I noticed that when I captured footage from my latest short onto the computer, I lost of lot of light in the night scenes. I panicked immediately as a lot of the subjects become too dark to see, so I upped the gamma before I rendered and burned to DVD. When I watched the finished file on my computer and on the DVD, I gained the light back that I seemed to have lost during capture, and the scenes in which I increased the gamma looked horribly washed out and grainy. Why is it that this happens? I plan on burning a final file of the movie to DVD and sending it to studentfilms.com. When all is said and done and the movie is uploaded, will I lose that light again once the movie hits the net, or will it retain the same look it had on the DVD? I'm trying to adjust my color correction levels to create the best possible look, but with this gaining/losing of light, I'm not sure quite what to do with the night footage.

Sorry to bump this, still wondering if anyone has an answer...

PC gamma is different than Mac standard gamma. Mac gamma is closer to most televisions, I think, but that's just my instinct.

For accurate color correction, you should use a real monitor (which will entail getting a video card that supports s-video or RCA out, or a breakout box). The cheaper alternative is just to check what it looks like on a TV at regular intervals. A laptop with an s-video out is good for this.

There's usually some difference, but not as massive as you're describing. If it looks OK on your computer now, it should look roughly the same online (although compression tends to artificially boost contrast and crush shadow detail).

Yeah, basically you're not actually losing any light, you're monitor just isn't properly calibrated. Either try to re-calibrate your monitor or do what Evan said about the s-video and the TV.

What you need to understand is that nothing is going wrong with your capturing. By the situation you described you're merely improperly viewing, on your computer monitor, what you recorded.

elliott (otiose)...

most computer screens ( especially apple lcds i have noticed ) are going to make your footage appear darker, but dont sweat it when u export back to tape it will look how it looked when you shot it