[Colin Ruggiero]

Thanks a lot for your quick reply, Chris. And thanks for all of the info you provided – I’ve seen your posts all over the place on these forums and it seems like you’re really doing a lot to try to help people, which I really appreciate.

I’ve read the stuff you posted here in other posts of yours though and I feel like what I’m currently experiencing is something else. Might be easiest if I reply directly to the numbers in your response:

1. Youtube is definitely re-encoding my content and mapping the levels inaccurately. No matter what codec, and I’ve tried everything, I upload, the rec.709 0-255 file that I’m uploading displays as 16-235. I’ve done everything I can think of, including retouching, to get Youtube to re-encode the file as VP9 but it won’t do it. When I check the stats on my videos, even 3 or 4 days after “retouching” the files are still encoded as AVI/MP4.

2. I’m using a new iMac Pro (but I’ve had the same issues on other computers and other monitors) that doesn’t use an NVIDIA card so this is not an issue here.

3. I’ve used your fixmyyoutube LUT and been very thankful for it in the past but it always crushes my blacks a little too much. Saturation in the image is restored and matches what I see in Premiere but the blacks end up really crushed.

4. VLC already matches what I see in Premiere exactly. I also don’t have any issues with AME vs. PP exports.

Thanks for the info about using DisplayCAL to create a LUT. That’s valuable and I may do that in the future to get a more accurate image inside of PP. But that is not my biggest issue at this point. My PP Program monitor matches what I export when played back in VLC and other players except QT. QT and Youtube match and are washed out. Exports from Premiere that I then import into color-managed AE also look identical. For example, I process a time-lapse in AE and export out as ProRes 422 using a completely color-managed workflow. I know you often recommend turning color management off in AE but I’m a fan of keeping it on. If I import that ProRes file into Premiere and then export it back out of Premiere using a variety of codecs they all match what I saw in both After Effects and Premiere. Those files opened in VLC or other players (except QT) also match with each other and with what I saw in both AE and PP. I have a second HP monitor that is just calibrated with puck and software and everything matches there as well. When I upload those files to Youtube they look like shit and no amount of retouching or tweaking causes them to be recompressed in a way that fixes the issue. I should add that they look bad on Youtube in various browsers also, not just one. This is not a monitor calibration issue. It’s possible that it’s some sort of browser issue but I doubt it. Any thoughts? And thanks!

[Colin Ruggiero]

Hi Chris,

I’ve been struggling with these issues for a long time and have read a lot of your posts on these threads. I don’t understand your suggestion to calibrate your computer monitor to the color profile that Premiere works in for two reasons. One is that, no matter how I calibrate my monitor, the program monitor display inside Premiere looks the same. And the other reason is that material in Premiere looks identical to me as it does in color managed After Effects and a host of other players. I know that lots of different issues get conflated in these gamma shift/color management threads. Mine, for now, is washed out videos in QT, Youtube and Vimeo. But I just can’t see how calibrating your monitor, or using LUTS inside Premiere could be related to this particular issue. And when you talk about calibrating your monitor you must be referring to hardware calibration in a broadcast monitor rather than software profiling a computer display? Otherwise I just can’t see how it makes any sense. Any thoughts you might have much appreciated.