[Erik Lindahl]

PrPro has a very low quality preview window / viewer sadly. FCP7, FCPX, VLC, QTX, AE etc all beat it by far.

Hope Adobe gets around to fixing that. Widescreen SD-footage looks even more horrible.

[Erik Lindahl]

I noticed the right-click convert in 10.8, quite useful for both images and video.

[Erik Lindahl]

The Photographers Ephemeris is a great app for sorting out sunlight-conditions a given date and time.

[Erik Lindahl]

Wouldn’t an iPad work great as a interface for grading suites like Resolve?

[Erik Lindahl]

Well it’s one thing with color management locally, and another if I’m looking at a complete producer > transmitter > reciver workflow. Let’s focus on what CAN be done – local color consistency! 🙂

[Erik Lindahl]

“Way more than 10%, if Apple also carries some kind of color management over to the iPad and iPhone.”

iOS is color managed. Everything sent to the platform is tagged with an sRGB profile. iOS however isn’t doing “active” color management like OSX for performance reasons. Also, each iOS device has a given display so coloraccuracy should be “good enough”. Using features like AirPlay things get messier as you’ll be sending a stream to a device with a lot of settings (i.e your TV). Still Apple can keep this managed with an input of sRGB and supposedly a REC 709 output.

For us at work it’s 50/50 what format is preferred. Clients have in general used Windows, where the agency has Macs. iOS and other smartphones are shifting us more and more away from MPEG1 and WMV. Still, color consistancy is a problem that should be fixed.

Odd Premier Pro isn’t color managed when all other apps in their suite more or less are.

[Erik Lindahl]

It’s a head-ache! I would love to recommend clients “view this file in application X or it will look like something your dog barfed up”. But now I really can’t… Given the above tests I don’t have a reference monitor at home so I can’t say if perhaps VLC actually looks more like a “proper” REC 709 in one of the above cases, the inconsistency, especially between QTX and VLC on the same Mac is very discouraging.

[Erik Lindahl]

“The colors should be constant”

Agree and they are not between After Effects, QTX and VLC.

“REC 709 should be altering the gamma and color curves to show how that image looks on a properly calibrated video monitor, right?”

Agree, but the look differs between the above three apps. AE and QTX should both be color managed, VLC I haven’t found any proper information on.

“I would assume that exporting a freeze from QT and opening it in something like ps and sampling in there should reveal the same color values as AE, minus a little change from any compression that occured.”

Re-importing the exported file in AE shows identicle color values, yes. But this doesn’t really solve the problem of consistant video display in the system.

“But still none of it matters. What matters, and what has to be the constant, is a properly calibrated video monitor.”

I very much disagree. I’d say consistent colors across applications is extremely important.

1. Content creation
2. Content distribution

Point 1 is a given. If I jump from After Effects to Final Cut Pro X to Premier to Flame, things should look the same – look consistent much in the way I can jump from Photoshop to After Effects.

With the ever growing source of digital distribution – NetFlix, iTunes, iOS content consumtion, YouTube, Vimeo – you name it – having consistent output is vital. Say you’ve graded everything against your $20,000 Sony LED reference display and want to output it for these channels. Then what?

For print there is a similar situation but they’ve had ICC-proofing since the late 90’s and it works. You soft-proof in Photoshop and correct your output against what “should come out of the printer”. You do a test-print to validate things and you’re good to go.

[Erik Lindahl]

There are still some oddities. Rendering a clip out of After Effects CS6 on a OSX 10.8 machine give the following results:

No color management used
– QTX displays the file way off the target (AE).
– VLC displays the file relatively close to the target (AE).

Using REC 709 as our working space
– QTX displays the file relatively close to the target (AE).
– VLC displays the file way off the target (AE).

I also tried working in REC 709 16-235 as someone recommended in another, given older, thread. This just made the file less accurate in both QTX and VLC (QTX was closer yet lacked a lot of “umph” in the picture).

The below are samples from a 1920×1080 test-project done in After Effects CS6 v11.0.1. It’s a simple logo animation with a clear GREY, GREEN and RED area. I used Apples Digital Color Meter application to measure the pixel values.

Working in REC 709 the colors from application to application is as follows:

DARK GREY
AE: 89 89 89
QT: 99 99 99
VLC: 87 88 87

GREEN
AE: 90 155 75
QT: 95 165 84
VLC: 16 155 64

RED
AE: 180 30 39
QT: 185 31 40
VLC: 208 25 32

I don’t understand why this has to be such a huge problem. Consistency between After Effects and Photoshop isn’t a problem but consistency with-in the OS really seems to be still. VLC is completely FUBAR when working with the REC 709 profile which I’d imagine is what a lot of people working in HD would want to do.

Working in Adobe RGB the colors from application to application is as follows:

DARK GREY
AE: 89 89 89
QT: 99 99 99
VLC: 87 88 87

GREEN
AE: 90 155 75
QT: 123 164 90
VLC: 87 155 73

RED
AE: 180 30 39
QT: 161 39 43
VLC: 178 30 35

VLC is much more accurate now, almost dead-on what’s seen in After Effects. QTX however falls short here.

Last but not least working in sRGB, something Apple recommends for amongst other things – iOS media:

DARK GREY
AE: 89 89 89
QT: 99 99 99
VLC: 87 88 87

GREEN
AE: 90 155 75
QT: 95 165 84
VLC: 18 157 65

RED
AE: 180 30 39
QT: 183 32 40
VLC: 208 25 31

QTX is close again. VLC completely destroys the media once again.

QTX is consistant in how “wrong” it handles the grey’s (or possibly gamma). It’s always a notch brighter than what the original in AE is like. Tagging the file via automator as an RGB-file the grey-value is actually dead on, but the color value run rampage in the wrong direction.

What does one do to sort this out?

[Erik Lindahl]

Have you tried with a different mini display port > HDMI adaptor? I know when the standard came out one could run into issues with these. It might even be worth trying mini display port > VGA if your screen allows it. I think these adapters always are “active” which is a good thing.