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Question

Washed out colors after export

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
March 31, 2017
5 replies
39943 views

Greetings,

even after two days and about 50 cups of coffee, I cannot wrap my head around this issue - to be honest it's starting to drive me insane. So yes, it's the classic problem with videos coming out looking washed out and dull. I'm sure many of you have read this story a million times, so please bare with me.

What I'm working with is a music video - it is shot on 8mm film and scanned frame by frame as a JPG sequence. I'm working on a PC with an NVIDIA Graphics Card and treating the material in Premiere Pro CS5.5 as stop motion in a sense. It's working great and everything has been a breeze - so far.

The video is aimed first and foremost for YouTube and the most important thing is that it streams on YouTube in as high quality and as "universally" as possible across different platforms, be it mobile or desktop, mac or PC.

By now I have read a hundred different discussions about this gamma issue or whatever you'd like to call it, there are views that it has to do with QuickTime specifically or that it's a problem within the H.264 codec - some claim it has to do with YouTube algorithms and some suggest simply changing the NVIDIA settings. There are views which suggest using other software (other than Premiere or H.264) for exporting and/or encoding, some folks say that a "gamma tag" within the video file should be changed. Some then argue that such tags don't exist in the first place. Me? At this point I have no idea whatsoever which, if any, of these suggestions is correct - all I know is, after 48 hours of trying I haven't been able to fix the issue. Everything looks very wrong on YouTube.

As I have no idea whether my issue has to do with a software bug, a codec issue, system wide color settings or YouTube itself - I will just list some key information on how the issue exhibits itself in my situation. Hopefully it would help in narrowing it down:

* The footage/frames inside the Premiere project look exactly the same as the original JPG-scans. Perfect. But exporting from Premiere Pro causes my video to look drastically more washed out and dull compared to what I see in a) the original JPG images and b) inside Premiere

*If I re-import an exported file (be it any format) back onto my Premiere project - the colors do look correct. No mismatch whatsoever. I do not know what this means, if anything.

* I'm using DivX Media Player, VLC Media Player and YouTube for testing out the rendered videos - interesting fact: in terms of what I see on the final YouTube upload, it doesn't seem to matter if I use, for example, the H.264 (or H.264 for YouTube preset) codec, MPEG-4 codec, AVI or QuickTime Animation codec - they all appear completely (and identically) washed out and ruined on YouTube. BUT as an exception, the QuickTime Animation Codec gives me a file, which does show perfectly on VLC Media Player after rendering. This then just doesn't translate to YouTube (and QuickTime animation would give me a too huge of a file for upload anyways - the tests I performed with short clips). So, no matter what format I upload on there, the end result streaming on YouTube will always be washed out and dull. As far as I know, there are no problems with any other videos I view on there, I've been using this system for years and have never paid attention that any videos on YouTube having incorrect gamma, it's all looking solid - but everything I put on there looks distinctively washed out. Very dark grays turn medium grays etc, bright lights turn duller.

* There was a suggestion to expand the dynamic range from 16-265 to 0-255 from the NVIDIA control panel itself. This indeed fixes the issue at once - both for videos viewed on VLC or videos streamed on YouTube! But see, I'm not worried about whether I see correct colors on my screen as much as I'm worried about correcting them on the actual video and making it look right on YouTube across platforms. I don't want something which only looks ok on my system (or systems with NVIDIA cards which have non-default settings set up by 0,5% of users). Once I have released the music video to the public (a very critical thing in regard to timing, social media exposure etc.) I cannot go back at that point. I need to be sure it is as "standard" as possible, even though I of course realize that different systems will always show things on screen slightly differently, as there are so many factors at play of course - that's not what I'm worried about.

Thank you so very much for any insight you could shed on this. I can't believe that after weeks of editing the music video (not to mention everything that went into getting high quality digitized material out of my 8mm footage...) it all falls apart at the final stage of making a decent YouTube upload.

This topic has been closed for replies.

D

Dip & Dot

Participating Frequently

I eventually found my answer to this issue buried away in another Adobe bulletin. I've been trying for years to find a solution to the gamma shift on video exports from Prem Pro, when viewing in Quick Time Player and on Vimeo and YouTube etc. I've generally just lived with it, too busy to find a solution in a sea of disinformation (eg many of the posts above.)

The link is below. Read it all but, importantly, go to point 4. I used the Adobe-designed export LUT and my exported video files are much more in line with what I'm seeing/grading in Prem Pro. I've now added the Adobe LUT to my standard Vimeo export profile, and it's near as dammit WYSIWYG. The colour on the exported file is very slightly less saturated, but I can live with that - crucially, the gamma curve looks right.

It's not the most elegant of solutions - I'd much prefer a software switch in Prem Pro to say "I'm publishing exclusively to the web and not TV broadcast" - but it looks like the best WYSIWYG solution on offer from Adobe at the mo.

Ben.

The link:

"Why does my footage look darker in Premiere?" Color Q&A

R Neil Haugen

Legend

There's a common misconception that is leading you to this choice: you're assuming all other screens look like yours. There's a good chance you're on a newer Mac, from your comments.

Those "P3-Display" color space screens are what ... somewhere around 4-6% of screens in the US, a bit lower elsewhere probably 2-4% of screens worldwide.

The problem you're going to have is your "solution" looks better on your screen, but worse on the majority of screens.

So which is more important to you ... the small percentage of new Mac users or the large majority of older Macs and non-Macs?

The underlying problem is the display variance between newer Macs and everything else out there. And that no app actually does the auto-adjust thing between color spaces for media.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

D

Dip & Dot

Participating Frequently

"So which is more important to you ... the small percentage of new Mac users or the large majority of older Macs and non-Macs?"

Neither. I can't account for everyone else's hardware. I think you're conflating two different issues. I came across this thread because, like the OP, my exported file was not matching what I was finishing in PP. That is an issue for which I feel I've found a satisfactory solution. I'm now confident that what I grade is what appears in the finished file. It gives me confidence.

The other different issue you're highlighting is accounting for varying quality monitors with different colour spaces etc. That's a decades old issue - similar to the weighing up of a broadcast monitor vs domestic monitor and those lovely big speaker stacks in a dubbing theatre vs the tinny speakers on someone's TV.

Yes, I might consider having a "domestic" reference (ie lower quality monitor and speakers) as part of a QA process before sticking it on YouTube, but unless I have confidence in the exported file, it's impossible to find a baseline from which to fine tune a "domestic" reference.

T

Thomas Feiner

Participant

For those who have waded through the above solutions and still get a gamma-lifted washed out version of their uploaded material, maybe also look into the specifics of the web browser itself. I discovered my videos looked as expected on Firefox, but washed out and pale on Chrome. I work with print as well as video on a calibrated monitor. This fixed my issue:

In the address bar of Chrome write chrome://flags/ and in the search bar that will appear below, write colors and hit enter. Chrome will give you a so called “experiment” named “Force color profile”.

Checking the options included in the box at the right you see the “default”, which is currently selected and is responsible for the washed out colors, as well as some other options you can try. In my case the option that worked perfectly was scRGB linear (HDR where available). This option gave me the exact same colors I enjoy also with Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

Perhaps in your case some other option works better. You can try all of them; nothing to lose! Each time you change color options you need also to restart the browser, but it re-opens automatically intact with all your previous tabs, including the “flags” tab with the color options. Therefore, it is really easy to try everything.

M

MojoPixel

Participant

This "washed out" issue just reappeared (this month September 2017) in After Effects, too, when I output my h264 Quicktimes.

For that app, the fix that worked for me was looking at the Preferences of After Effects and changing the 'Preview' setting to "more accurate except cached preview". I assume "more accurate" would also work.

P

pcrecord

Participant

I found this that may help some users that find this page.

Adobe Premiere & Youtube - gamma/color shift FIX !! - YouTube

R Neil Haugen

Legend

A summary of the YouTube referenced above ... when YouTube first takes in H.264 uploads, they are AVC1 ... and in that form, they may not show correctly. If YouTube does a full re-encode, it will be to VP9, which will show correctly.

So ... when exporting from PrPro using ProRes (not available in PC's), the WMV format (near the bottom of the Format options, at least in PC's), or the WebM format (apparently available from a plugin from the link I'll give below) you start with a VP9 ... and therefore exporting for YouTube in a VP9 format may be the easiest fix for many.

The fnordware site he mentions has Mac & PC downloadable plug-ins for PrPro ... note, I've not downloaded nor tried these. This plugin supposedly adds the WebM format to PrPro's export dialog box Format listing.

WebM for Premiere

The YouTube also lists an alternative YouTube workflow ... noting that although most vids uploaded to YouTube are converted to VP9 and then show color & gamma correctly, some never are converted by YouTube, and always show "wrong". For those uploads starting out in H.264's AVC1, you can force YouTube to convert an already uploaded video by going to your YouTube channel's edit options, choosing 'retouch' for one of your videos, and then saving without even changing anything. Sometime in the next two to ten hours YouTube will re-encode it to VP9, and then it will display properly on most browsers.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

P

pcrecord

Participant

Just a little precision.

If you export in vp9 from premiere, you will have the right colors but youtube will encode it first in AVC.

In fact Youtube always use AVC first regardless of the uploaded format.

Also, I think the amount of time to get vp9 from youtube depends on the amount of subscribers and views on the channel.

So some popular youtubers may get it right away but small channels have to wait.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

"But see, I'm not worried about whether I see correct colors on my screen as much as I'm worried about correcting them on the actual video and making it look right on YouTube across platforms."

As Gandalf righteously says, "That way lies madness!"

I regularly talk with some colorists of note. They work on network broadcasts either the 'content' or commercials all the time. In commercials especially, the clients will be in their suite during the grade and obsessing about an exact re-creation of the colors of their branded logos and graphics. And a colorist better know how to do that. But ... they also note, not a single person on the planet is ever going to see those colors reproduced "correctly" once it gets broadcast. No one.

Only those working in "long-form" theatre-based work have some small guarantee that a certain percentage of the viewers will see that image pretty close to the way they graded it. Depending on how well the people running any individual theatre's calibration system work, of course.

What does matter is making it as close to broad-cast standard as you can, as once 'released into the wild' that is the only way to have it look "right" to the end-user: it looks the same as other b-cast type material does on their screen, no matter how badly their screen is messed up. As one colorist noted, he went to visit his grandma in Minnesota, and saw his program appear on her very-green TV. Yup, gramma's green TV ... that's Life for those who deliver content into the wild.

And all the user screens are messed up in different directions over which YOU have no control!

So make sure your setup is at least calibrated with a decent puck & software, if not done with full broadcast monitor specs. Test your output when possible on setups with better calibration than yours ... if you know anyone working in a tv station, or routinely delivering content successfully to such, see what your media looks like on their gear. Make sure you're creating proper stuff. And then, once your stuff matches other b-cast quality stuff, publish.

YouTube seems to do different things in different places. I've uploaded to that without any notable change in gamma and end-points when seen on my computer screens. Others have very different things appear, yes, with the blacks lifted from 0 to 16 ... but some the whites stay "up", and for some others, the whites are clearly dropped to 235. No clue how you get around the uploading service's weirdities.

VLC and PotPlayer are realistically the two computer video players that show the media most reliably outside of PrPro. And yes, with an Nvidia card, you NEED to set that control for video dynamic range to 0-255 "Full Range" and also set it to over-ride the video player with the video card settings. That's how you control what you produce.

I think I recall someone noting that one set worked for them, as an export setting. Trying to remember whether it was using the Quicktime format (wrapper) with GoPro Cineform as the codec, or just a DNxHD/R export. I've just used the H.264/YouTube preset.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

stevethornton

Known Participant

From Photoshop, saving my video as a .PSD file, then using Adobe Media Encoder to export using DNxHD/DNxHR and checking Max Depth and checking Max render quality solved this problem for me. Thank you Neil!

ST

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