H.264 / Premiere Colour Degradation when Exporting! - Advice Needed for Best Quality

Gavros88

Gavros88

New member
Hi folks,

I'm having rather a major headache with attempting to export my new DSLR short (shot on both Canon 7D & 60D) from Premiere Pro as a finished file.

The shots are uniformly PAL, 1280x720p, 44.1kHz audio (recorded externally and synced), at 50fps. There are quite a few additional elements in there (After Effects .swf files and additional music tracks, etc), but my issue is to do with the colour grading. The files were all edited and colour graded in the timeline natively at (H.264), and I've got them looking exactly the way I want them to in the uncompressed AVI export tests. The tests are only 25 seconds long and produce files around 8GB uniformly; considering the final film is just over ten minutes, a full timeline export in uncompressed AVI would create a file size bigger than the hard drive itself! So, not ideal.

My problem has arisen by an inability to export to a compressed format without serious colour degradation in the grading that I've done. Exporting uncompressed AVI at 32bit produces identical colours to what's in the timeline (and it looks great!), but all of the export codecs I've tried max out at 24Bit and lose a catastrophic level of colour - it looks drastically faded and almost coloured in with chalk.

So far, the only export I've managed to make in any format / codec was in F4V (for Abode Media Player). It reproduced the colours perfectly and was at a file size of just 19MB (!) for the same 25 seconds, without any noticeably loss in quality compared to the AVI version. Obviously this is exactly the find of solution I was looking for - but I'd prefer a file format a bit more conventional than F4V (like MOV or MP4, for example). The problem is being able to reproduce those colours without any noticeable loss.

The film is intended to be shown online, on DVD and (if all goes to plan) on local theatre screens. Therefore, it's pretty essential I fix the colour issues.

This is my first DLSR export and I've encountered a few problems. I've only just got my head around the 1.0 vs 1.333 pixel aspect ratio issues that were letterboxing the image in MOV - thankfully now fixed! However, I've been trying to find a solution to this particular problem for over a week now, and I'm beginning to tear my hair out a bit.

Should I convert the native files into a different format and try a new export? What are the optimum DSLR export settings you would use for these clips?

I'm at a bit of a loss, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!
 
Without seeing samples of what you mean, it sounds like your problem is either related to gamma (midtone balance) or the difference between full (0-255) and broadcast (16-235) brightness levels.
Certain media players will display different video codecs with different output settings to what Premiere Pro will show. Also it will look different on a TV.
If you aren't using a calibrated monitor (or dedicated video monitor) to check the colour as you edit, then the finished look won't match exactly.

Have you tried different players (VLC, QuickTime player, etc.)? Also video card diver settings may dictate how video playback levels are displayed.
Also try making a DVD and playing that on a TV to test how it looks. TV sets usually look brighter than PC displays, and although most TV sets aren't totally faithful in their colour rendition, they are usually a better bet than a regular PC monitor.

Ideally you want to be exporting as an .MP4 file for web. MP4 and DVD colour depth is always 24 bit.
 
MOV is always problematic, the gamma shift is a nightmare - also, my home PC has problems playing back H.264 files generated by Adobe software, but works great with files that were taken out of CS5 with very high quality and then recompressed to H.264 mkv using Handbrake - in any case, you seem to be having a very specific problem that probably won't be solved by this...
 
Thanks guys, appreciate the input. Based on your advice, I'll ditch the MOV format and focus on getting a nice looking MP4 export at 24 bit.

Geoff Gilson; if the problem is related to full vs. broadcast brightness levels, do you know of any measures that could be taken to prevent the desaturation? Somehow flattening the bit depth required while retaining the colours as they appear in PP?r

I'm going to try some MV4 > MP4 converters tonight, and see if there's a way I can carry the colour through. Alternatively, I'll play around with exporting to short AVI clips then back to H.264 in Premiere Pro.

Fingers crossed. Still haven't quite found a solution yet.
 
does exporting h.264 in .m4v container mess up the colors too? I think going out of CS5 on very-high-quality h.264 .m4v and then recompressing to standard h.264 .mkv using handbrake is a suboptimal but reasonable solution
 
NormanBates said:
does exporting h.264 in .m4v container mess up the colors too? I think going out of CS5 on very-high-quality h.264 .m4v and then recompressing to standard h.264 .mkv using handbrake is a suboptimal but reasonable solution
Click to expand...

It took me a while to under stand this... but when one uses the 'mov' format, the Quicktime version of encoders are used, and everyone 'knows' that the QT H.264 encoder sucks... One has to select the m4v/mp4 option to get the MainConcepts H.264 encoder.

This is despite the fact that MOV is just a container format, and could have just as well carried the MainConcepts generated output...
 
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