On a deadline and stuck! AE color interpretation problem

[Walter Soyka]

What format are your originals? How did you transcode in note 5?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[John Cuevas]

Ahh, the joys of color space, RGB and video. Along with Walter’s questions, what are your project settings(File Project Settings). Also, right click the footage in the project panel and click “Interpret Footage”. Check the color management and see if it has the correct color profile.

AE for some codecs(Avid DNxHD) chooses the wrong profile. Since I work with DNxHD all the time, I’ve modified the interpretation document so that it does this correctly(though now it does other wrong, but I don’t work with those codecs enough to worry about it—I correct them in AE on a case by case basis)

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[Faith Granger]

QUESTION 1 – 5 different consumer camcorders were used by casts / friends. Most are spitting out MPG-2:

Type: MPEG-2 Transport Stream
Streams
Video: 00:00:07.508, 29.970 fps interlaced, 1440x1080x12, AVC

file extentions varies from AVCHD Video (.MTS)(Sony camcorder) to Video Clip (.avi) (captured from mini tapes of older footage) to a few .mov files, usually those come from other weird formats I had to pre-render a few years back because they were making my NLE crash.

QUESTION 2 – When I pre-render in Vegas I chose SONY mxf, which produces very small files, renders super fast but does not show much quality loss, it is a good compromise, that was suggested by the Sony Vegas team.

This morning I will test one of the avi files see if I have the same problem. i think so far I have only converted EPISODE 4, which is all made of .MTS clips, so I;ll try importing a few avi fies and rendering them out see if it does the same thing and post result here.

[Faith Granger]

Currently I have color management OFF. I tried color settings depth at both 16bit and now 32bit to see if it helped, but same outcome.
Previously the color management was ON (whatever AE defaults to, but I now don’t remember what the default setting was LOL) and since I was having the contrast issue I turned it off. As my initial post revealed, turning it ON or OFF did nothing to solve my predicament :/

Glad to hear I am not the only one who noticed AE difficulty in dealing accurately with color space.

Have you seen the screengrabs I uploaded on that page I made (see link in post 1), and can you suggest a project setting / color space and settings to correct the problem?

NOTE: you said ” right click the footage in the project panel and click “Interpret Footage”. Check the color management and see if it has the correct color profile.” but the problem is I don’t know what the “correct color profile” should be. I need guidance. As I said, it’s my first time using AE and I’ve only used it for about 10 days now, mostly dealing with creating my title animation (that went well 🙂 ) and now frame rate conversion…

[Faith Granger]

Imported and rendered back out one of the avi clips, with color management OFF, and SAME PROBLEM. So we can rule out that the clip native formats are to blame, since both avi and MPG-2 are doing the same thing.

[Walter Soyka]

How did you render the AVIs?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Ae is of course capable of perfectly color-accurate work. Can you walk through your entire workflow? What’s the next step after Ae? How are you evaluating the output? Where are these frame grabs/screen shots coming from?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Faith Granger]

Well currently, for the purpose of testing the problem, the workflow is incredibly simple lOL:

I drag a avi or a .MTS (MPG-2) clip into AE, with color management OFF then send it to the render queue.

I then render it as lossless quicktime (but have tried many other render formats – see my first post) or as Quicktime with video codec JPG 2000 at 95% quality.

SO BASICALLY i AM NOT DOING ANYTHING TO THE CLIP EXCEPT RENDERING IT BACK OUT.

I then bring both the original clip and the AE rendered version into my NLE on seperate tracks but loned up so they start at the same place. And compare frame by frame by muting and unmuting top track.

And I can SEE the difference, loud and clear.

The screengrabs posted came from my NLE timeline.

FAITH GRANGER
Multi Award winning filmmaker
—————————–
http://www.deuceofspadesmovie.com
http://www.facebook.com/deuceofspades

[Faith Granger]

My last test: you can see the two clips in one frame, I put the AE one on top of the original one, allowing some of the original clip to be seen on the sides. You can clearly see the sky color and brightness difference, etc…

FAITH GRANGER
Multi Award winning filmmaker
—————————–
http://www.deuceofspadesmovie.com
http://www.facebook.com/deuceofspades

[Walter Soyka]

Let’s try ruling out a variable.

If you export from your NLE (Vegas?) into one of these formats (codec and container) that you’ve used with Ae per above, then immediately re-import into your NLE, do you see the shift?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]