Exporting H264 from Final Cut, color very desaturated.

Humanwire

Humanwire

Active member
After editing my 7D footage as ProRes422 in Final Cut Pro and exporting a H264 quicktime, with the best quality render settings, the color in the quicktime export is noticeably desaturated. The colors just don't pop like they do when viewing the original camera footage, or in Final Cut. I heard this may be a gamma issue.

Any ideas on how to remedy this? Should I over saturate the edit, so the final file comes out "normal"?
 
I'm not too knowledgeable on color representation but I know things like color, brightness, and such will differ slightly when compressing from codec to codec. I guess oversaturating to compensate is the only real thing you CAN do.

Are you using Compressor btw?

:bath:
 
I'm exporting from Final Cut using "Quicktime Conversion". Perhaps exporting using Compressor might give me a better render?
 
Humanwire said:
I'm exporting from Final Cut using "Quicktime Conversion". Perhaps exporting using Compressor might give me a better render?
Click to expand...

Take a 30 second snippet and test that in Compressor. That might tell you if its a setting somewhere. When I have encoded H.264 from ProRes it looks stunning.
 
I always export as "quicktime movie" in the native format it's currently in.. then drop that file into Compressor for h.264

I've noticed small differences in brightness but nothing too major with color.

:bath:
 
Humanwire said:
After editing my 7D footage as ProRes422 in Final Cut Pro and exporting a H264 quicktime, with the best quality render settings, the color in the quicktime export is noticeably desaturated. The colors just don't pop like they do when viewing the original camera footage, or in Final Cut. I heard this may be a gamma issue.

Any ideas on how to remedy this? Should I over saturate the edit, so the final file comes out "normal"?
Click to expand...

What were the levels on the vectorscope before rendering?
 
Humanwire said:
Perhaps exporting using Compressor might give me a better render?
Click to expand...
Without a doubt. The h.264 encoding in Quicktime is very basic. And you get none of the pre-processing Compressor offers. You should also in the Quicktime Player preferences enable Final Cut Studio color compatibility.
 
Quicktime has one of the worst h.264 codecs bundled into a compression software package.

There are other issues with using Quicktime as a deliverable such as QT Gama shift. Don't Use .mov's as deliverables. Quicktime was never designed as an internet delivery system.

x.264 gives much better results, however to get the best results you'll need to pre-process your footage to properly scale it, de-noise, de-interlace, convert color space to sRGB etc.

If you're interested you can check out some of the compression work I've done for other forum members.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGsPtjyOlFU

If you want a professional to handle it, send me a PM and I can quote you a price for what you're trying to do.
 
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