I still don't know what "TV levels" or "PC levels" are, but that's it, really.
ConvertToRGB(clip, matrix="rec709")
All this was prompted by news (to me, anyway) of a cheaper, better alternative to the HDfury. That made me take a harder look at my AviSynth video settings.
Right now I'm playing Jet Set Radio (free on Vita and $2.50 on PS3 thanks to PlayStation Plus), and I recorded one of the sewer levels. Those levels are always dark. Playing the level on my monitor was fine, but my raw capture (MJPEG) was darker than I remembered. I learned from this thread that the capture was YUV (confirmed with MediaInfo and the Blackmagic site), and that RGB would've been ideal.
That's when I looked for an AviSynth solution and found this page. And wow, what a difference...
Raw capture (YUV):
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Converting to RGB:
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For me, this is huge. Going back to the Tekken 3 days, Castel's combo videos were always clearer and crisper than my own. My blanket solution was just to brighten the whole clip, but I wasn't completely satisfied. Fast forward a decade and I was capturing Einhänder from my PS3 and expecting great things. However, the first two levels were as dark and muddy as ever, and certainly a far cry from the crisp picture from emulators. I'm going to try Einhänder again, and while I don't expect that level of improvement, I'm still excited to see the results.
Downsides to using RGB? Considerably longer encoding times. The 1st pass was about 38 fps instead of about 88, and the 2nd pass was only a little slower at about 36 fps instead of about 60. I also know some AviSynth filters can't be used with some color spaces, but I rarely try anything fancy.
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EDIT: Well that was a waste of time... after actually encoding with my usual settings in Xvid4PSP (i.e. without color space lines in AviSynth), the videos look pretty much the same, both looking more like my RGB vid. Quite a difference from the raw video screen grabs above. Looks like I still won't bother adding any color space lines to my AviSynth scripts after all, since I'll get the fastest speeds and the best picture quality anyway.
