Differences between quicktime and WMP color

Rippie

Rippie

Veteran
My colorist sent me a test file of a short film I'm working on.
I'm on a PC.

There is quite a bit of difference between playing the same file in windows media player (deeper blacks) and quicktime (more washed out)

The test file is an .mov.

Is this something that just has to be lived with? or is there a trick
or process to even it out between players?

The final main use will be playback within a web browser at different resolutions.


(ignore the aspect ration differences, I just resized the windows)
Thanks


anoojcolorexample.jpg
 
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We really need a sticky for this... Here's the bottom line: Quicktime does it wrong.

The easy answer is that QT has incorrect handling of H.264 levels (For whatever reason... I don't know if Apple prefers it this way or not, as this has been known for years).

There ARE workarounds (After Effects can encode MOVs I believe with QT flags that compensate for the level change, but I've never actually tried it), but the easiest answer is to simply not preview in Quicktime.
 
Thanks RX782 for the explanation. Sorry if this has obviously been discussed before.
Tough solution though ("simply not preview in quicktime") as I'm sure a majority of browsers out there
have the quicktime plug-in.
 
Rippie said:
Thanks RX782 for the explanation. Sorry if this has obviously been discussed before.
Tough solution though ("simply not preview in quicktime") as I'm sure a majority of browsers out there
have the quicktime plug-in.
Click to expand...
Don't feel bad, just saying we need a sticky ;) A quick google search for "Quicktime H.264 levels" should bring up a ton of results on the matter.

Are you providing a straight direct download of the .mov file? I seldom see anyone provide web-ready versions of their videos that way anymore, may I suggest going a Flash/HTML5 method instead, and just export into an MP4 container? This is still H.264 encoding, so unless you're trying to show to particular client, Quicktime shouldn't even be necessary for web viewing (Ironically, the iPod/iPhone/iPad QT players don't *seem* to mess with the levels, but I can't tell with that screen's brightness).
 
Quicktime Player 7 is notorious for having incorrect levels in the majority of Quicktime Files. In fact, if you want to see what you saw in FCP, you need to enable a "FCP Compatibility" switch on the Mac to view the correct gamma.

Quicktime X does a good job of displaying proper gamma ONLY on h.264+AAC files.

The iOS devices run gamma 2.2 at sRGB. They translate all h.264 video formats correctly.
 
As of OS X 10.6 the default gamma/color space is sRGB gamma 2.2 Anything before that is the Apple RGB color space, which is gamma 1.8

It's possible to correct the viewing in the quicktime clip. If you have After Effects, you can enable color management, and force the clip to REC.709 16-235. The gamma should match up with the Windows Media clip and then you can export to any format you choose.

Quicktime Player on Windows almost never interprets the gamma correctly.
 
Demistate, since color is definitely not a strong suit of mine if I would go the after effects route you mention above
does this make viewing 1 particular clip in WMP and Quicktime player looks the same?

Or if it corrects it for quicktime would that same clip now look extremely dark in WMP, flash, etc? (I'm guessing its this)

I think in the end I'm going to probably have to make the film playable in flash at 4 different resolutions
and then make a 5th version that is quicktime compatible.

Do you happen to know if Apple color has a color management tool like after effects that can do the same thing?
I was planning on taking the final uncompressed .mov into color and then exporting in all the different resolutions I need.
Then again that was when I thought I was going to be exporting all quicktime based mov's.

I gotta read up on exporting to flash.
 
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