Colour change after exporting - After Effects / Media Encoder

[Tom98A7]

Hi! So I have been working on a very simple animation for a UI design project to post in Behance, happy with the animation but when I export this there is a color change. I am using Media Encoder to export the file and have attached the settings below. It is as if in the process of getting over the Media Encoder there is a colour change as even in the screenshot settings below the color is incorrect.

I use Sketch App to create my UI designs and I then used AEUX to get those elements into After Effects. The colors are correct in After Effects but it seems to just be the export. I have attached a comparison left being Sketch and the desired color / Right being the rendered out mp4 files.

Really hope someone can help has been giving me a real headache and I have exhausted all solutions I can think of!

[Rick Gerard]

Please embed your images using the toolbar. It's incredibly inconvenient to download them and they are difficult to see on a mobile device. 

Color changes are caused by:

• improper color management
• format differences - 8bit 4:2:0 MPEG IPB compression treats colors differently than 8bit 4:2:0 frame-based compression
• media player differences - YouTube on Firefox can look completely different than YouTube on Chrome which can look completely different than your media player or Premiere Pro or After Effects

Give us a complete workflow right down to how you calibrate your monitors, manage color, and set up your devices and maybe we will have some suggestions. Most of the time just turning color management off all the way through the process is the easiest way to get consistent color but it does not guarantee that the color on your phone will match the color on your computer or the color on your client's machine. 

[Mylenium]

Long and short: You need to educate yourself about how some CoDecs change Gamma, have limited color ranges to begin with and on top of it you may need to get into that whole color management thing plus then of course there's potential other issues with hardware accelerated playback, monitor color profiles or even different players handling these things differently. That is to say you will have to accept some minor color shifts, especially with compressed output, but can work towards minimizing the issues. Still, no simple answers here. This isn't a matter of "Where do I need to tick a box.", it's much more complicated. The keywords are all there and a simple web search can turn up tons of info, it just requires a lot of reading. A simple "fix" might be to apply a Levels or Exposure effect to correct the Gamma, but to be honest your output looks so way off, something is definitely off and this would not be a real solution and still look wrong on other systems. You likely won't be able to avoid having to  tippy-toe through your system config and settings to straighten things out.

Mylenium