H.264 Gamma Missmatch - please Help

[David McGavran]

That's the reason why there are systems that provide colour accurate playback. Iridas FrameCycler is one of them. Such systems are build to close the pipeline between post production and director when the director is not available and somewhere else around. But that's expensive and needs special hardware.

I think http://www.inmethod.com/air-video/in...D5A382E62EABCF may help to solve these problems. We are going to implement it for our clients. I'm not sure how this behaves regarding colour shifts.

Avoid QT. That's what we do. And tell all those clients that use a Mac to set their monitor gamma to 2.2 (OSX legacy gamma is 1.8...)

We have less problems with clients that use Windows. Apple messed this up.

Sorry to be not really helpful,

Hans

h.264 in an mp4 wrapper is a great format for us. We don't have this issue reported but I will dig a bit and get back to you.

Cheers

Dave

[Emi Stefanach]

This happens only in windows and not Mac right?

In the past I corrected this annoying bug with a turnaround and saving (no texporting) the quicktime file again (described below)

But now I just disable Direct3d video acceleration in quicktime player advanced preferences (the last of the 3 checkboxes)

This is good to see colors correctly, but will return in slow playback performance maybe.

There is no gurantee that your client is going to see the colors in the correct manner unless you force the quicktime player to always turn off direct3d and I personally discovered that another tip does exactly that, like maging (beware because it fixes gamma, but will play more jerky)

Open the QT
Go to "Window/Show Movie Properties"
Select "Video Track", then click the "Visual Settings" tab
At the bottom left, change the transparency to "Blend" then move the slider to 100
Change the transparency to "Straight Alpha"
Close the Movie Properties window, then play or scrub the QT. Your black levels should now look correct
Save over old .mov

[Derek Marcinyshyn]

I use the Adobe workflow to render out to H.264. I start with the YouTube Widescreen Preset then build my own custom preset off of that one. I always make sure I'm using the Main Concept as the codec provider rather than QuickTime as the gamma issue is just not acceptable.

There is a Main Concept upgrade that will allow CUDA enabled rendering to H.264 along with many other Broadcast / Film codecs.

http://www.mainconcept.com/products/...broadcast.html

[Rudi Herbert]

Everything David said (surprise) is the best solution:

1- Export to Media Encoder directly from Premiere, not AE.
2- Do not export to H.264 Quicktime, instead to H.264, which will render an mp4 instead of a MOV file, and should fix this problem.
3- If you don't have to, don't use QT at all, whatever people say, QT is an old codec full of flaws, so work directly on your AVCHD files or whatever other format you have, which is one of the reasons, I assume, you switched to PC and PP in the first place.

[Uli Plank]

While QT is not a codec, but a container, everything else is true. It sucks with it's gamma issues, and even the man himself recently complained about that.
That said, Adobe is doing a pretty good job on their side to handle it's flaws. I can't see any problems here using ProRes, for example. H.264 MOVs are a different thing…

[J Davis]

Avoid QT.

+1

When I go to h264 I have been avoiding QT and using the mp4 container

Is there any advantage in this? I have read on wikipedia that the mp4 container is based on the QT container but I have been hoping it would be more free from the apple gamma curse?

[Craig Parkes]

Going straight to Mp4 from a QuickTime export seems to avoid the main problems with gamma changes .mov introduce for me, especially when going on to YouTube etc.

[Martin Dugard]

Kim Frank,

Everything you've done is fine and correct. The problem is, and always has been, QuickTime on Windows. It applies a lower gamma on video playback.

Most media players that support QuickTime movies should render the video with the correct output gamma. (For instance, I believe WMP12 and MPC-HC have no problems.)

My advice, now that you're on Windows, is to avoid any workflow or intermediary files that involve QuickTime. Once you've imported, edited and finished your RED shots, export to a standard video file format like WMV9 (for Windows systems) or H.264 (universally accepted), but wrapped in .wmv and .mp4 containers, respectively.

Dear Kim,

May I ask a very newbie question?

I have a very similar problem: when I make a movie in Premiere Pro (CS5 / Windows Vista 64bits) and export it in Quicktime (H264 level 5.1), I get washed out colors. I tried the trick highlighted above (Go to Movie Properties , Blend >100% , Straight gamma) in QP.. but it seems I cannot save these setting. Works when I just do it but as soon as I close the file, even if I save it, it comes back to its previous setting...useless.

You advised to use H264 but wrap it in .mp4 rather than .mov... but when I export my file in PPro, I usually choose H264 as XX and then level 5.1 (because my file is unsually large in pixels) and it does automatically build a mp4 file .. with the famous washed out colors.

Do I do something wrong?
Should I open it in something else than Quicktime (but what? Windows Media Player refuses to open the file)
Should I convert it to mov in Quicktime Pro?

Ultimately, although I work on Windows PC, the file is going to be used on a Mac (hence with Quicktime)

Your ideas and advice are most welcomed!!

Thank you very much