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You Tube Colors All Blotchy – Never Had This Before
About a month a go I did a series of interviews for a client who insisted they be conducted with the backlight coming from a filtered window shade (fortunately bluish) but they did NOT want the color to affect the subject’s face *sigh*. I was able to match the color from the shade with my Zabos and which left me with an in-camera WB of 10K in the EX1. Surprised the camera didn’t melt at that temp. Ha!)
Back in post I was able to grade the images so the colors looked fine and natural, no problems with skin tones. When I rendered out the videos, they looked fine. However, when I upload them to You Tube, some of the segments shot in that session have terrible purple-red blotching on the face. Some folks have it and some don’t. I’ve tried dozens of codecs, rendered in 109% and legal color space, pulled out grading plug-ins that were used on the subjects and nothing has made a difference (the problems largely go away on You Tube if you watch the clips in HD. Problem is, most folks who will watch these videos will do so at the default 360p setting which looks terrible). In fact, while some of the segments improve with different codecs, others do not (one subject cleaned up in WMV but then another that was fine started freaking out).
Any ideas? And why can’t I see these issues in any of the renders? No matter how lo res I render, they look fine (color-wise) so it’s not just a resolution of bandwdith issue. It’s only on You Tube that they go awry.
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4 Replies
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Although they never talk about the specifics I am guessing YouTube “tweaked” their encoder in the last month. A lot of people have been currently complaining about every manner of distortions of their original video. For me I had a video that I re-encoded several times and uploaded several times that broke in the same spot (during a transition.) It came up on YouTube as black but my original file plays a fade between two scenes just fine locally. What I gathered from my own personal experience is that the new encoder is very sensitive to out of range color data. What I mean by that is the encoder is perceiving data as a “command” and not actual data. Whether it be I or B frame mechanics or just a stricter tolerance on color ranges I am not sure. Since the corporate hype machine will never admit that they downgraded their encoder to the point of breaking it where we go from here is a mystery at this point.
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Try Vimeo. If the problem goes away, you can safely blame YouTube.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Thanks for jumping in, gentlemen.
I tried uploading to Vimeo and the blotches are there as well, but once again, only in one or two of the segments shot at that screwy session; all the other content looks fine.
So clearly it’s something in those shots but they don’t show up in Vegas, they don’t show up in the final renders (nor attempted transcodes from the master renders), they only show up when they go online. Which makes fixing the problem seem like nothing more than trial and error. I even tried rendering those shots out as brand new files from the masters and dropping them into the master project but it makes no difference.
I respect that repair via remote control like this is pretty much impossible but if anyone knows what You Tube and Vimeo’s encoders are seeing that my renders, eyes and Vegas aren’t, that’d be a great first step for me to take. 🙁
Thanks!
*EDIT* Went back to the source content, exported it to Resolve 11, carefully regraded and exported back into Vegas. Uploaded a test clip to You Tube and the colors are pretty much where they should be. I have no idea what Resolve pulled out that I couldn’t see, but I’m loving this program more every time I use it.
Thanks again Matt and Steve for your ideas!!
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[Scott Bruffey] “the problems largely go away on You Tube if you watch the clips in HD. Problem is, most folks who will watch these videos will do so at the default 360p setting which looks terrible”
At the lower resolutions the online video services typically use compression profiles which are not as good as the ones used for HD resolutions. One reason for this is to ease the decoding burden on older low res mobile devices.
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