So, there’s RGB and YUV (YCbCr) color spaces- televisions and the like use YUV color-space, while RGB is what you see on computer’s monitors.  There’s a long and in depth explanation as to why, but what’s important in this post is that an RGB image (8-bit, the standard) has a range of 0-255, which means your blackest black is 0, the whitest white is 255.  YUV on the other hand is 16-235, which means 16 is your new black, 235 is the new white limit.  When you don’t take these differences into account you can end up with strange looking video- video that looks good on a television looks washed out on your computer screen, and what looked good when you edited it on your computer suddenly looks blown out on a TV.

Modern software (video drivers, editing, encoding programs etc.) can better recognize and handle the differences, but they can crop up and cause problems when you’re not looking (or in this case, are.)  The specific problem is that the 5D appears to be encode its YUV video using the full 0-255 range, but neglects to inform any programs, leading them to think it’s 16-235 video that looked good on the camera’s LCD (and what a nice LCD it is too) suddenly looks strange when played back elsewhere.  The strangeness most commonly manifests itself with the video levels being clipped at 16 and 235, then stretched out to fill the full range.

Add to this the fact that the 5D uses H.264 video encoding at a datarate above 30 mbps (most camera H.264 video encoding is in the 17-24 mbps range ).  This puts a lot of strain on your computer to play the video smoothly, especially when almost all the playback programs (windows) are single threaded, so no help having multiple cores.  The exception to this is CoreAVC a program that will allow you to playback using multiple cores for only $14.95.  The program gives you the added advantage of being able to set your input and output levels etc. which is very nice in conjunction with a player such as media player classic (MPC).

Here’s the important part though- to get MPC to actually use coreAVC to playback the video, you need to change the file extension of your videos from .MOV to .MP4; a necessity I found out the hard way.  You still need to follow the coreAVC instructions for setting up- but remember the file extension bit.

A reminder I’m talking Windows here, Mac is on your own, Linux to follow if I can.