Casper Buijtendijk

An undoubtedly silly question: I've been playing around with SpeedGrade for 2 days now, and I've got three wheels to work with: Offset, Gamma and Gain. Now, I've messed around with the three, but I don't exactly know what they mean, and google doesn't really seem to help. In the past I worked with Premiere's curves, which really worked for me, but I thought I should move to something better. Can anyone tell me what those three things mean? Thank you!

Thank you for your answer. I didn't know this, I thought they did it on purpose (for whatever reason). Do you know of any way I could still compensate, as I still want my film to look good even when played back by bad players. Are there other players you would suggest for just watching movies?

I'm fairly new to color correction/grading, so this question may strike you as stupid. Anyway, I've been working on a shot in Adobe Speedgrade, and I'm pretty satisfied. I do know that most media players (including VLC, which I always use) display black as gray, so a lot of my work gets lost. I've tried just crushing the blacks more, but that gives the picture a very artificial feel. Does anyone know how to compensate so I get the colors I want in the final video file?