[Iggy Roddy]

Thanks, I activated HTML5 on Google Chrome (34.0.1847.131 m) but it makes no difference:

I’m not sure how to identify the version of HTML5.

Anyway, I’m wondering whether there is some other parameter that could make the difference. Otherwise there are millions of people getting off-color in their videos (if they’re using the Chrome/Flash/HTML5 combination). Granted 99% of people won’t notice.

I also tried Safari (4.1.3 (4533.19.4)) with a Flash version of 9.0.246.0 on an old Mac, purely out of interest:

Again, the colour is off although it’s such an old version the consequences are academic.

But, on the later versions of Safari/Flash (7.0 (9537.71)/13.0.0.206) on an iMac everything is OK:

I also tried a later version of Flash (13.0.0.206) on Internet Explorer (8.0.6001.18702) on a different computer and I’m getting a good match:

I realise that some of the browser/flash versions may seem somewhat obscure but they represent the ones I have available on various machines.

So, in conclusion, Internet Explorer and Safari using latest flash versions are giving a very close colour match to the Vegas Preview.

[Iggy Roddy]

[John Rofrano] “[Iggy Roddy] “I wonder also why there is never an exact colour match between the different images; is this just part of the rendering/compression process?”
Rendering to a lossy format will ALWAYS loose data. The information that gets lost is mostly color because it is intentionally thrown away to get high compression. (i.e., 4:4:4 gets reduced to 4:2:2 or even 4:2:0 or 4:1:1) If you don’t want to loose anything you need to render to a lossless format. Unfortunately, these files are quite large and not used as a deliver format.”

Thanks for the reply John, I’m just getting my head around color sampling! But, I’ve now got the RGBs very close (in many cases within 1 point) – see update below. So I’m not going to lose too much sleep over very marginal mismatches in color.

[Iggy Roddy]

Guys, I’ve an important update on this. I was rummaging through the old posts on similar issues and it got me thinking to check a different browser which is what I did.

So here is the equivalent Youtube screen grab on Internet Explorer (my previous screen grab had been when using Google Chrome):

As you can see it’s a much closer match to the Vegas Preview.

For example the RGBs for red are:

Vegas Preview: 180 16 16
Youtube on IE: 180 16 17 (below green line)
Youtube on Chrome: 167 0 18

, the green is:

Vegas Preview: 16 180 16
Youtube on IE: 16 181 16
Youtube on Chrome: 29 209 22

, the blue is

Vegas Preview: 16 16 180
Youtube on IE: 15 16 180
Youtube on Chrome: 18 5 174

and, just to pick another non RGB colour, pink is

Vegas Preview: 180 16 180
Youtube on IE: 181 16 181 (some minor variations of this)
Youtube on Chrome: 167 0 177 (below green line)

So what’s the cause of this difference?

I’m not quite sure, but I visited this page: https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player.html and it told me that my flash versions were 13.0.0.182 and 11.3.372 for Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, respectively. I’m not an expert in this area but the cause may be these different versions, but I know also that HTML5 is involved with playing Youtube videos so I can’t give a conclusive reason yet. It would seem worrying though if a later version of flash was producing inaccurate colours.

[Iggy Roddy]

[Scott Simpson] “The shortest answer I can think of is: “Because it’s YouTube.”

YouTube is a lot of good things: quick, easy, ubiquitous. But it’s not known for being kind when re-encoding uploads for delivery. We also have to factor in whatever the YouTube player is doing to levels and colors on playback.

In short: Do your best and feed YouTube the best file you can, knowing that you have no control over how much the site will chew up your file once it’s received.”

Thanks, I guess I thought that the “A Better Method” tutorial offered a solution – which it did for blacks/white/greys but obviously the green for example is a lot brighter on Youtube.

[Iggy Roddy]

[Dave Osbun] “I just wanted to say “Thank you!” for posting the link for the free test pattern. This will come in handy!

Dave”

You’re welcome! It is useful to diagnose problems before you move into real world footage.