Glitch in the machine…

Oh how i’ve loved living at the studio for the last week…(not). It’s been a full-on task getting the film finished…but when i set the final Mpeg2 render going last night, i thought that was that. I assumed i’d pop in today, burn a DVD and i’d be done..

But oh no… fate had other ideas.

I burned the Mpeg2 video and AC3 audio to a video DVD and stuck it in my DVD player…and what did i see? Not a lot… it was so dark i could barely make out what was going on in some of the scenes…pants.

So, after much googling, it turns out there’s 2 issues here. Firstly, Apple gamma isn’t the same as everyone else’s…. and secondly, compressing video to Mpeg2 causes additional darkening… great.

So, i’ve added a gamma correction filter to the render this time and set it going again… it won’t finish until later tonight, so i’m not going to have the master DVD until the morning now.

I also forgot about the quality loss going from DV footage to DVD…  Hollywood studios use very very expensive Mpeg2 encoders that work in an adaptive manner…ie, they work harder on the shots with more movement and complicated things going on. Unfortunately, us mortals are stuck with Apple Compressor or one of the other similar packages.  Still, it looks pretty good, so it’s not all bad.

One thing i am really chuffed about is the audio master. I encoded it using Dolby Digital into an AC3 file… it’s amazing, but the audio now sounds just like a film should. The dialogue is clear and crisp and the foley sounds great.. there’s some clever compression going on there.  I was pleased with the audio master anyway, but this has made a big difference.

So… we wait another day.. What’s one more when you’ve come this far?

S