Colour shift at start of .mp4 when transferred to phone

Report · Feb 16, 2021

I'm using AE to export an animation, which looks fine in terms of colour when viewed on my iMac, but when transferred to my iPhone over Airdrop, but the initial preview (left image) of the .mp4 on photos saturates the orange for a split second, then reverts to the correct colour (right image). This is particularly annoying as they are intended for Instagram, and the incorrect colour appears on the video thumbnail and as the background colour for Insta stories.

I'm using Media Encoder, h.264 Match Source - High bitrate, Render maximum depth & max. quality. Have tried each of the CBR/VBR1/2 settings but each time the same problem occurs. I have also tried rendering a .mov from AE and then converting it in ME with not much luck either

The (correct) orange used is 255/115/15 #ff730f. I've put this as I wasn't sure it would have something to do with the RGB value range, although it should be ok for sRGB?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Report · Feb 16, 2021

Start by actually not using the maximum depth render setting. It inflates the color depth and due to the way MP4 works, the few frames you are seeing flicker around may in fact simply be the auto-adjusmtent kicking in to dial back down the overblown colors. You might want to read the online help on what these settings actually do and when they should be used. Beyond that obsessing about specific colors for online services is pretty much pointless. They'll re-compress it on their servers, which may screw up any color, anyway, plus the simple fact that MP4 is not a suitable format to retain exact colors in the first place. Of course things might slightly improve if you instate actual color management on your system, but since this means going all the way, you have a lot of reading ahead of you and it would need to be consequently carried through in Photoshop and AE as well as any other program, but even then your Hex code will not match exactly, even more so on a mobile device, most of which don't even support CM and only rely on factory default screen calibration and a global assumed color profile/ color space intrinsic to the operating system itself.

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