MM degrading color/brightness

[Guest]

Since I'm posting here for the first time, let me tell you it's because I
have searched/read everything I can and cannot restore the published output
from MM to what it was a few weeks ago (yes, I did a restore, but I cannot at
this time reload Vista).

So here is the problem. I have a complex movie made in MM 6 but if I
publish it to DV-AVI, the brightness is substantially reduced. If I attempt
to publish this a using any other profile including custom ones, it tints the
movie color towards the red spectrum.

It did not do this a few weeks ago and I know it's due to me attempting to
install various codecs to use Mpeg4. I have uninstalled all of them, I've
attempted to disable non-obvious filters for directshow but I'm just shooting
in the dark here. Yes, I have disabled all extra filters in MM options
(there wasn't really anything there new). I would even accept at this point
to publish it to DV-AVI which would stretch the size, but even that is too
degraded to use.

I have no easy way to publish this on another machine as it's about 100
clips all specifically trimmed, etc. so I was hoping someone here might have
a solution.

Any ideas or ways to locate the source of this filtering that is occurring.

Thanks in advance,

Meret

 

[RalfG]

Don't know about MM6 but MM2.1 cannot use any other codecs than Windows
Media or DV. Installing other codecs has no effect as they are just ignored.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but AFAIK DV-AVI is a format intended
primarily for display on Television, which uses an entirely different colour
space and a higher Gamma than typical computer monitors. The most visibly
obvious difference is that TV is much brighter than a computer monitor. A
video that appears normal brightness on a monitor will be overly bright or
washed out looking on a TV. MM automatically adjusts its output according
to the viewing medium it is apparently intended for.

Usually you would expect video/image editing software to use whatever color
profiles are installed for your output devices in order to correct the
"apparent" colour. A video would look different when viewed with or without
using the same colour profile. MM is a rather simple program though and I
don't know if it does that level of colour matching. Or possibly MM uses
colour matching and the video viewing program does not. I did see samples
from someone else's conversion to WMV that did seem to show a slight shift
towards magenta, especially in the darker shades, but I'm not completely
certain about it because the samples were not both exactly the same frame,
only close.