No Colour Grade on Export->Upload

[hakanahmet85]

Hi all,

would really appreciate your thoughts on this, and hopefully a solution. Has anybody had the issue of footage being exported from premiere without its colour grade & contrast? I can't see how I haven't noticed this before, but it's very prominent on my last project.. almost as if the export is by-passing the grade.

I had a little root around and people on forums (dated posts) were pointing their fingers at QuickTime, saying that there was a playback bug. So I downloaded VLC, and boom.. the grade was there when played back. But when I upload the very same file to Vimeo/Facebook or played it back on my iPhone.. there was hardly any grade, it was desaturated and flat.

Lastly, I dropped the exported/desaturated h.264 file back into premier and onto my time line, and again the colour and grade is visible. So if it is a QuickTime playback issue, why is Vimeo/Facebook giving me the same problem?

What is going on here and what do I trust? As a quick solution I had to crank up the grade in Premiere more than usual, just so it was visible in the export, but I can't be doing different grades for different players surely ??

[Moderator note: title modified for clarity of issue]

[Jim_Simon]

The first step in judging the quality of a video signal is to ensure an accurate viewing environment.  That means getting the video off the computer and into a hardware player, like Blu-ray or thumb drive.  You need to get software, the operating system and graphics driver, all of which can and often do alter the signal, out of the signal chain.  Next, you need to be viewing on a properly calibrated display, which would not include many computer monitors and probably not any phones.

Only then can you judge the image quality.  If it looks good there, you're job is well done.  How it looks anywhere else is beyond your control.

[R Neil Haugen]

Jim in a certain view has it totally correct. As one colorist I know put it, you can't fix gramma's green tv in Sheboygan. Those working for broadcast have extremely tight tolerances they grade for and deliver to, one freaking pixel over-saturated or over/under 'exposed' and the auto-check QC unit will reject the delivery and it won't be broadcast.

Even with all that tight work on delivering to exact standards, no one out in General Public will ever see that material as delivered. TV's and computer monitors are all over the freaked out creation for how they handle both color & gamma, and as the person creating the content you have no control whatever. The colorist's comment came actually from visiting his gramma in Sheboygan, and her TV was on, and a commercial he'd graded ... with the art director, DP, and product manager for the company looking over his shoulder wanting to check their color samples against his screens! ... was ... green.

Like everything else on gramma's TV. But it all looked "normal" to her, as everything looked like that on her TV.

Or as another colorist put it, when asked about how to control for everyone's weird monitors, "That way lies madness!" ... apparently quoting Gandalf.

But there is a solid issue here.

PrPro is totally built around stock-standard totally strictly legit Rec709 for gamma/color. You can't  set it to do anything else. Rec709 'base' is totally set for a dynamic range of 0-255, and a specific gamma.

There are older standards that are still out there ... the old video-tape days saw both 16-235 and 16-255 used for dynamic range, at a slightly different gamma. It has been suggested that unless YouTube "sees" a specific setting in a file header, it defaults to 16-235 and the other gamma. Which means that a 0-255 video looks "flat" and de-saturated. One determined and tech-savvy person posted his testing on here, saying that PrPro did not put anything in that "slot" of the header file. And other apps that he could try for H.264 outputs did. One re-wrapping app specifically. He'd take a PrPro exported file, re-wrap in the other app (which changes none of the files pixels in any way at all) with the slightly different file header, and Youtube "saw" the file as 0-255 and it looked fine.

I asked a PrPro engineer about this at NAB a couple years back, and he semi-rolled his eyes, noting they saw no need to deal with "amateur" standards, and if YouTube just properly did it's own file handling, there'd be no issue. PrPro was perfect as-is. I think he thought that YouTube should assume or set the default to the proper current standard, with all files getting displayed in 0-255 unless they had that tag filled with the other setting.

Also, it's been suggested that perhaps depending on where you are can affect whether you have this trouble. I've never had one of my uploads display this problem. Some people cannot get one "up" without it. A couple people here or elsewhere have posted that when traveling, some places the same file gets hammered, another locale it doesn't.

User dummergold​ has posted an export LUT I think it is that helps with this.

We've had threads go to past 100 comments about this subject ... several times.

Neil