Exported video displaying color differently then in Premiere Pro

And I agree with Salvo, that you're doing a very good job on the lighting there. I came out of a pro portrait background, starting my studio in late 70's, and mastering lighting through sheer dogged pushing at it. All sorts of lighting units/sources, studio/location, individuals to 300+ in a shot.

My only comments are 1) be careful the camera isn't low enought to look up the subject's nose/nostrils ... and 2) the lighting fixture coming out of the head of the woman on the right isn't optimal. Minor changes of camera location fix both.

The lighting style and quality are excellent. Better than so many podcasts and things I see done by "major" folks in their home setups shown on major podcasts/channels and streamed events.

So the big stuff here ... you got it, and done righteously.

Neil

Paul, good going on watching videos about lighting and night / day color balance and stuff like that ( and 3 point lighting). I think what you did is better than 3 point stuff cause it looks like you used some bounce and fill in some places too. Trust your eye. You're doing great IMO.

As for the future, and what you do to earn living, I have no clue what to say except keep doing what you're doing.

🙂

ps. mostly it's about telling stories, branding, selling, stuff like that... so your casting and distribution will matter eventually ( and budget and position ... on projects ). It's a business mostly.. so you're doing fine as far as I can see.

Paul, I don't know about what you just said.. how that relates to me and my experience. But I'm old and retired so I am not involved with pro stuff anymore.

I found that having an attitude to do my work at 100% on the jobs gave me a kinda work ethic. Same as in school studying photography and stuff. If I really cared and did the best I could and learned everything I could and so on... the day went by pretty fast and I was sorta proud to contribute. Once that 'bar' is set your whole life and everything else you do ( other than work to earn living ) invites you to apply the same level of interest, dedication to your own expertise, and it even helps you to teach others ( younger people new to the business ).

I was working on some 2nd unit thing ( gossip girl ? ) where the DP stormed into the set from DIT and asked what the problem was. We were shooting talent at a computer monitor on a desk that was supposed to have video on it. But the video guy couldn't get the video to play. He was really good and all that ( I liked him and he did amazingly good stuff on many projects ). But he was sweating bullets trying to get this stupid monitor to play the video.

Anyway, the DP said, ( almost shouted cause he wanted to go home after a long day ) " JUST SHOOT THE DARN THING ! "

Then he stormed back out to go back to DIT.

I was dolly grip. Everyone was sorta looking at one another, like, " What the ?? "

I said, " it's static shot and post can mask the screen and drop whatever they want in there."

So we shot it and went home.

🙂

I look around at other channels and don't see this drop off in color/quality. And I guess I could be seeing it but not knowing what their production side looks like I would never know. But I follow great filmmakers and their stuff looks immaculate. I'm not expecting myself to match them in quality because I'm not on their level. 

You actually answered it in here ... because no, you don't know what their media looked like on the system it was graded on. And I will guarantee you, it looked a LOT different in the grading suite on that spendy Flanders or Eizo or high-end Sony monitor than you've ever seen it.

How hard is this? In a pro colorist's suite, they'll have their working monitors, the Reference monitor, and a client monitor.

The UI monitors are just nice computer monitors. The reference monitor for the colorist is a specific tool ... Grade 1 Reference Monitors are actually a separate category of monitor, with standards for not only color performance but pixel-by-pixel screen uniformity well above any consumer monitor. That monitor is then calibrated, often by specialists with gear costing many thousands of dollars, and a LUT is generated that is use either internally in the monitor or in an external LUT box for each color space that colorist may need. This is "fed" from a break-out system, a card or output device, that ignores the OS video signal and is not connected to the GPU, so it gets the raw video data from the app being used, whether Premiere, Resolve, Baselight, whatever.

That is what the colorist sees when grading.

The client is watching a large-screen TV, that has also been fed typically from a breakout system with a LUT box, in an attempt to match that screen as closely as possible to the Reference monitor screen.

A huge pain for colorists is when the client looks over at their reference monitor, and likes that better than the client monitor ... and says "Make my screen look like yours". Well ... if they could, they would have already! This is why most colorists setup their suite so when the clients are sitting at their sofa, they can't see the Reference monitor of the colorist.

And note, this is all in rooms with typically medium gray walls, NO windows! ... and in semi-darkness, with the only lights used running at 6,000K.

Does that describe your setup? No?

Well, yea, you're not seeing what the colorist saw. But nearly all pro work is graded to that setup. Why? So that it matches other pro work. It's the relative to other work part that is important.

If you want to match that, you need to get as close to the setup as you can afford, and learn to use the scopes as much as your eyes. Pro reference monitors start above $4500 for say a 24" HD monitor. If you're talking HDR ... the cheapest usable reference monitor I know of currently is $28,000USD. As far as say Netflix or anyone and their requirements for the gear used to prep for their service.

Are you and I going to have one of those? Not seeing it here ... but I have set up as closely as I can, carefully setting the i1 Display Pro software so that after calibration, when I run a profile with Lightspace color profiling software connected to Resolve for patch creation, I get a series of graphs that show my 'reference' monitor within specs.

No, it's not nearly as uniform across the screen as the Flanders I'd love to have. No, the black level isn't as deep as I'd like.

But ... when sent to a colorist for viewing on their system, the tonal values and saturation are all within bounds. Skin tones are an appropriate range of hues. Shadows still show details, highlights don't clip except where I want them.

It works well enough for my web needs. But if someone hired me to do b-cast work, I'd immediately get a full reference monitor setup simply to know absolutely and totally that what I'm producing will pass the dreaded QC machine.

Neil

There are a lot of posts around here on this subject, I'm surprised it took 3 months. Even if you just scroll thru the pages, you should find one in pretty quick time. Speaking of QuickTime, I just did a quick search and found it in 3 seconds... 🙂

Paul,

I assume the PPro still image is what you like. It looks to me that the VLC image is closest ( if not exactly the same ). That's really good. I'd stay with what you have for settings and keep working as you are.

What happens when you upload to youtube or vimeo or other places is that they internally transcode to whatever they use to stream stuff. I see that the youtube and quicktime stills are lighter. But I still like them as it doesn't bother me. If I didn't know your original stuff it wouldn't bother me to see those lighter versions. It's still pretty.

If it gets really really important the only way to mess around with the result is to make an educated guess as to the 'percentage' of difference and do a temporary change ( use save as and change and name new project " For Vimeo" etc.)... like take your overall level down 5% ( that's a guess ) and export and upload and see if it's the way you want. There's nothing else you can do really.

Unfortunately it takes time and you should only export small section to save time and then upload the small section. When happy delete the test you uploaded, export the corrected new project completely and upload the whole thing.

🙂