Need color range capture review
 

I am experimenting with a TV recording, before I start capturing home videos and I came to the point where I have to calibrate brightness and contrast.

I have captured a video together with its waveform using ffmpeg. The "danger" areas on top and on the bottom are marked with red, as you can see.

My first question is about brightest white. I have deliberately adjusted it somewhat below 235, because of some scenes being over brightened. Notice the guy in blue jumping up to the ceiling. All levels increase above everything else in the clip. Now, I don't expect to see such thing in family videos, but I am confused on how to adjust the whites. It appears to me that this is an artistic effect, so in my opinion it should be allowed to go very high, but still, I am unable to set the normal whites too high. What do you guys think? Is it okay like this anyway?

Next question is about black. According to the waveform it is within the safe limits, but it looks too dark to me. I can fix this by decreasing the contrast a little until the image starts to look more natural. On the other hand this causes black values to become too high. In this case is it better to adjust the picture more to what it looks "natural", or stick to what measurement says?

Answering to myself: almost everything about brightness and contrast is explained in this thread. Also, there are examples.