Still really struggling with AE color space.

[Larry Baum]

Here are the nasty problem. After Effects is color managed and most video players are not AND sRGB profile actually uses an sRGB tone curve, which contrary to popular understanding, is NOT the same as gamma 2.2.

If your monitor doesn’t have internal calibration things will look off to varying degrees regardless (although if the video player doesn’t toss out the video card tone response curve ramp that would still be calibrated but see the next part).

Assuming that your monitor was calibrated to gamma 2.2 and not to sRGB tone response curve then:

Even if you have a monitor with internal calibration (or you are only talking about tone response curves) you will still notice a difference. All of your videos will play back looking like the darker parts have become just a bit too dark and the highlight roll off will very slightly change. Contrast and saturation will appear to have been slightly boosted.

This is because the video will have been edited while you were viewing an sRGB working space with it’s sRGB TRC difference compared to the monitor’s gamma 2.2 TRC compensated for. But when you play it back in most video players they won’t compensate for sRGB TRC vs Gamma 2.2 TRC.

Since most HDTV or monitors are NOT calibrated to sRGB TRC it is very curious that After Effects doesn’t provide for an option to maintain primary location and saturation profiling while turning off tone response curve profiling or to give a toggle to treat the sRGB working space profile as if it were Gamma 2.2-2.4 (at user option) instead of as sRGB TRC.

If you have something like a NEC PA with 14bit 3D internal LUT you could just turn off color-management in AE and internally calinrate the NEC to sRGB/REC 709 primaries but with Gamma 2.2 and then things should match in and out of AE. If you don’t then I guess you should keep color-management on as you adjust color balance, etc. and then at the end turn it off and try to adjust contrast, brightness of the image a bit to try to match it closer to how it looks at gamma 2.2. Another possibility would be to try to find an .icc profile that uses sRGB/REC 709 primary locations but has gamma 2.2 set instead of sRGB TRC. I’ve been trying to find one, but have not so far. I might have to create one. I know that in Photoshop you can then have it convert from one profile to another. I’m not sure if AE allows that though. I think it does, but I’m not sure if it gives free reign.

Or you could calibrate your set to sRGB TRC and then it will match what AE shows (but then other video material will look a trace faded).

0-255 pc vs 16-235 video levels issue can also crop up. That is a whole long issue in itself and various video card drivers and playback software, etc.

It really is kind of silly that Adobe has AE set up so that by default most video edited with it will play back with a touch more contrast and saturation and darker shadows, etc. and not look quite like how you thought you edited it on most systems.

[Thanos Kagkalos]

Hey guyz, lots of information there. So in general, since im working mostly with H.264 and web players like vimeo or youtube, should i set both my monitor to sRGB and also the AE to sRGB as working profile? what about the output? thanks