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Reconcile color differences between .mov and .mp4
Im working in Premiere Pro CS5.5.
I created a “kinetic typography” type animation in after effects and exported it as a quicktime .mov and brought it into Premiere with other footage. After finishing the movie in Premiere I exported it all as a H.264 file. The default codec is “Main ConceptH.264 Video” – can’t change it.
Im not sure what is exactly off but it looks like the contrast and brightness are totally spiked in the .mp4 whereas if I export it as a .mov again it looks fine.
I want to use .mp4 because of the small file size. I’ve tried adjusting brightness, contrast, gamma and other properties with little improvement.
This will probably be a problem for everything else I export as mp4. So what can I do to improve the output or avoid this problem altogether?
Thanks
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5 Replies
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What are you viewing the clip in? Typically QuickTime’s gamma issues start to play a role in some of this…the “spiked” version might be what you actually have, it’s just that QT player doesn’t display it that way…
Are you on a Mac? Windows? How are you viewing your results to compare them?
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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Very interesting. Quicktime shows both the .mov and the .mp4 the same, no difference. But in WMP I see this “spike”.
So comparing the between two media players I see a difference. Which is the one I know is the actual or will that always differ? It seems Quicktime is the only player that doesn’t spike my colors and levels but Im not sure how to compensate for that.
Thanks Tim
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Yes…the QuickTime player does the same thing to both clips…WMP needs to use QT to play the .mov file, but uses it’s own MP4 decoder to play the H264 clip.
I suspect if you get a player like VLC, it will be the same as Windows Media Player.
The odd thing is that the “spike” version is what most non-QT players would see…I don’t want to say that gamma value is “right”, but certainly the gamma shift that happens in QT seems to belong only to it.
I did some web classes not long ago that specified a QT H264 file for distribution…my stuff looked nicely saturated and dynamic…right up until I put it in QuickTime…it appeared the color all went out of it, but what is actually happening is a well-known QT gamma problem that’s been around for a long time.
If you search “QuickTime gamma shift” on Google, you’ll get more results than I can reasonably take Cow server space for.
At least you’ll see what it is and how others deal with it…lots of different approaches.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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Thanks for all the help. I havn’t really figured out a solution but at least I know whats happening.
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Actually, after testing the same .mp4 on all my media players, I see that it is only windows media player that is altering the gamma or something of the movie. Fine everywhere else – quicktime, vlc, realplayer.
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