Final Cut Export Brightness Problems

FCP 5.0.4
G5 Tiger
QT 7.1.3

Nasty surprise at midnight last night.

Starting with an 8-bit uncompressed NTSC timeline, export two different ways; QuickTime Conversion, Uncompressed, and Sorenson3, 8-bit, quality sliders maxed to high.

They both produce a similar size file and it's the expected size given the short video we were trying to produce.

They don't match. Open both of them up in their own QuickTime Player side by side on the same monitor and Sorenson3--the closest one to what we were expecting--is clearly brighter than the Uncompressed QuickTime.

As near as we can tell by guessing at it from the picture elements, the contrast actually goes up. Brights get brighter and blacks turn to mud. A lot of the work happens at night, so digging blacks was not welcome.

We had a lot of trouble creating a DVD on this machine, so we needed to push the work to the reliable Final Cut 4.5 machine to get it out the door. We have a workable disk, but we're trying it again by exporting, transporting, and importing Targa Frames.


I am, of course, going to be compulsive and put test signals through it, but this is broken, right?

Koz

News (not good) on the Targa transfer. That doesn't match either of the first two. We went with the Targa transfer.

Are we traveling through another dimension?
Is our boundry that of imagination?
Is there a signpost up ahead?

Is Rod Serling going to post a fix?

Koz