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Cut to blacks and a TV issue?

S

Scotty Fox

Hey all,

More questions about some small technical issues before finalizing my project.

1. Noticed when viewing on a flatscreen TV yesterday that whenever I cut to black in the short, or even when my titling fades to another name, the TV was dropping the black levels to COMPLETE BLACK. It seemed it was fading in and out as text would reappear on screen, or the image would come back.

This is strange because it doesn't happen on my laptop, so I'm thinking it's a TV setting. BUT I think I've noticed this before, and I had to add a black slug or transparent video in Premiere (or Resolve) to avoid that fade to complete black that seemed to be happening.

I wasn't sure if this was a TV setting doing this, or if in editing and films you have to put something there (black slug or transparent video, etc.) to trick the viewing devices that there is something there? Has anyone else dealt with this?

I'm going to experiment a bit and see what happens. What is strange though is my entire credit sequence was built in After Effects, and the names that fade in and out aren't separated by black empty tracks and it's still happening. It's not on an alpha layer either, it's over black.

Anyway, hopefully this made sense, TYPING FAST!

Thanks in advance.
 
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My guess is that the TV has a 'dynamic contrast' feature that is enabled - it adjusts the brightness of the backlighting on the fly so that shadows in dark scenes will be darker while bright scenes are brighter. When you hit a full screen of absolutely pure black it's probably turning the backlight off (or nearly off) so that you don't see it bleeding through the screen, and then as soon as something bright (white text) comes on it has to bring the backlight up. I wouldn't worry about it - you can't really predict when someone will have that kind of thing enabled or do much about it.
 
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Thanks for the response.

I checked out the settings and it does have a dynamic contrast, but it's "off"....

Not sure what else could be causing it on the TV settings, or if it's actually always on no matter the options. But I tried throwing a black solid in Resolve over the gaps in footage and it still seems to do it.

But what you describe is exactly what I think, about it recognizing the brights as they come on screen.

Anyway to test this to make sure it's my TV though? And not something I'm doing in the NLE or Resolve?
 
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I should also mention that that's correct. It only seems to be doing this when I put the .mov in full screen mode from my laptop (running into TV through HDMI). If I keep it in non full screen mode it doesn't do this dipping to black thing.
 
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Have you tried playing something else - a DVD or Blu-ray, for instance - to see if the TV does it with that? I'm guessing the TV may automatically do it (regardless of the settings) so that you don't seem backlight bleed when the screen is dark.

Also - when you tried the black solid, is it absolutely 0 brightness? Try it with RGB all set to 16, which would be a proper NTSC black level.
 
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Hey ItDonned

I tried the 16 on R,G,B. And it seems to avoid having that dip effect. Which is good. But you don't get that nice black anymore... which sucks.

I dont have a blu ray player, so I'll have to dig through some old dvds to see if I can dig one up.

Maybe I should add a black solid then with the RGB at 16 as a precaution? But again, not digging the brighter black look it gives off. But maybe that's normal and how the blacks should be???
 
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You can try lower values as well, you'll just have to test to see where it triggers the backlight to drop out - it may only happen at absolute zero. Try 1,1,1 and then move up from there if it doesn't work.
 
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I figured it out.. reading other forums.. Apparently Samsung has this thing where if certain settings are not above a certain value (for brightness, contrast, etc.) the display shuts off, giving that deep black. I literally had to raise the brightness level by "1" from 45 to 46 to have it stop occurring.

I'm not sure why this is or what the bigger problem is but it's pretty ridiculous because from what I read and looked at on my TV, you can't shut it off. It just happens and is dependent on those values.
 
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It's probably some sort of energy saving and/or backlight preservation thing - designed to shut off the backlight is the signal does. Odd that it doesn't have a delay or something so that it doesn't do it when a video fades to black. The other possibility is that it's just there to make the tv look better in dark rooms - it essentially hides the bleed from the backlight on a pure black screen.
 
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I'd doubt the color ranges. Just because I saw the same issue popping up for other people on forums... with big budget films (blu rays) they purchased... then again maybe it is. It's the weirdest thing I've seen in a while. Placing a black solid as was mentioned, with RGB values of 1 helped stop it from happening... but so did just bumping the brightness by 1... I didn't feel like adding solids into all the gaps but maybe I should?

Weird.
 
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