AVI saturation problem

[powerandrubber]

I don't know if i've always had this problem or not but when I compile my tgas into an avi, the avi comes out way too saturated and doesn't match the original tgas at all. I've tried with a variety of compiling apps (including ram player) and a variety of codecs. The only way I don't get the oversaturation is when I compile to an uncompressed avi. I assume this has to do with compression?

[Morbid Angel]

yes this is compression related. Thats why we never use avi for showing shots to clients, always quicktimes.

[powerandrubber]

I can't believe it's taken this long for me to realize. Now I know why my animations are always dissapointing. Can you recommend a codec?

[Morbid Angel]

yes, we use two types:
1 - sorenson video 3, with compression of eather medium or best and keyframes at every 15th frame, 1000 kb/s stream.

2 - motion jpeg A, with eather medium or high quality.

Usually medium is for previews, high for client to see. But final outputs are always tga or other non compressed images.
Avi's are usually used for the web...when low file size is needed.

[DaForce]

what AVI codec are you using?
As i have never noticed this before.

Does it only happen with TGA's ?

[Morbid Angel]

daforce, no this happenes to any format. AVI also seems to do this with ever codec... something with the compression i guess.

[DaForce]

serious.....odd.

So if you get any series of any image format and compress them with AVI they wont look the same.. like the saturation will be out.??

That strikes me as odd, as I recently did some compression of PNG's and i think either TIF's or TGA's (not sure now) to an Xvid AVI and i certainly didnt notice any saturation differences.
Mind you it was a very simple render but still.

I might do some testing on this tonight. As it does strike me as odd.

[Morbid Angel]

with xvid, the image loses brightenes, so it becomes much darker...the more compression you put on it.

[DaForce]

and thats only converting from images to XVID or from anything (i.e. other video streams) to xvid??

[Morbid Angel]

same deal, i have converted quicktimes to xvid, divx, and they are dark.

[DaForce]

hmmm that is odd... cause recently i have been doing a fair bit of mpeg2 to xvid conversion and I cant say i have noticed the darkness that you mention.

Will run some test samples tonight.

<edit>
Just to be certain are you talking about a slight difference a a fairly significant difference?

[Morbid Angel]

the difference is quite segnificant.

[panthon]

Quicktime is always a safe bet. Take a look at the new H.264 codec shipped with quicktime 7. Small files, great quality! Unfortunately, all adobe products try to love avis and hate quicktimes (a while ago it was the opposite) and premiere doesn´t behave well with them, neither adobe encore. Avid is perfectly fine though.

By the way, we do use quicktime with sorenson 3 too, it´s kind of industry standard, at least at the moment.But I guess h.264 will take its place soon.

[vlado]

I think the .avi format applies some sort of gamma correction; I think there should be an option, either in the coder or decoder, for this.

Best regards,
Vlado

[suurland]

I experienced problems with quicktime, input files was png files where the background was pure white but when compressed with Sørensen3 to a .mov the white background got gray :/

/Thomas