Global brightness/contrast adjustment

[Michel Gilbert]

We need to output our show (single screen) from Watchpax to an Atomos Flame video recorder. All is fine but for one thing, the recorded video file has probably a 10% higher brightness than what we get on our monitors or our protectors.

 

Is there a global command in WATCHOUT we could use to reduce the displayed brightness? Read the manual and could not find what we are looking for.

 

Thanks

 

Michel Gilbert

W/O 5.1

[matkeane]

My first thought was that you could just drop a black solid over the top of all your Displays and play with the opacity, but that's perhaps not a very elegant solution. An alternative would be to adjust the RGB sliders in the advanced settings of the Display configuration. I think this is normally for adjusting the white balance of different outputs to match, but dropping all the RGB slider to, say, 90% should achieve what you want. And, although it's not a global setting, as it's set on each display, it would be quite easy to adjust all your Displays to the same settings.

 

Matthew

[Fredrik Svahnberg]

Hi Michel!

 

You can copy your complete show into a "composition" and apply a brightness/contrast tween track to this composition.

[warwolf]

You could also use put a virtual display where your screens were and output those virtual display on top of the new location of your displays. You would now have individual brightness control of each virtual display and you can apply any tween you would like to use.

Virtual display are very powerful.

 

with the previous options given, I think you can see that there is multiple options for you. With Watchout, There is always more than one way to do something.

 

-Have a good day

[matkeane]

An afterthought: Some of the Atomos recorders (can't remember which models) have a built-in waveform monitor. If the Flame has this function, you add some colour bars to your Watchout project and see whether the output levels are actually 'hot' or whether it's more a monitor calibration issue.

[Michel Gilbert]

Thanks to all. We will look into the various suggestions. I like Fredrik's idea.  Just back from a presentation and our video file looked a bit hot... at least to our liking. Coming from a Kodachrome background (last century) we like saturated and slightly underexposed images. We have been very successful at achieving the look we want using Watchout. Only need to find the best way to replicate when we have a single screen show that needs to be dubbed to video. Fortunately we were outputting Prores 4.2.2 so the result was OK.... still prefer the original Watchout uncompressed result though.

 

 

As Warwolf said, multiple options is the norm with Watchout.

[Mike Fahl]

The easiest is probably to use the color balance sliders of he display to just back all colors down a bit. That will decrease the overall brightness without changing the color tint.