White renders out as grey

[Michael Szalapski]

We’re going to need a lot more info. Check your project color management settings. Share with us your render settings. Etc.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Major Attila]

Rendering settings:

Project settings:

[Spencer Tweed]

Hey man, hopefully this is somewhat helpful for you. I’ve seen this with various codecs/settings, particularly on a Mac (I haven’t worked on Mac for several years but I used to see this back in the day). I’m pretty sure it comes down to codecs, particularly with quicktimes.

As a test try just rending to a .png sequence in AE and skip Media Encoder. That will tell you if it is a codec thing (.png’s have never failed me) and from there you can see if it is on After Effect’s side or Media Encoder’s.

The one other area that I see this ALL the time is when your render gets converted to REC.709 without you knowing it. If you don’t know that I’m talking about basically the broadcast world doesn’t actually work in the 0-255 color space that After Effects (RGB or sRGB) works in, they work in 16-235 or so (don’t remember the exact numbers at the moment) and so if you render to a codec or color space that is in 709 it will compact the whole value range, lifting the blacks slightly and darkening the whites down a pinch (much like what you see here). Again rendering to an image sequence out of AE should help you out here, then you just need to find the best way to convert that sequence or check your output settings for the video file.

– Spencer

[Walter Soyka]

[Spencer Tweed] ” you don’t know that I’m talking about basically the broadcast world doesn’t actually work in the 0-255 color space that After Effects (RGB or sRGB) works in, they work in 16-235 or so (don’t remember the exact numbers at the moment) and so if you render to a codec or color space that is in 709 it will compact the whole value range, lifting the blacks slightly and darkening the whites down a pinch (much like what you see here). “

This is supposed to be properly re-expanded on playback, though.

Major, how are you evaluating the results? Do you see different results with different playback software?

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

[Major Attila]

Actually, I uploaded the rendered video to YouTube and I noticed that on YouTube its everything alright. The colors are shown properly. Also if I am using Windows Media Player, everything is fine. It seems that the issue happens only in BS Player.

[Spencer Tweed]

Haha isn’t that annoying! That’s why it’s important to isolate your problem before you try to fix it I guess 😉 I didn’t think to check the player but of course that makes sense.

– Spencer