Help needed from colourist/avid experts...

[Jamie Havill]

Hey,

We literally have hours before we need to submit our short film to the Cannes Cinefoundation, and we're having problems with our DVD encode.

Whenever we transcode to MPEG2, we ALWAYS have a milky overlay on our video. This has been a problem for us for as long as I can remember.

I export a master (Quicktime Reference) from Avid using RGB and the colours are fine, nice deep blacks, and saturated colours. Then as soon as the film gets transcoded to another format (both Blu Ray copies and DVD copies suffer from this) the colour shift/milkiness happens!

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm sure we're not the first ones to experience this.

PICTURE ATTACHED HIGHLIGHTING COLOUR SHIFT.

 

[Bruce Allen]

What are you using to make the DVD? Try Adobe Encore. Also, just try exporting it in Animation codec from Avid?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Oliver Peters]

You are fighting how an encoder deals with QT and 709 versus RGB levels. You are also fighting QT. It CANNOT be trusted. QT makes adjustments to the image to optimize it for the display (your computer screen) and will alter levels (or not) based on known or assumed specs and profiles for the codecs it encounters.

Unfortunately all encoders process levels slightly differently, so Compressor on a Mac will do different things than Squeeze on a PC, for example. I'm on a Mac and the right recipe for me is to export Avid "same as source". That's 601/709 color levels. Encode in Compressor to MPEG-2 and author in DVD SP. This will result in a DVD with proper levels.

Blu-ray is a different path, of course.

- Oliver

 

[Rainer Fritz]

Don't use compressor... use Adobe Media Encoder CS5. It works well on bluray side because they wrap the H264 into a MP4 container... didn't tried that with PAL DVD but I think it will do it also fine....
It depends how you ingested the footage into mediacomposer... if you graded full range and worked RGB then you should be fine to get same out what you put in...