[Sharad Patel]

For whatever reason, maybe because I didn’t use youtube in the past, but use Vimeo, I never noticed this problem until I started working as a video producer at a new job that distributes work primarily online. (Before, much of my pro work was for broadcast or theatrical (festival) projection, and colors always looked great on those screens)

Recently, I made a careful color grade on an interview subject to get just the right skintone…
Monitor is calibrated to Rec709, the AE workspace for graphics is Rec709, Premiere reportedly works in Rec709, and the color grade is done in Davinci Resolve which reportedly also uses a Rec709 color space. (No, I did not have a dedicated monitor with an SDI connection)

But once on youtube it lost contrast, and had a slight yellow-green shift (which was made apparent because the emphasis here was on the skin tone. Yet, youtube was supposed to also use the Rec709 color space.

I looked at the exported movie file (encoded as an Apple ProRes master and as a Mpeg4 for youtube) and in QuickTime as well, both also looked dull and with a slight color shift. so basically youtube and QuickTime were both displaying the movie the same incorrect way.

This color flaw showed up consistently on the computer monitor, any browser, phone screen, etc.

Just to check, I imported the master and the Mpeg into Premiere and…. they looked great, just as intended!

So… I opened them in After Effects where I had controls over color management for the project. With the Rec709 management on for the project color space, the contrast/colors of both looked flawed, but with color management completely off, they both looked great! So somehow Resolve was showing me what the colors looked like with color management off, but youtube was displaying it through a Rec 709 color space translation.

On a completely random move, I decided to re-output my master from resolve as a sRGB profiled file out of After Effects (since it gives you control over what color profile to flag an output with). I then used this on Youtube and looked at it in QuickTime… and the contrast was correct! But the color shift was still there.

I found that Resolve does let you control the color space, but I haven’t figured out the right parameters to recreate the dull, yellow-green tinged output. Yet.

But then I also read that the difference between a full 0-255 range RGB output vs 16-235 RGB output could also be causing the loss of contrast (or increase in contrast other people are surprised by at the end of their workflow to distribution). There is a switch in Resolve to make sure it’s full range output.

So I guess I need to map out the variables and find the magic chain that maintains consistency between Monitor calibration, Premiere, After Effects, Resolve, Rec709, sRGB, 0-255, 16-235… but it feels like I’m trying to guess a winning lottery number.

My work:
https://ufoclubcreative.com

[Sharad Patel]

I wonder if it’s a bug in AE 2018?

(I know I had to switch back to AE 2017 to use Mocha Pro combined with the Roto brush on separate layers. With AE 2018, it started to crash, and led to crashing just upon opening the program. A quick search in Adobe forums revealed this to be a widespread problem, and not just with the exact plugins and tools I was using. But for this particular sequence here I was still in AE 2018.)

I’m already trying to sneak this past their eyes, because I have other work to get to. but I’ll try to recreate and do variations of it to see where the problem begins.

This looks like when you have layers in “dissolve” mode of transparency.

My work:
https://ufoclubcreative.com

[Sharad Patel]

Vertical lines? Don’t know what you’re referring to.

I’m talking about the organic black peppered dotted areas between the portrait frames that should be razor smooth flush to each other (there should be nothing between the portrait frames).

Yes, the client who pays big $$$ notices everything, right down to a hint of yellow in skin tone, or one stray fly away hair that has to be mocha’d out.

Are you not seeing the organic black peppered areas between the frames?

You can see it in motion right here: https://vimeo.com/253863623

Password: EOG

My work:
https://ufoclubcreative.com

[Sharad Patel]

You need to actually click the first image to enlarge it to see the problem.

My work:
https://ufoclubcreative.com

[Sharad Patel]

I think you misunderstand the situation and where the problem is I’m concerned about. That first frame has no motion as the videos of the portraits play for many seconds. And in that moment of no motion I am getting the edges you can see in the still. Once they move away from each other, the edges are fine.

I am specifically talking about he characteristics of the first frame where all 9 frames are up and motionless.

My work:
https://ufoclubcreative.com

[Sharad Patel]

LAte to this thread… but what preset in Compressor 4 will create a .mp4 extension that uses AVC encoding? I’m finding most clients require that exact file type instead of the more common presets on bot Adobe Media Encoder and Apple Compressor that result in an H264 .mov file that does not identify as AVC.

My work:
https://www.krop.com/sharad/

[Sharad Patel]

wow, I’m getting this message/problem too, and final cut just gets hung up and doesn’t open and become functional.

My work:
https://www.krop.com/sharad/

[Sharad Patel]

A true workflow for the visual portion of a project is : editing / special effects / motion graphics / color correction-image mastering.

Yeah, I should have mentioned earlier that the reason I want to take it back into Final Cut Pro is as a sort of live storage area for the project since sending and updating teaks to Color is really easy to monitor and keep fresh through viewing the project in Final Cut Pro.

Sorry, it should be a question of: Can I take my cut location info from AE into Color.

Retaining the edits really helps make the process in Color faster. So maybe I should look into getting some kind of data out of AE straight into Color.

After all, 3D programs like Lightwave and Maya had translations to open position data in After Effects and vice versa.

These would help speed up my process on scenes like this containing many cuts and tons of After Effects work to cover up the original 30p HDV look of the original footage: https://vimeo.com/27782196

My work:
https://www.vimeo.com/ufoclub1977

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Vimeo framework” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[Sharad Patel]

Right, just as Final Cut Pro only RENDERS out single encompassing clips as well, right?

But there must be a way to get some sort of XML type information out of AE and trigger Final Cut Pro to cut it up. Maybe someone has independently programmed this.

After looking it up, there might be a way to push cuts from AE to Premiere and then to Final Cut.

My work:
https://www.vimeo.com/ufoclub1977

[Sharad Patel]

thanks! I didn’t know it would be so easy.

I prefer Rob Bottin to Rick Baker