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Dark Information Unintentionally Revealed


Stewart McLain

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Last night a short film of mine was in an online film festival.  I was unhappy to see that in several scenes which were intended to have a dark background, and which have always appeared dark when watching elsewhere, the picture was almost fully illuminated.  It was as though the ambient light level had been lifted by a stop or more.  A basement ceiling that was supposed to be largely obscured by darkness was entirely visible. 

As a note, I watched the festival on my television via hdmi from my laptop and the festival was conducted over a zoom call.  This morning I watched a clip streamed from Filmfreeway with the same laptop to tv setup and the picture looked as intended.

How is this possible?  Is Zoom increasing the overall gain?  And why is that information recoverable?  Is this preventable by more aggressively crushing the blacks or increasing contrast?  Posting here because I suspect my grading skills are to blame. 

Thanks for any insight!

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Hi!

There are several options in Zoom that can be set by the sender and by the receiver: deshake, denoise, deflicker, … . (Screenshots from the German iPhone version)

It’s hard to tell whether it was an incorrect setting on your or the organizer‘s side.

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@Joerg Polzfusz  Those settings might have had something to do with it.  I'm still curious as to what I could do to protect my images in the future.  I mean, it's not possible to to light up the darkened corners of the Batcave or Don Corleone's inner sanctum just by tweaking a few settings on Zoom, right?  

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Crushing blacks excessively has side effects. Might want to control the lighting better so you don't have spill on the planes you want black. And if you want to check your work to make sure there is no information in the blacks export the final cut then bring it back into the editor and increase the exposure to check if there is still info there

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