After Effects 17.0.2 Renderings much darker, imported videos also much darker

[David Emmenlauer]

Hello, I recently upgraded After Effects to version 17.0.2 and noticed afterwards that clips in my compositions suddenly appear much darker. The composition is in Rec709 with 32 Bit color space, I didn't change sth there. In the project, that I set up some time ago, I rendered parts of the composition out as Quicktime ProRes422 and re-imported them for performance reasons. There is white text in this composition, and it also appeared white in the rendered and re-imported clip. Now, the same clip is light grey at the same spot, and when I turn on the original text-layer, the difference is striking. I first noticed the diffenence, when I looked at renderings today and found, they were much too dark. These were exported as Quicktime ProRes from after effects and in a next step encoded as mp4 via media encoder (also newest version). I noticed, that the rendering from after effects was already turning everything darker, but the encoding via media encoder darkened the clip additionally. I reinstalled after effects 17.0.1 and the problem is gone, no luminance shift any more. See screenshot for comparison between clips with and without the issue. Does someone experience the same issue or know an answer to this? I'm working on a macbook pro 15 inch 2018 with Mojave 10.14.6 installed. Thanks!

Best, David

[Rameez_Khan]

Hi DemolitionMan14,

Thanks for your detailed post.

Which version of After Effects are you using exactly on all the three machines? FAQ: How to find the exact version of After Effects...

Let's look at some preferences on your Mac Pro.

• Navigate to AE Preferences > Import and see if "Enable Hardware accelerated decoding (requires restart)" is enabled.
• Under Preferences > Display, see if "Hardware Accelerate Composition, Layer, and Footage Panels" is enabled
• Next, under File > Project Settings > Color, check if Color Management is turned on

Make sure all of these preferences are set to the same options on all the three machines.

Report back to so that I can suggest next steps.

Thanks,

Rameez

[DemolitionMan14]

22.2

All settings match.

Color management is set to None.  Then it says assume working gamma 2.4 (Rec. 709)