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alfio_8968
Participant
July 22, 2025
Answered

Colors become blue when rendering RGB + Alpha

  • July 22, 2025
  • 5 replies
  • 467 views

Very new to After Effects, only working on premade graphics and templates. On two separate files I've tried rendering graphics with transparent backgrounds, and for whatever reason the colors all change to blue after it renders. First file I used was a red, white, and blue patriotic sequence and all my reds looked fine until I opened the finished rendered file in VLC or in Premiere. 

 

Same issue with the file I'm working on now, everything looks like the correct shade of green in the project, while it's rendering, and only turns green after I open the finished file. Exporting through Media Encoder results in the colors all working properly, but I don't want to have to open ME every time I need to render something when I'm not working with complicated stuff.

 

Above are photos of the colors in AE, while it's rendering in AE, and then afterwards in VLC. The last photo is the render in VLC when I went through ME.

 

Below are photos of every setting I could think to grab, but if anyone needs to see a different setting let me know. For Video Rendering and Effects I have it set to Mercury GPU Acceleration (CUDA) but also tried on Mercury Software Only to the same effect. I've also tried "None" under Working Color Space, also with the same issues after rendering.

 

 

I'm at my wits end, and haven't found any threads anywhere about this particular issue. Thank you!

Correct answer alfio_8968

Not entirely sure if I did what you said here, but did discover a different way to get AE to export with RBG + Alpha that resulted was ProRes file. Images attached for render settings used both ways that worked.

 

 

Appreciate your help here!

5 replies

A
alfio_8968AuthorCorrect answer
Participant
July 22, 2025

Not entirely sure if I did what you said here, but did discover a different way to get AE to export with RBG + Alpha that resulted was ProRes file. Images attached for render settings used both ways that worked.

 

 

Appreciate your help here!

J
Community Manager
jenkmeister17177426Community Manager
Jenkmeister
July 22, 2025

You could try the High Quality with Alpha output preset. That'll go out in ProRes and include transparency. There are gotchas with QuickTime due to color conversion that require a bit more finessing. 

A
alfio_8968Author
Participant
July 22, 2025

Hi,

 

I appreciate you taking a look at this. Exporting at 2.2 also resulted in the color issue.

 

I have exported as h.264 and the colors turn out fine, but it doesn't have the transparency I need. The problem only occurs when rendering Quicktime; RGB + Alpha.

 

I tried rednering with AVI; RGB + Alpha and it worked! The colors were correct and the transparency was there.

 

I'm not sure what happened that made Quicktime stop working, but it created the blue color issue across several AE files both on my computer and two of my coworkers' computers. 

J
Community Manager
jenkmeister17177426Community Manager
Jenkmeister
July 22, 2025

You probably don't want to be in Gamma 2.4 unless you know you need to be in that color space. 2.2 is more likely what you want.

 

Have you tried other output formats besides Quicktime / Animation? I'm not sure what the destination for your rendered files are, but you could use the High Quality or H.264 presets and see if you get a different result.

 

Otherwise, we'll likely need the project to look at the settings further. 

A
alfio_8968Author
Participant
July 22, 2025

Correction above, the color turns "blue" after rendering, as shown in the photos.

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