My 7D footage looks terrible on a projector

[yommytacoe]

Hey,

I recently completed a documentary shot on a 7D. It looks fantastic on my computer screen and plasma screen tv, but for some reason when I play it back on my data projector it looks awful, especially the color depth. There are a lot of blotchy colors, and peoples faces and lips especially look extremely red. Normal DVD's or youtube videos play back at great quality, but for some reason the quicktime files don't.

My initial thought was that the footage was just over-color corrected, but I checked the project files and the colorist only did very modest changes (boosting mids here and there and some desaturating).

Any idea what I'm doing wrong? I want to make sure that it will look good on the big screen at festivals, ect.

The only other reason I can think of is that the movie files are at 1080, and the 600x800 projector is doing some weird compression in the projection.

Thanks!

[bwwd]

Resize it to smaller resolution and check again then.Maybe gamma is different on 720p and higher.
Its hard to tell something about picture without seeing single frame grab tho.

[Gary Huff]

How are you playing it on the projector? You said it was QuickTime files. Could there be a way to put it on DVD and check it the normal way you play other material?

[yommytacoe]

How are you playing it on the projector? You said it was QuickTime files. Could there be a way to put it on DVD and check it the normal way you play other material?

That's a great suggestion. I'll try that. Thank you!

[qazwsx]

Are you playing from a windows machine or OSX? I had a similar issue when playing quicktime files on a windows PC using QT player. I switched to VLC and got better results. I guess it has something to do with the QT player's incorrect gamma setting for the windows version.

[sonofaresiii]

sounds like either your projector isn't calibrated for it properly or you haven't colored the footage to be optimized on different screens (making sure your blacks are black, etc.). i know very little about the process, so do some research, but if it's looking good on everything but the one projector, sounds like a likely culprit.