Color Management between Color/AE/FCP
by Doug Cooper
on
Jun 27, 2008 at 6:55:34 am
I'm working on a spot that's destined for the web, and we're working in monitor color ( with monitor calibrated to sRGB).
But I'm seeing differences in the displays between Color and After Effects. Just rendering out the material from Color and loading it back into After Effects shows it different in After Effects. However - if I open one of the exported Quicktime files that came out of Color (Apple Uncompressed 422 format) in Quicktime player, it appears with the same color as Color shows it.
The same media loaded into After Effects looks desaturated and washed out. If I apply a Gamma of roughly .85 to the footage inside of After Effects it looks about right (though still slightly less warm and saturated than the same material in Color or Quicktime).
I currently have color management DISABLED in After Effects, and my Quicktime Pro preferences set to "Enable Final Cut Color Compatbility".
Come to think of it, I just tried turning that off (the Final Cut Color Compatibility) in quicktime, and that makes the Quicktime Player look a lot closer to After Effects (the gamma seems right, but now the Quicktime player seems slightly less saturated and less warm than After Effects). Of course if I do that, then the rendered media that came out of Color doesn't match the Color on-screen display when I play that media in the Quicktime player.
This is driving me nuts - can anyone help shed some light on how Color, Quicktime, and After Effects might be managing (or not) color spaces, and how that may be throwing me off?
MPB 2.6GHZ Core 2 Duo
OSX 10.5.3
After Effects CS3
Color 1.0.3
Quicktime 7.4.5 (25)
Re: Color Management between Color/AE/FCP by Doug Cooper on Jun 27, 2008 at 12:19:46 pm
After a little digging, I found numerous postings about gamma shift problems when exporintg Quicktimes on a variety of Mac apps when you're monitor has a custom profile setup. Some users have found that exporting the files with their monitors set to the default profile (then setting it back to the custom profile while working) solves the problem.
In my case, using Cineon files as an interchange format instead of Quicktime gets me a match between Color and After Effects. (Note that After Effects won't read DPX files from Color for some reason, but it will read Cineon's exported from Color).
Re: Color Management between Color/AE/FCP by Doug Cooper on Jun 27, 2008 at 12:23:04 pm
PS - for the record, exporting the Quicktimes while set to my default monitor profile did *not* solve the problem for me, only the Cineon files worked.
Re: Color Management between Color/AE/FCP by Noah Kadner on Jun 28, 2008 at 4:35:42 pm
[Doug Cooper]"I'm working on a spot that's destined for the web, and we're working in monitor color ( with monitor calibrated to sRGB).
But I'm seeing differences in the displays between Color and After Effects. Just rendering out the material from Color and loading it back into After Effects shows it different in After Effects. However - if I open one of the exported Quicktime files that came out of Color (Apple Uncompressed 422 format) in Quicktime player, it appears with the same color as Color shows it.
The same media loaded into After Effects looks desaturated and washed out. If I apply a Gamma of roughly .85 to the footage inside of After Effects it looks about right (though still slightly less warm and saturated than the same material in Color or Quicktime).
I currently have color management DISABLED in After Effects, and my Quicktime Pro preferences set to "Enable Final Cut Color Compatbility".
Come to think of it, I just tried turning that off (the Final Cut Color Compatibility) in quicktime, and that makes the Quicktime Player look a lot closer to After Effects (the gamma seems right, but now the Quicktime player seems slightly less saturated and less warm than After Effects). Of course if I do that, then the rendered media that came out of Color doesn't match the Color on-screen display when I play that media in the Quicktime player.
This is driving me nuts - can anyone help shed some light on how Color, Quicktime, and After Effects might be managing (or not) color spaces, and how that may be throwing me off?"
DPX is imho a superior workflow. But it's not included "in the box" with QuickTime. You need to invest in this plugin, which I cannot recommend highly enough:
