Re: Xena 2K Broadcast Legal output??

It's luminance that's the problem. On both the low end and the high end.

This stuff isn't going to a colourist unfortunately. It's directly from a Nuke artist and it was made for a film output. The conversion from FILM LOG to video REC709, I assume, is just substituting like for like values and not really scaling to legal SMPTE values.

I don't believe that clipping the top and bottom end affects the "aesthetic of the image", mostly (dangerous comment but I don't want to get into a debate over that, I just need some kind of answer about my original question! :) ), but I know what you mean. Although there are differences you can see, I don't believe the image as a whole is compromised. Going from film to video means a compromise has to happen at some point!

If this was a project that was being paid for, then yes, I would have a colourist check it out, but in this case, I simply need to know that the values that make it to tape are legal. Obviously, if we're not happy with the results of a "quick fix" then we'll re-address the offending clips, but if we think the result is acceptable using a hardware scale, then that's what we want to do.

Any ideas? ;)

Thanks
Bram