x264 experts? Video transcoding pros?

[TridenT]

Let's say you have a movie from your digital SLR. You watch the footage out of that on your computer with VLC. It seems pretty dark, but you're thinking, "Well, I guess the lighting just sucks." Overall it just seems very high contrast or something of that sort.

You transcode it in handbrake using the "high profile" option and suddenly it's way less contrasty and actually more balanced in exposure.

What is going on?

 

[Crono]

x264 has built-in filters like denoise and deblocking. Not sure what would make it "less contrasty", but there's probably a filter turned on in x264's settings. Or whatever is handling the decoding input for HandBrake is changing the contrast/brightness.

If it's just x264 and not any other codec, it's probably one of the CLI options.

EDIT: Hmm, this page might have the explanation ("gamma shift"):
http://byteful.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-fix-the-h264-gamma-brightness-bug-in-quicktime/