H264 color fade on media export?

There are a number of quite lengthy threads on this subject.

Build your projects on a fully calibrated system, with a high-quality monitor (broadcast quality, if possible ... a couple grand or so). And by calibrated I mean with at least a puck & software.

Test your exports on fully calibrated pro playback equipment. Make sure that what you produce is within color & gamut specs for the format you deliver into.

And kiss it good-bye.

Once it leaves your system, you have no freakin' control whatever on how it looks. Period, and there is no way around this!

Very few computers have a decently setup monitor to begin with. Are you really aware of how badly setup for color, tone, white/black points, all that sort of thing ... that the vast majority of computers are as a video display?

And past that, people see it through a browser. With all the junk that browsers do to "enhance the viewer's experience". Juice it around, that is.

PrPro is built to deliver professional standards in Rec709 ... period. That's what it does. But you can only tell what your output really is if you've got the system to show pro work properly calibrated. Or take it on a flash drive to someplace that can show it like that. Once you know what you can make, and can control your own output, then ... do your work.

YouTube & Vimeo have clearly varying internal practices depending on where you upload from. Some people here have terrible trouble uploading and getting something very different than what they expected. Some of us get very much what we expect, especially being as we know that it's just YouTube.

Neither YouTube nor Vimeo apply normal professional standards to their modifications to every media they handle.

I've had decent results from my work ... I know seen through a browser it will not look precisely like the beautifully graded piece I created. (And I'm a darn picky sot when it comes to grading my work.)

Broadcast pros have this issue also. I've some friends who are major pro colorists. They have to deliver shows that are dead-on within very tight specs for color gamut, black/white points, and saturation, completely besides the taste and choices of those paying quite nicely for their work. Any submission to a full broadcast system goes through a quality check, and if one bitty pixel is out of line someplace, the whole thing is rejected and sent back until it passes QC.

Believe me, they've got better color-calibration setup than probably anything you've got ... sure past mine!

But as soon as that show goes out over the cable or airwaves, granny with her tv all light and green will see that show ... light and green. Just like every other show she sees. And because it looks just like every other show on her light & green tv, it will look "good" to her. It's what she's used to.

And there ain't squat you can do about that.

So make your own end ship-shape. Test upgrades to Vimeo & YouTube, see what settings seem to work best. Forget "Max Render Quality" and "Maximum depth" because in an 8-bit output, they will only add time, and may even screw up some of your pixels. Forget about 2-pass encoding, as these days that's just going to get you a long lunch break.

There's a user here ... chris & a bunch of numbers for a moniker. He's got a few tips & tricks some have used to they feel, their benefit, and he may chime in here. You may find a couple of his things useful.

But no matter what you do, once it's uploaded to such as Vim & YuT, well ... it's in the Wild now. As long as it looks similar to other professionally produced pieces, you're gold. Don't expect every subtle tone and shading to reproduce through their upload and then download/playback on a browser to look like it did all shiny new in PrPro. If you can get it close, you done good.

Neil