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Colours washed out on rendered video
I have a composition that looks and previews fine within After Effects, however when I render out the video as h.264, the colour looks washed out when I play the video in all but one of my video players (Windows Media Player seems to display the colours fine).
If I export the file a lossless AVI however, the colour looks perfect. I can’t use AVI though as this generates a file in excess of 50 gig, instead of the 200 meg h.264 version.
I am sure this has something to do with colour management, but being a complete newbie in that area I’m not really sure what I need to do.
Can someone give me some tips as to how to fix this problem please?
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5 Replies
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Do the colors look washed out in QT?
How about VLC?
I would not count on QT being accurate when displaying H264 color- VLC and WMP are better at that.Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
Thanks for the reply, Ted.
To answer your question, in QT the colours look washed out, probably the most washed out of all the players I tried so far. In VLC, they are *slightly* better, but still washed out. Windows Media Player shows the video almost exactly how it looks within AE.
What I can’t figure out is why, if I export as lossless AVI, the footage looks fine regardless of which media player I use!
Mike.
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H264 in QT does not do well with color interpretation when rendered out of AE. I would use the Animation render to compress from Adobe Media Encoder. You can get a much better result and Variable bit rate 2 pass encoding. That should do the trick. Weird though that VLC did not correctly interpret the color.
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
OK, now this is weird!
I took your advice and tried to render as animation via Media Encoder (2-pass variable) and I kept on getting an ‘encoding failed’ message when choosing my local hard drive for the location to save the file. However, if I choose the exact same settings but render to an external device such as a USB drive, the operation performs flawlessly AND the colours are spot on!
So, I’ve finally got a solution (many thanks) but this has caused another head scratching session as I can’t understand why I can’t use my hard drive as a target device for the exported file?!
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I’m having this exact same problem. If I export in anything but “Lossless” aka AVI its looks washed out. Windows Media Player seems to be the only program to not show the colors washed out, but VLC player is the worst and QT can’t even properly play it in MP4 format. Its been driving me crazy, but on YouTube it looks like it does on WMP. I know this thread is old, but just so everyone knows this isn’t that random of a problem, it must be the players, but its aggrevating.
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