Brightness/color issues with Vegas Pro 11 and Scarlet footage

[Bryan Gosline]

Hey everyone, I'm having issues with the image quality in terms of brightness and color. In RedCine the footage looks similar to what I saw on the RED monitor, looks great. Once I lay the file directly into Vegas Pro 11, the image gets much darker and more contrasty.

I opened up Adobe Premiere to test it out and the image is almost identical to RedCine, but a tad lighter.

Any reason to this? Is there something I'm missing when importing the Scarlet footage into Vegas Pro 11?

What would cause this?

Thanks!

[Nicholas Costaras]

Hi, the main reason for it would be the colour space. Vegas works at Computer RGB which is 0-255, and most codecs and programs support studio RGB which is 16-235. So the blacks are very different. When you push out an mp4 from Vegas you will see all the blacks dissapear into a void. So you need to place in either "Levels" which has a preset called "Computer RGB to Studio RGB" or use the "Secondary colour corrector". I cut a film trailer and had so many issues trying to figure this out. The latest trailer I cut went straight into the Arri lazer with the RGB corrections and the results were perfect.

Since the preview in vegas is designed for computer RGB your results will always be different. I find Red Cine does produce different results, it all depends on what you are looking for, and the only way I managed to get the edit in there was by importing the veg file into Premier pro and then exporting into xml into redcine. There might be a quicker way I just haven't had the time to experiment some more.

One other thing that will cause brightness differences etc is the "Pixel Format" settings in the project properties. 8bit and 32 bit, with different Compositing gamma will change your image too.