H264 Quicktime clip viewed on PC darker than on Mac

[Shane Ross]

How it looks on people’s computers and monitors is ENTIRELY up to how they have their monitor settings set. Just like how something looks on a TV is ENTIRELY up to how they have their TV set up. Go to Best Buy and look at the wall of TVs…none will look the same. They might actually look decent as they might have been set up right, but TVs in people’s homes, and computer monitors in people’s homes, most likely aren’t set up, calibrated, at all.

Shane

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[John Fishback]

Checkout this link. While it’s out of date, the info might be related and useful to you when making images for both mac & pc.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.1, Motion 4.0.1, Comp 3.5.1, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.1)

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[Mart Lume]

Thanks, Shane. I’ll give some more background:

The white color I mentioned looks white (as in screenshoted and eyedropped: #FFFFFF) to all 5 people who are looking at it with Macs. The same clip is looking gray (as in screenshotted and eyedropped: #EDEDED) to all 5 people who are looking at it with PCs.

This is a drastic difference very consistent between PCs and Macs (PC being much darker). We are viewing the clip and developing it for the web (no reason to mention TV), working remotely with the editor and trying to troubleshoot the problem remotely.

I can’t quite believe that no-one has had a similar issue before. Could it be that the pre-Snow Leopard gamma settings are still present in FCP, which forces the MOV being played at higher gamma on a PC?

Any advice is much appreciated.

[Jeremy Garchow]

And what color space are the pc and mac monitors set to? Shane’s tv analogy is right on. It’s even worse for computer based displays as there’s no equivalent of a smpte standard. Everyone’s display and color space is going to look different. If you see it as correct on your calibrated computer monitor, then it’s correct. You can’t control what eveyone else is going to do to their graphic card calibration or lack there of. If you need it to be uniform then you have to make a recommendation on how to tell people to calibrate their monitors when viewing your material.

[John Fishback]

This difference has always been the case. I agree with Shane and Jeremy about viewing on a proper broadcast monitor. But I go about it differently for corporate projects I know will be viewed almost exclusively on PCs. Then I’ll make “lightened” version of my encode. Sorenson Squeeze even has a “lighten” preset for this case.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.1, Motion 4.0.1, Comp 3.5.1, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.1)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO & 192 Digital I/O, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN