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Grade Inconsistency
I have an on going problem that I must address. After grading my footage in resolve transcoding the master file in AME and burning a blu ray, I am seeing a tremendous gamma, contrast and sharpness boost when I view on any uncalibrated consumer HDTV. This happens on all of them whether plasma LCD or LED they all crater the image in a different way. Im not talking just a small change, this is a huge luminance shift. Skintones look noisy and over saturated and highs look clipped. Sometimes depending on the TV the blacks will be all over the place as well, sometimes washed out (LED LCD) sometimes crushed (PLASMA). I’m on a mac and grading on a rec 709 calibrated flanders LM2140w fed via SDI from a blackmagick decklink extreme 4k. if I take that same blu ray and plug it into my digital Mitsubishi projector it looks identical to what I graded at least luminance wise. So whats up with the HDTV’s? how does one compensate to fix this problem? do we export with different output LUTS for various targets? What is thoroughly confusing to me in all of this is when I view a Hollywood produced Blu Ray it looks the same on my projector as on my HDTV, consistent. so no huge gamma shift distorting the image or perhaps its graded in a way that its not heavily effected by this “boost”? So heres the million Dollar question that I hope someone here can answer, How does one achieve this? I’m not asking for perfect but just a little consistency thats all. hopefully someone can point me in the right direction as I have been struggling with this for over 3 years now with no help. Thanks!
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8 Replies
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Have you tried exporting reference frames to see if there is a quantifiable color shift somewhere in your color pipe?
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The part that I’m confused is where you say “transcoding the master file in AME “
Are you referring to Avid’s AMA?
If so, check your video is imported into the Avid as RGB instead of Rec709, that corrects the shift for me, or if it’s RGB change it to Rec709 -
many many times. Ive done every experiment percieveable (by Me : ) no shifts happening in the pipeline. What I’m talking about is the contrast sharpness and gamma boost that HDTV’s produce. How do we compensate for that? thanks..
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no no… AME= Adobe Media Encoder
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[sean pollaro] “many many times. Ive done every experiment percieveable (by Me : ) no shifts happening in the pipeline. What I’m talking about is the contrast sharpness and gamma boost that HDTV’s produce. How do we compensate for that? thanks..
“You can’t really, you’d just end up chasing your tail. Target a specific color space (on a good calibrated display), deliver correctly for the appropriate color space for your project. That’s it. Consumer TV’s are usually delivered so far out of spec (boosted, over saturated, over sharpened, etc.) Just so they stand out in show rooms to uneducated consumers. I don’t have very high expectations for my work when it hits peoples homes, because most people don’t care or take the time to have their TVs set correctly let alone calibrated. At least with Digital theatrical projection my work is usually pretty close to the artistic intent in that environment! …Usually. Still way better than what I’d see the days of distribution on film prints!
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Thanks for your response. it seems that if I colorgrade where blacks sit at 0 and the highlights are 100 on my rec 709 monitor it looks perfect but it ends up being way too hot on an HDTV. Im having to set luma at the highest 70 IRE for it to look halfway decent on these consumer TV’s. after I compensate The result on my grading monitor is dark dingy and washed out. Boy you’re right about the tail chasing thing! I see what your saying but if theres nothing we can do then why do these hollywood blurays not have this issue. Ive looked at like 5 on my Samsung HDTV and compared them to my projector and it looks pretty close. While my grade looks drastically different from HDTV to projector. perhaps I’m not grading properly? I just dont get it
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If it’s a technical problem it would probably be on your video range settings being incorrectly configured, or a bad calibration. Maybe a problem with your blu-ray authoring is a possibility. If you’re noticing a major color shift, there is probably something severely off somewhere. In the end you should just target correctly, and understand that it’ll probably not look as good anywhere else. 🙂
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OK, AME… Nevertheless, Gustavo’s query is spot-on. You are transcoding FROM what TO what with “AME”?
It really sounds like you have got your scaling or Color-Models wrong: then, of course, there is the oh-so-often, oh-so-deadly problem of ingesting/exporting your files at DATA LEVELS, AUTO, or VIDEO-LEVELS.
Need more precise info on your work flow/codecs used.
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