Depressing. Footage in Premiere/VLC looks VERY different in Quicktime/Vimeo/Youtube

[Shane Ross]

[Crescent Diamond] ” I’m wondering if anyone has any updates from Adobe on this? “

It’s not an Adobe issue, it’s an issue with the various players and web browsers and websites.

[Crescent Diamond] “VLC looks like Premiere but QuickTime looks desaturated in a major way. I guess the work around is a LUT – maybe one for YouTube and one for QuickTime (playback at an event)?”

YouTube on Safari will look different than YouTube on Firefox, and Chrome. And they will look different than QT Player, which looks different than VLC. And then people’s monitors connected to their computers are all calibrated differently, and will display the image differently. These are things you cannot control. Just like you cannot control how people have their monitors set up, or what browser they use.

Go to Best Buy and look at all the TVs…computer monitors. They all show the same video slightly different. There is nothing you can do about that. Make it look good on a properly calibrated monitor, but once you let it out into the wild, there’s nothing you can do.

Shane
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[Greg Janza]

I second Shane’s thoughts. There’s no problem within Premiere and there’s also no need to check videos on a variety of playback devices because they will all be different.

The only place that you have control is with the originating master file. By calibrating your monitor with a calibration tool like x-rite’s i1 you can be confident that you are creating the best product possible.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Jim Elliott]

For the record, it’s definitely a problem with premiere. Video is essentially in sRGB (rec709), and a wide gamut monitor (in program like premiere that has no colour management) will stretch the colours and make them appear more saturated than what you are exporting. FCPX, lightroom, photoshop etc don’t have this problem because you can say to the program ‘this is an sRGB/rec709 file’ so it renders the colours appropriately. In Premiere there is no colour management… you could even change the display profile and recalibrate your screen and it wouldn’t change the image in the program monitor – try it – load up a project and switch to a massively different display profile….the image doesn’t even change

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Jim Elliott] “wide gamut monitor”

This is why one would need to calibrate their display(s) according to what one is delivering. I have a reference monitor that has a wide gamut and I use a calibration LUT to limit that to the specification I need. A failure in viewing conditions or choosing a monitor that can’t be set up accordingly is a user error not a Premiere error.

[Jim Elliott]

As a workaround, when I come to export my video I put a layer of colorista over the top, with saturation at 7.50 and a tiny bit more crushed blacks. At this point it looks a little too saturated/crushed in the program monitor – but the result is the file that is exported and then played on Vimeo, YouTube, iPhone, QuickTime, preview, PowerPoint presentations, Dropbox, safari, chrome is pretty much exactly what I was viewing in Premiere when I was editing. Only problem is now when you play the exported video in a non-colour managed program (vlc/Premiere…I think maybe Firefox) it looks a little oversaturated. If vlc was the only medium the final video was played, I wouldn’t put the colorista layer on.

It IS a problem, one that FCPX have addressed recently by asking at the start of a project if you are working with a wide-gamut monitor, and one that Adobe saidi they were looking at when I raised it to them recently. What doesn’t help is people saying it isn’t a problem because they don’t realise what is happening

for anyone who wants to edit what you want in Premiere only for it to look drained in QuickTime/YouTube/Vimeo/iPhone etc then good luck ????????????????

[Tero Ahlfors]

Either you have a properly calibrated color pipeline or all the colours will be wrong. Slapping on some random Colorista value that “looks pretty close” instead of trying to make your monitor match isn’t really the way, but hey, you do what you do. If your monitor has any manual settings you can change and you have a supported calibration probe you could check out how close you are with the free Lightspace DPS over here https://www.lightillusion.com/lightspace_dps.html

There’s also a manual display calibration guide using said software: https://www.lightillusion.com/manual_calibration_idiots_guide.html

[Bret Hampton]

Shane Ross is totally correct about this.

I would think almost no one here has a calibrated BROADCAST monitor. If you did you’d understand network/cable delivery standards and what video should look like. Plus how things get screwed up down the chain (cable providers mistakes, home viewers setting up their sets too bright, etc.) My brother loves the brightness and saturation cranked way up. I just tolerate it since if I ‘fix’ it for him he’ll just change it back.

As for the squished 16×9 producer’s problem.
Years ago I used to receive standard def master videos from one of the most famous cable networks and the labels would often say 16×9 when it fact they were 4×3 letterbox. Other times they’d be 4×3 center cut (sides cut off). Our delivery standards always said 16×9 only. People screw up sometimes. My guess is the producer’s cable provider had some inexperienced operator who didn’t understand the settings of his encoder and sent it out wrong.

At trade shows like NAB you can see all kinds of Broadcast monitors from Sony, Panasonic and others. They aren’t cheap. They exist for a reason, to know your stuff looks right.

[Ken Kaiser]

Spoken like someone in Cable! lol

[Alan Okey]

[Bret Hampton] “I would think almost no one here has a calibrated BROADCAST monitor. If you did you’d understand network/cable delivery standards and what video should look like.”

Ditto for using/understanding video scopes. Scopes can tell you as much as or more about an image than your eyes. I’m amazed how many editors can’t read or won’t use scopes.

[Crescent Diamond]

I don’t have a broadcast monitor (I know what that is, and I know how to use scopes) but we are also not editing for broadcast – it is for the web and occasionally screening with a projector. These posts are extremely condescending, but what else is new.

Thanks, Crescent D.