Video Levels are wrong in PC footage from GB West.

Ever since you moved studios, the video levels have been set incorrectly for your PC footage, resulting in a washed-out image.

One of the more obvious examples of this would be the Devil Daggers Quick Look, since that game is supposed to take place in a black void. In your video, however, it's gray.

This happened before the studio PC was updated Windows 10, so that is unrelated.

For a very brief moment, it seemed to be fixed in the SUPERHOT Quick Look, but everything else since then has been back to using the wrong video levels.

The most likely cause for this is that the output is set incorrectly in the NVIDIA Control Panel. (I believe you are using an NVIDIA GPU) since it is only PC footage which is affected.

If it's not that, then something else is set incorrectly in your capture/editing chain.

GB East's PC footage is unaffected.

I can confirm this. The image is also not as sharp as it was.

It's very noticable in UPFs when they switch to a PC.

This has been mentioned so many times in Quick Look comments, at this point it either isn't the problem or they just don't care.

Looks like it's still a problem with the new Oculus Rift footage.

Corrected:

I just don't see how someone working in video production doesn't notice that and correct it immediately.

@00: Holy shit, I'm an idiot. I didn't know about this... I know hundreds of people who don't know about this on my architecture course and we all do loads and loads of graphic design work... We're all idiots. My project is about manipulating light to comfortable dark spaces too...

Well, as they say, learning is a super power.

This is still a problem.

From the VRodeo 01

1. The Oculus logo is supposed to be pure white (255,255,255) and measures 233,235,233 in the video.
2. The background here is supposed to be solid black (000,000,000) and measures 013,016,013 in the video.
3. Shows the disparity between "black" from the PC, compared to the black background you're using for the green screen.

That shouldn't happen if you're doing in-place upgrades, and it should be trivial to fix when encoding the video if it reset and they forgot to change it back before recording.

It's not only the color range. It looks more blurry overall. The scaling used to be excellent and now the footage looks much worse. Something goes wrong when it converts 1080p to 720p for TriCaster. It's a big downgrade and is especially visible when they have to scale VR games.

@drewbert I'm sure you and Jason are aware of the issue. Is it something that can be fixed or maybe you could at least shed some light on the issue? Thanks.

I think contrast is intentionally a little crushed to make game details easier to see on a wide range of displays that people have. Not everyone is viewing GB content on an awesome display with a huge contrast range.

Compare to GB East having the opposite problem where the videos are captured at what seems to be a much lower brightness or gamma than they have their studio displays set to. Many times in the Kerbal videos or the Layers of Fear Quick Look the crew is obviously seeing details, because they're commenting on what they're looking at, while I'm staring at a pitch black screen.

Crushing the contrast/upping the gamma a bit and making sure a game is visible to the widest swath of viewers out there is the lesser of the two evils when the alternative is having great color, but making dark games impossible to make out for a portion of the audience.

@sweetz: Well that portion of the audience can spend 5min of their time to adjust their screen and watch those great colors instead of blackness.

Incorrect levels has been a thing for as long as Giant bomb has been a thing but yes the recent videos are notably blurrier somehow.

No, this is not intentional. It doesn't affect the PS4/XB1 footage, only PC footage.

And it's very specifically outputting 16-235 (or close enough, since they're still using analog video) which corresponds to a limited-range output.

Ah you beat me to it.

I grabbed the most similar keyframe from both videos, scaled them to match, and added a black border.

GB East's footage has always suffered from bad compression artifacts from whatever encoder they're using, but that's a separate issue.

Here's GB East's footage:

And GB West's footage:

I hope they don't see this and make things darker :P, i prefer grey if it results in an overall brighter image.

@monkehhh said:

Are you doing a "clean install" which removes all driver settings? It shouldn't be resetting like that when upgrading the driver.

Either way, it's something that should be immediately obvious before recording the video, and easy to fix before publishing it.

It doesn't. It's compressing an 0-255 image to 16-235.

So the black level is raised and the white level is reduced, resulting in a dull washed-out image.

This was so obvious with the recent Quick Look of Overwatch, switching between PS4 and PC versions.

Pretty sure they don't care about this issue since this thread has gone unnoticed for over two months.

It's cool if they fix it but I don't think it's as extreme of a problem as some people are making it to be. I work with images/photography/etc everyday, have my monitor tweaked for the best output to work in that area and my eyes are used to find these kinds of stuff but even I almost didn't notice the light black on the recent videos. Also, 013,016,013 is not even grey yet and most users on this site didn't even noticed that PC footage is lighter and probably will only notice if they have both 013,016,013 and 000,000,000 right next to each other. The difference is so minimal that probably it wasn't fixed because it looks good on the monitors they have on the studio.

Now, I do agree with how the GBEast looks though, there's been multiple times where they reference something in the dark that it's impossible to see on the video. But there has also been situations where the opposite happened and the footage was too bright or with the colors slightly wrong, the biggest example of this situation is the Contradiction videos.

Well I'm not sure why it isn't really obvious if you work with images/photography all day, but this is video 101.

Even if you don't notice it right away, it should be clear on the histogram.

The higher contrast your display is the more noticeable it should be, as the difference between black and gray (this is very gray) is larger.

Have you tried tweeting at Drew or Jason about this? They've both generally replied to tweets I've made at them, might be the best way to get this noticed.

Also thanks for mentioning this because it made me realize my own PC was outputting as limited to my TV. I'd noticed games on my PC looking more washed out than games on consoles before and knew about the differences between limited and full color range but didn't realize there was an option in the Nvidia control panel to fix it.

guessing my standards are in the gutter as i've never noticed any of these things (when the screenshots are next to each other i can tell the difference kinda? but normal viewing it hasn't affected me at all).

i'm sure they're aware at this point and either it's a bigger problem than it appears or they don't consider it significant enough to address.

I love GB, and I've been paying money to these guys for years now, but it's always a little weird how they over-emphasize certain quality issues and let some fall to the wayside. Video production isn't easy, and lots of people speak without any expertise on certain issues, but it's so confounding why certain things are just forgotten about. There are a lot of different parts being juggled around during live-streams, but levels during quicklooks and such should be easily fixed and noticed.

Personally, I've got digital vibrance cranked all the way up (how else am I going to go pro in CS:GO) and it makes the fucked video levels even more noticeable.

Jason can fuck up his cables all he wants - that doesn't effect me, just CBSi's budget - but video levels do effect me :(

Am I the only one who don't know what this is about and can't tell the difference? XD

I was expecting to see whining over a subtle difference, but it actually is kind of shocking.

Watching the current Old Games Show stream, it looks like they may have fixed this!

It seems that on Windows 10 - which GB West are using - the video levels are reset every time the NVIDIA drivers are updated.

So that's possibly why this keeps happening, and it either needs to be something that they actually check before recording, or set up their capture gear to use 16-235 rather than 0-255.

Of course it would be great if NVIDIA wouldn't discard this setting every time they update the drivers too...

@00: For some reason the latest UPF archive seems to have gone through a color range mismatch. This makes the PC footage even more fucked.