you not have this.

Using the lossy format doesn't itself make the videos dark.

I found that with or without 'lossless RGB' checked the final videos would be equally as dark, with the normal fraps lossy (yuvj) format just being a slightly crappier quality. They both use the same colour range though so the common suggestion of 'tick lossless RGB' won't work by itself but it is good practice.

Check the video scope values for 2 clips I recorded in fraps with both formats.

Normal lossy output:
http://i45.tinypic.com/vxf4zt.png

And then Lossless RGB
http://i50.tinypic.com/2mwb4n5.png

Both have the bulk of the black value information starting from zero. Lossy format doesn't make it any darker.


I wasn't clear enough with the pixel format stuff. Vegas only renders 16-235 regardless of the input file, and yes you can colour correct to make it look normal. But if you select 32 bit pixel format you don't need to use correction as vegas will actually render from 0-255 and you don't need to stretch your original video to fit 16-235.


This article was very useful.
http://www.glennchan.info/articles/vegas...8color.htm

[Peter]

The difference is chroma resolution and how it stores colour channels*.

Without lossless color ticked you get a video encoded in yuvj420p (or whetever your program calls it, this is FFMPEG's term).

With lossless color ticked you get a video encoded in bgr24.

The reason one may not exhibit the same darkness problem than the other is mostly incidental.

It depends on the program reading the file. A program that doesn't get one of them right (i.e. Pick up that it has 0-255 levels), may well get the other one right, but they're both 0-255 levels of brightness pixel formats, and they're both susceptible to being confused as a 16-235 levels of brightness pixel format.

*Without getting really technical yuv doesn't store a frame as red, green, and blue channel, instead using an alternative of storing a luma (brightness - i.e. Grey-scale) and two chroma (colour) channels, this can represent exactly the same information as red, green, blue, but has a big advantage - when we send a lower resolution chroma channel in YUV (this is chroma subsampling), it is way less noticeable than sending a lower resolution red, green, or blue channel. 420 is a ratio (4:2:0) describing a way the chromas are sampled in comparison to luma, this particular one holding quarter the resolution of colour in comparison to luma. Generally a person can only tell the difference on zoomed stills. The 'lossless color' option in FRAPs refers to chroma subsampling, not compression of colour, and not the codec as a whole (which is why it's an option for the colorspace of the same codec). If YUV420 is good enough for blu-ray, then it's probably good enough for video game footage.

[mattwestwick]

Thanks for putting the final nail in the coffin on this one Peter. Takes me back to my AV processing and encoding days.

Like you mentioned about variances between players. I found that VLC plays yuvj as dark and bgr24 as normal but you can alter the yuv->rgb conversion option to play it like you expected.


Windows media player his it's nuances so I just avoid it.

[Kein]

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/

Oh that.. there is a better solution, it is called as AVS proxy, comes with awesome tool AVIDemux.

[DatDirtyDawG]

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.

I know this is an old thread but I had the exact same problem in that all my videos recorded with Fraps came out very very dark. Found a solution so here goes:

Mind you this solution works under the following conditions: Nvidia card and Windows Live Movie Maker software.

In the Nvidia control panel under video/video color settings change the default setting from "with player settings" to "with nvidia settings". Record and compile your video. For me I compile to a .WMV output using WLMM. After it's done compiling change the setting (in nvidia control panel) back to default and your video will have the correct color. No more dark.

It's a bit of a drag going in and out of control panel like that but it works and for me its either that or use a different recording software and I really like Fraps. Hope this helps

[failedALIAS]

NecroDAWG pls.

[mattwestwick]

Man, this takes me back.