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OSX 10.8 + QTX + FCPX fully color managed
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[Walter Soyka] “However, if Apple ships new computers with decent preloaded profiles and color-managed software, this problem will eventually diminish on the Mac platform.”
Still less than 10% of your potential customer base. The greater concern will likely be how it looks on a tablet/phone from Vimeo or YouTube. 😉
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “Still less than 10% of your potential customer base. The greater concern will likely be how it looks on a tablet/phone from Vimeo or YouTube. ;-)”
Way more than 10%, if Apple also carries some kind of color management over to the iPad and iPhone.
This is one of the places where Apple’s end-to-end control of their products could really shine.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “Way more than 10%, if Apple also carries some kind of color management over to the iPad and iPhone.”
Except most clients aren’t handed the video directly from you to their device. The web (and possibly other conversions) are in-between. So I have little or no faith that this type of color management would be effective. I suspect we’ll still be plagued by gamma shifts for decades to come.
Now magnify the issue by people watching TV shows via Hulu, Roku, Apple TV, etc. – using the internet as the transmission conduit – but watching on consumer LCDs and plasmas (“TV sets”). So it leads me to just end up saying “don’t sweat the details” when it comes to color. It’s never right at the other end. I can only hope that it’s reasonably close 😉
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Erik Lindahl] “It’s a head-ache! I would love to recommend clients “view this file in application X”
As far as consistency for review and approval, I’ve had good luck with Compressor’s H264 and then posting that to Vimeo. Tends to look consistent. If I know clients are using iPhones and iPads, I send them the video in one of Compressor’s iPhone/iPad presets. I also find WMV and MP4 encoding is often less subject to gamma shifts. If I know my clients are on PCs, they get WMV files. If I need it to be generic than using MPEG Streamclip for MP4 (MPEG4) gives you good results.
If you really want to get specific and accurate, use WebM (encoded with Squeeze) and have them view it in Chrome (the browser).
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “Except most clients aren’t handed the video directly from you to their device. The web (and possibly other conversions) are in-between. So I have little or no faith that this type of color management would be effective. I suspect we’ll still be plagued by gamma shifts for decades to come.”
All great points. Everyone has to do a little bit of work to make it work — but color management is not sexy, so it won’t happen.
Again, though, Apple does own some distribution with iTunes and iCloud, so if they wanted to, they could make it happen within their ecosystem. Of course, they’ve had ColorSync for almost 20 years now and have not even considered using it for video until FCPX launched a year ago.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
“Way more than 10%, if Apple also carries some kind of color management over to the iPad and iPhone.”
iOS is color managed. Everything sent to the platform is tagged with an sRGB profile. iOS however isn’t doing “active” color management like OSX for performance reasons. Also, each iOS device has a given display so coloraccuracy should be “good enough”. Using features like AirPlay things get messier as you’ll be sending a stream to a device with a lot of settings (i.e your TV). Still Apple can keep this managed with an input of sRGB and supposedly a REC 709 output.
For us at work it’s 50/50 what format is preferred. Clients have in general used Windows, where the agency has Macs. iOS and other smartphones are shifting us more and more away from MPEG1 and WMV. Still, color consistancy is a problem that should be fixed.
Odd Premier Pro isn’t color managed when all other apps in their suite more or less are.
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Well it’s one thing with color management locally, and another if I’m looking at a complete producer > transmitter > reciver workflow. Let’s focus on what CAN be done – local color consistency! 🙂
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[Oliver Peters] “So it leads me to just end up saying “don’t sweat the details” when it comes to color. It’s never right at the other end. I can only hope that it’s reasonably close ;-)”
Boy do you have that right!
This just happened to me on the project I finished yesterday. It’s an art video with a very specific color palette. The artist and I carefully tuned the colors on my computer monitor, but when we played the finished piece on the 46′” displays that will go in the gallery, there was this one very deep purple that looked blue. This was a critical color in the artwork and it really *had* to be purple. The remote gave us options of different white points but the white point that made it purple enough made the white too yellow.
In the end, I went back and tweaked the purple in the video after testing some screen grabs on the display to make sure it was exactly right. We wound up making two video files. One is graded for the monitors in the gallery, the other is graded for computer displays, Youtube, etc. The artist is very happy.
There’s just too many variables beyond control on the end-user side. All it takes is one button on the TV remote to totally mess a carefully planned color scheme. “Don’t sweat it” is about the only thing guaranteed to work every time! 😉
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
Unless every monitor in the world has a device like the Spyder calibrator permanently installed color reproduction will always be a problem. I guarantee this will never happen.
I make a lot of video Kiosks, and I always buy the monitor that will be used in the kiosk, and then simulate the light conditions the kiosk will be in my suite. I set the monitor to factory defaults and after finishing the content I do a CC pass using the actual monitor as well as my reference monitor. I actually have the kiosk monitor hooked up the whole time editing. This way I come as close as possible to match a clients pantone colors in the logo or whatever.
If you can’t have this much control then use a pro reference monitor, that is all you can really do. I use both Matrox and several AJA interfaces in my suites. To play the kiosks I use BM’s Hypershuttles these days. To many problems with BluRays, Pioneer still makes a really good industrial duty SD DVD player, but all the Blurays I have tried burn out quickly and the discs go bad fast as well, heat is the problem I believe.
Olof Ekbergh
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[David Lawrence] “This just happened to me on the project I finished yesterday. It’s an art video with a very specific color palette. “
I’ve done a lot of themed attraction projects (museums, theme parks, kiosks, special venues) over the years. In almost all cases, the final audio mix is done on-site so that the mix is specific and conforms to that space. The reason DI color grading for feature films is done in a certified projection environment – and the audio mix is done in a properly designed dubbing stage – is precisely because you are monitoring in the same environment that matches movie theater design. Unfortunately in the consumer world, there’s no guarantee this will be the same. The last time I delivered art for a print ad, the company doing the prepress asked for not only the TIFF file, but also a print-out on paper that reflected the colors the way the ad should appear.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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