I wanted to render my scene via mplay and export the video. But the video was very dark, there was almost no light in the video, which was different from the render result I saw in mplay.
So I just found a workaround, I edited the brightness and the contrast of the video through Adobe After Effects, I fixed the lighting, but then there was another problem, I noticed that the anti-aliasing was very bad, I could see the edges were “moving”.
I have two questions here.
1. The exported video was very dark. How do I fix it so I don't need to use After Effects?
2. The anti-aliasing was very bad. How do I fix it?
The attachment is my project file.

This is the render result in mplay:

This is a screenshot of the video exported from mplay, you can see that the scene is very dark:

This is the end result after I edited the video using After Effects, but you can see the edges are “moving”, which indicates the anti-aliasing is very bad:


I seriously need help! Thanks.

I'm having the same problem! (but to a lesser extent) It seems that the export gamma is by default 1 when it should be 2.2 if I remember correctly. I don't know about the antialiasing though, sorry

Use ffmpeg or some other encoder to create a video from an image sequence. mplay isn't suitable for producing video files.

OK, thank you for replying. I think Houdini + After Effects is a good combo for video production, so whenever Houdini has an issue, I'll just fix it in After Effects anyway. But how to fix the “jiggling” and “flickering” edges in the final render? I initially thought that was because some sorts of settings relative to anti-aliasing I hadn't known about yet; but this was not entirely true, some of the edges were stationary but still yielded the “jiggling” and “flickering” effects. So I think it also has to do with the lighting.

I also checked the grammar value as you guys mentioned, it was set to 2.2 by default! Maybe it was a bug in MPlay? I also tried to export it as image sequence, the lighting was back to normal, but when I created a video out of the image sequence, I can still see the “jiggling” and “flickering” effects.

However, I think it's my problem, I have seen a lot of good render-by-Houdini videos and have never seen a single one that is as bad as mine, I'll just go learning some more…

I also checked the grammar value as you guys mentioned, it was set to 2.2 by default! Maybe it was a bug in MPlay? I also tried to export it as image sequence, the lighting was back to normal, but when I created a video out of the image sequence, I can still see the “jiggling” and “flickering” effects.

Did you look the gamma value in the export window also ?

Efi
Did you look the gamma value in the export window also ?

Yes! That worked for me. I set the Gamma to 2.2 and it fixes the lighting. I was aware of that setting and had tried it before, but didn't work for me, I think I definitely did something wrong at that time. So always double check…