colour looks different when published

[PennyParker]

Hi - I have Adobe Captivate 8. My colours look as I need them when I preview my project, but when I publish to video they look a lot darker, not just the bright=ness but the hue too. Any ideas?

[Lilybiri]

Are you talking about publishing to mp4?  Did you preview in Browser of HTML in Browser?

[PennyParker]

Hi 🙂 Yes publishing to MP4 by selecting the Publishing option and then Video. I used Preview - Project - and the colours looked fine at that stage. It is only when I played the MP4 that I noticed the darker colours

[Lilybiri]

I suppose this is a non-responsive project since you want to publish to mp4. You should never use Preview, Project in that case because that is based on a temporary SWF file.  That is for sure not what you'll get when published. There is no real WYSIWYG preview for video. Reason: Captivate is an eLearning authoring tool, mp4 is meant for passive video. IMO it is not a good use of an authoring tool, because you lose all interactivity. But that is off topic.

After publishing, how did you test the published video: did you upload it to YouTube or another video site? I cannot really remember a similar question complaining about hue shifting for video, and I moderate Captivate forum since many years. Could you insert screenshots?

[David Burnham HBA]

I find that when I publish out my .cptx file to mp4 that I get colour brightness and hue changes. My experience with video encoders over the years is that if you maintain high quality settings you get more staturated colour in the resulting video output.

[Lilybiri]

Thanks for that information, David! I never use Captivate's publishing to video, except for cpvc-files of course. You can help this user better than me.

[David Burnham HBA]

Lieve, that's just my experience again having work with AME and Premiere.

[PennyParker]

Thank you very much for your replies. Have you found a "solution" to this David? Are you suggesting altering some of the settings? If so which ones?

[David Burnham HBA]

When you installed Captivate you also installed Adobe Media Encoder. Open the mp4 file in Adobe Media Encoder. Once you place in AME click on the H264 and it will open the Export Settings. In the Effects tab select the SDR Conform and adjust brightness and contrast. This will help you work with colour in the file. Just a note I can't recall what version of AME was installed with Captivate 8, but since version 2015 we can work with the Effects tab in the Export Settings. There is nothing to work with in Captivate since the only settings deal with Profiles which essentially deal with output size for mobile, standard and HD.

[PennyParker]

very much appreciated. I will try this on Monday and will post what happens.