Contrast and Desaturation upon Render....PROBLEM

Contrast and Desaturation upon Render....PROBLEM

by ellen osborne

on Dec 24, 2012 at 8:09:25 pm

I am having a problem with my piece becoming desaturated and losing contrast when I render. The clip is all animated from still images imported from photoshop. I am rendering through AE using Quicktime and the animation codec. If I render it into a psd sequence it looks fine, but the quicktime render looks awful. What can I do to make the Quicktime/Animation work properly? Or should I use something else? I tried using Prores 4444, but it didn't make any difference. I don't want to compress my file too much, because this is a short animation that will be shown in a theater.

Thanks for your help.
Ellen

Re: Contrast and Desaturation upon Render....PROBLEM

by Tudor "Ted" Jelescu

on Dec 24, 2012 at 8:14:46 pm

For delivery you must contact the folks that run the playback system and ask them what kind of codec you should use for compression. The final delivery codec can be compressed- sometimes quite extensively- without playback quality loss.
As far as your color issue goes:
Are you working in a 32 bit color space?
Is the linearize color space option on or off?
Have you checked to see how the final render looks in VLC or a player other than QT?

Tudor "Ted" Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

Re: Contrast and Desaturation upon Render....PROBLEM

by ellen osborne

on Dec 24, 2012 at 9:05:17 pm

It looks perfect viewed with VLC. So, I guess my next question is regarding FCP where I am assembling everything. Will I experience the same problem when I render the final piece out of it?

Re: Contrast and Desaturation upon Render....PROBLEM

by Todd Kopriva

on Dec 25, 2012 at 1:10:29 am

QuickTime Player (and applications that use the QuickTime Player infrastructure to play .mov files) are notoriously difficult to get consistent results from, since the handling of gamma is different from codec to codec and even from on version of QuickTime to another.

Regarding the result in the final movie: You need to test that yourself; never take anyone else's word on something as crucial as that.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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Re: Contrast and Desaturation upon Render....PROBLEM

by ellen osborne

on Dec 25, 2012 at 11:24:52 pm

Thanks Ted & Todd for your responses.

Just so I get this right. The problem is with Quicktime viewer and, although Quicktime is used to export these files both from AE and FCP, they should look fine unless viewed with Quicktime Viewer?

Ted, I'm not working in 32 bit and linearize working space is unchecked. (Don't know if this hinders or helps.)

Re: Contrast and Desaturation upon Render....PROBLEM

by Todd Kopriva

on Dec 27, 2012 at 10:15:25 pm

It's not the QuickTime viewer, per se. It's the part of the QuickTime system that renders images for playback---which is used by the media player known as QuickTime Player, by Final Cut Pro 7, and even by our software for some (but not all) QuickTime/.mov formats.

This moving target of QuickTime's inconsistency with colors is one of the reasons that we gave up on trying to use the QuickTime infrastructure for decoding many kinds of .mov files; and we're gradually replacing our dependence on QuickTime with our own decoders.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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