Vimeo HD Export Preset – movie darker when uploaded to Vimeo

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Where are you seeing the difference?

Are you watching your video in the Quicktime player?

Do Premiere and Vimeo not match? This is regardless to any 3rd party media player?

What is your operating system? Is your computer monitor calibrated? Are you using any exernal monitoring like an Aja, Blackmagic, or Matrox card?

[Devin Mclaughlin]

My monitors are calibrated. And I’m using Lion. After I export using the vimeo preset, and I play it in quick time it’s fine, looks exactly like my original sequence. However when I upload to vimeo, the image is much darker. This also happens with youtube. Not using anything else.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Try exporting your sequence as an H.264 with a .mp4 (NOT .mov) extension, and upload that.

If it looks right on Vimeo then what you’re experiencing is the dreaded Quicktime gamma shift.

[Devin Mclaughlin]

the vimeo hd export preset does that, my movie is an .mp4. and it looks fine, in quick time, but on vimeo and youtube it creates this gamma shift. I will post screen caps of my sequence, my quicktime player, and the vimeo player to show the difference between what’s on my computer and what my upload looks like. Should I detail any of the preset’s info to see if there is a discrepancy? Thank you again for your consideration and support.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

You shouldn’t be comparing how the video looks on YouTube/Vimeo to how it looks in QuickTime on your computer cause QuickTime isn’t playing back the file correctly it never has, and it never will. FCP editors have been dealing with this Gamma problem since the beginning. The problem is QuickTime.

Where else is QuickTime entering into this project? You aren’t perhaps editing ProRes files are you?

If you have VLC you sould try playing back the files in that. If they look dark there, then they’ll look dark once they’re uploaded.

If you can’t find the source of the gamma shift then you’ll need to just lift the levels to compensate and test the videos in VLC.

[David Steiner]

yep, same issue here: Quicktime is “too light”

But if my goal is vimeo, then everything works, because I ignore the QT intermediate files, and then Resolve image = Vimeo image.

details:
– From Resolve, I export a QT ProRes 422, with data levels = auto (same as data levels = scaled video, ie 64-940). My QT ProRes is too light, but I don’t care

– Convert QT ProRes to QT MP4 15mbps in Compressor. that’s too light too, but I still don’t care

– I upload to Vimeo, and I get my Resolve image.

hope this helps
David