Range check/safe levels

Hi All,

I've got a little last second surprise as I've been editing a piece I'm due to transfer tomorrow morning to Digibeta. The material was originally transferred/imported in DVCPro50 and as it was from a finished/delivered project, I thought the color correction had been done previously. I was just going to check a Motion graphic title I did, and when I opened the FCP scopes, nearly everything was off the scale in both the whites and the blacks!

I've been feverishly researching online, and my DMTS training discs, but I don't have a monitor (on order) other than my 23" cinema display. I've been going through the range check, using the "both" setting, and going through to bring each clip down to the check mark safe range, but according to the scopes it still looks like the whites are too high and the blacks are too low. Should/can I trust it? I wish I had more time, but this project came up last minute and was originally just for the web, where I wasn't going to have to worry about this.

Also, I was planning to apply the broadcast filter after I'm done with the range check, and color balancing each image (I'm using FCS 5.1); is this recommended? And which setting; conservative?

I know this has come up many times, in many forms, but I couldn't find anything specific to my question and I'm running out of time.

Thanks in advance!
~Chris

To add to this, there are some shots from set that have giant bluescreen backgrounds and greenscreen as well (in the shot, but not intentionally; they were just covering behind-the-scenes). The range check just goes crazy on these and even using the limit effect on the color correction, if I adjust it too much (and couldn't even get rid of it all) it starts looking really fake. Not sure if I should just throw a broadcast safe filter on these and that would do it?

Also, when we do the transfer to Digibeta, I was reading you can dump it out with a broadcast filter then?

Again, thanks for any info.

~C

just tried the broadcast filter and it seems to have solved the blue/greenscreen completely.