• Adobe Premiere Pro

  Keeping whites white

  Posted by Patrick Coan on March 23, 2014 at 12:53 am

  Hello!
  Background:I’ve been working with video in Premiere for several years, typically animating in Studio Max, compositing in AE, editing in Premiere and rendering to h.264 for the web- just recently, I started noticing that videos streamed through some monitors, on some web streaming services display whites as a dingy gray- kind of like your old white t-shirts.

  I found settings in my nVidia control panel to set video’s ‘Dynamic Range’ to ‘Full’ (0-255), which is nice, until you consider that there is no way to guarantee that the viewers of my videos will have the same wide range set, instead something like 16-235.

  Some video streaming services display whites correctly, like YouTube. The company that I am making videos for uses another streaming service, Wistia. Something about the way it encodes my video exposes this white issue. In the instructional videos that I create, I rely on animated elements that are placed on a white background, when displayed through the Wistia lens, it is obvious that the elements have been cut out and placed onto a white background. Also perplexing to me, some of the elements (specifically, screen captured white) display as white as they appeared in Premiere, while bitmaps imported from Photoshop appear off-white- even though they were completely white in Photoshop and appear completely white in Premiere.

  Question: How can I ensure that a video rendered from Premiere will display streaming video that is as white as it was in the editor. Or at least, how can I guarantee that it contrasts with other colors proportionately, so that the white background of one image layered above the white background of another is the same apparent color?

  Maybe there is no guarantee, is there a way to limit the range of brightness when compiling the movie so that white is white- even when a viewer’s video settings are not set to display the full range of colors?

  Can you point me towards technical documentation that explains options, or refer me towards any information that explains how to mitigate the issue? What do the pros do?

  Moderation in all, and all is relative.

  Patrick Coan replied 12 years, 2 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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