MAJOR Gamma Shift Between Premiere and Encoder Export

[Jacob Sørensen]

Could you please give an update on the issue here at some point? ☺

[Duke Sweden]

Through months of intense research I’ve discovered that AME does not like h264. When I encode using WMV I get exact reproductions of my video as they appear in Premiere Pro. I realize this is not an option for you pros (although I see no difference in quality, it takes FOREVER to render to wmv), perhaps this can give the engineers at Adobe a starting point in troubleshooting the problem.

[Jason Jammer]

Hello Everyone,

I’ve been in contact with Adobe and they have shown interest in looking into the issue. I created a sample file along with sending them my Encoder Preset. Hopefully they will be able to duplicate the shift on their end which in turn may warrant a conference call.

The people at Adobe are very busy and I value any time they put towards solving this issue. If it comes to a call with them I will let everyone know the results.

In the meantime, comprise has been my only solution to this issue. I do a lot of render testing and make adjustments as needed. If you scroll up and see my post from Feb 2 that shows the side by side render along with the Sequence Settings panel. I found very significant differences with “Composite In Linear Color” UNCHECKED as opposed to CHECKED.

[Duke Sweden]

I did another search on this problem and 6 threads on the adobe forum came up. This problem goes back at least as far as CS6, so I don’t think Adobe is in any rush to fix this. Just curious if users of other NLE’s have had this problem. I’ve never seen any complaints.

[Duke Sweden]

Haven’t had a chance to read it all yet but this may be of interest.

https://nofilmschool.com/2014/09/massive-difference-export-quality-fcpx-and-premiere-pro

[Duke Sweden]

I think I may have discovered why encodes have a color shift in them. It’s not the encode, it’s Premiere Pro. I just opened a new file, no effects or lumetri or ANYTHING added to it, and I noticed it looked yellower than the original file. I never open my original file before opening it in Premiere Pro but this time I did. I noticed that I was getting fairly good skin tone, but in Premiere Pro it had a yellow cast. So, obviously, if I go to tweak the colors in Premiere Pro to, say, give the skin tone a more pinkish hue, I’m actually pushing it towards the purple hue I get when I encode it. So it’s not Media Encoder, it’s Premiere Pro.

Again, something for somebody at Adobe to look into. Assuming I’m not the only person left staying with this.

[Duke Sweden]

Here, you can’t get any more obvious than this.
On the right is the unmodified straight out of camera file, still frame in VLC.
On the left is the same file opened in Premiere Pro, with NOTHING done to it.

Obviously a yellow cast. If I color correct it, it will push it too far towards pink. I can calibrate until the cows come home and it’s not going to make two different images look the same on the same monitor when they’re obviously different. Again, that’s VLC, NOT Quicktime.

Now who’s the lunatic!?! Don’t answer that.

[Chris Wright]

I finished some tests on this problem. I did not compare exporting premiere vs AME as that has already been proven conclusively a bug. I focused on only premiere exports to original vs VLC. This is what I found.

1. exporting out of premiere and comparing difference to original is no pixel change RGB info values
2. screenshoting from VLC into AE difference matte is no pixel change RGB info values
3. screenshoting from premiere into AE difference matte is no pixel change RGB info values
4. making a color transform lut with https://sellfy.com/p/aQ1y/ has no pixel change

What I can deduce is that possibly the VLC media player and premiere both interpret the pixel values and display via opengl in slightly different ways in certain video cards. The biggest problem being that without a broadcast monitor, there is no way to color correct accurately or make conversion luts. I am now working on a colorpicker transform lut at opengl level.

update:
colorpicker VLC matches premiere preview in my configuration. I am now testing another color picker… both color pickers match.

Final result: I cannot replicate VLC color problem on this system. furthur testing on other systems required to narrow down gfx card/vlc color problem.

[Peter Garaway]

Hi All,

After some testing with the project and files provided by Jason I wasn’t able to reproduce the same major color shift between Premiere and AME – as long as the settings matched, i.e. GPU, max quality and composite in linear color. Unfortunately, I do not have an answer for this problem as I could not reproduce it on 3 different machines using different windows versions and GPU’s. I can follow up with you Jason offline.

One thing I’d like to point out is the difference in color when ‘composite in linear color’ is enabled vs disabled. There’s been lots of post about this feature which I’ll include links below. In short, compositing in linear is gamma set to 1.0. Compositing in linear color will generally look more natural for compositing real video footage, but worse for synthetic computer generated graphics like the example Jason provided in the post dated ‘Feb 2, 2017, at 9:29:34 am. To avoid this look you will want to disable ‘composite in linear color’.

Additional posts:

https://www.keenlive.com/renderbreak/2013/10/premiere-pro-linear-compositing-and-single-source-cross-dissolves/

https://s3.artbeats.com/articles/pdf/linear_light.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyqM4TbyiI0&t=43s

Peter Garaway
Adobe
Premiere Pro

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[Mike Kelland]

I think it’s the same issue – I’m battling with colour differences when max bit depth is enabled and disabled in combination with viewing with Open CL on and off (yellow bar above or red bar above). When I enable max bit depth the image goes more magenta.

There’s a definite bug in there – the colour should be the same between settings. It makes colour correcting a nightmare, i.e which is the real colour??

nMP 2013 D700