How to grade footage for WEB distribution?

R

Rareboy

New member
Hello guys, I was grading some short clips in my new setup with professional color grading monitor to test it out and I have posted them to web to see if I am well calibrated for the web and I have to say that both on Youtube and Vimeo the clips looked very different - little different in colors and absolutely awful in terms of gamma and black level... As the clips looked pretty accurate on other consumer monitors, except they were little brighter because they were LCDs and I was grading on OLED monitor, the web destroyed everything...
I know that I cant do much in terms of that HTML5 web decoding but I was wondering till what point I can still affect how the video will look on the web and how much can I do about it till its still in my hands?
Do I have to adapt my workflow for the web distribution?


Please, if you would show me some article that focuses on this topic I would really appreciate it.


thank you
 
For the web you need to make sure your monitor is calibrated for SRGB color space and gamma. There will still be minor differences, it even varies by which browser you use to view it, but you should be quite close. If you are using a Mac, make sure your GPU display settings are changed from the default Apple 1.8 gamma monitor space to SRGB 2.2 gamma monitor space. Macs have very extensive display color space emulation LUTs. PC GPU drivers typically default to SRGB.

 
Depends on MANY factors. For instance what your master codec is (DNxHD needs to be danced around very carefully - even though it's, in my opinion, superior to ProRes). DNxHD is broadcast in Rec709 color space so blacks and writes are mapped as 16-235 thus both will look washed out on regular monitor (as regular monitor is 0-255). So if you want your broadcast footage to look legit on your computer monitor you need to remap blacks and whites (in CC tool you remap output levels from 16 to 0 and from 235 to 255.

That said if you shot NOT for broadcast, or didn't use Rec709 color space then you "might" be fine.
 
Im still wondering in general what the lowest cost pro setup is...last time i researched it was around $3000, maybe more for i/o box plus monitor.
 
we always color correct with a calibrated broadcast monitor, if it looks good there, it will look good online at least that's how we do it, we send spots to broadcast every other day and most of those spots end up on youtube, vimeo, facebook etc. you really can't grade to everyone's preference as there are so many monitors and color variants and you have no idea what people are using to watch these videos, for us grading to broadcast standard has always worked
 
Josh Bass said:
Im still wondering in general what the lowest cost pro setup is...last time i researched it was around $3000, maybe more for i/o box plus monitor.
Click to expand...

depends what you mean by "pro" post houses invest thousands upon thousands on color critical monitors, if your stuff is going to broadcast then you need something that will give you accurate colors
some people just want something that will give them some peace of mind and know that their colors are at least in the ballpark, I think it comes down to how much you want to spend and your margin for inaccuracy on a monitor
 
aalleexx said:
we always color correct with a calibrated broadcast monitor, if it looks good there, it will look good online at least that's how we do it, we send spots to broadcast every other day and most of those spots end up on youtube, vimeo, facebook etc. you really can't grade to everyone's preference as there are so many monitors and color variants and you have no idea what people are using to watch these videos, for us grading to broadcast standard has always worked
Click to expand...

So that means the color space you're grading to is REC.709 (not sRGB)?
 
I guess I'm a little old fashioned. Having worked in a TV station environment years back, where people dicked with the calibration of the monitor because they thought it looked better to them. In result I couldn't trust the monitor and had to rely on my scopes. So my old guy advice to you would be.... Learn to read your Vectorscope and Waveform monitor. They don't lie when your monitor might because of miscalibration.
 
I have been frustrated by the OPs problem as well. My levels will be perfect in premiere from 0-255, i'll expor tto h.264 and VLC will play it fine, however once uploaded to youtube (and played with the youtube player on my desktop) the blacks and the whites will both look muddy. If played back on my iphone (in the youtube app) it looks fine. The same thing happens if just using firefoxes built in video player (when played directly from my server) as compared to when I just play it directly from my server from my iphone. For reference I edit on PC.
 
I am on a mac pro to blackmagic decklink hdsdi card to a jvc monitor like this one
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=797557&gclid=COO6ksj82csCFYkCaQodmhsL2A&is=REG&ap=y&m=Y&c3api=1876%2C92051678642%2C&Q=&A=details
except ours is a 21 inch I think, found it on ebay for less than 1k
we calibrate at least once every other month
are getting 100% accurate colors? probably not, but I know we are in the ballpark, we have sent thousands of spots to broadcast all over Texas and have yet to get one kicked back because of colors, but then again you have to know how to properly read a waveform and vectorscope to know where you are at, the monitor plays a big role in your colors but your other tools are equally important



bill totolo said:
So that means the color space you're grading to is REC.709 (not sRGB)?
Click to expand...
 
David W. Jones said:
I guess I'm a little old fashioned. Having worked in a TV station environment years back, where people dicked with the calibration of the monitor because they thought it looked better to them. In result I couldn't trust the monitor and had to rely on my scopes. So my old guy advice to you would be.... Learn to read your Vectorscope and Waveform monitor. They don't lie when your monitor might because of miscalibration.
Click to expand...

Scopes don't lie, but they also don't give you subjective feedback. When I worked on magazine style show I could rely a lot on the scopes because the goal was to get everything to look 'normal' (the whites are white, the blacks are black, and skin tones look human), but when I worked narrative projects where they wanted a 'look' then I relied on my monitor much more. For example, my scopes could tell me that there was a lot of green in my image (which I wanted) but they couldn't tell me if it was too much or not enough green. I had to look at my monitor to make that subjective call.


-Andrew
 
yeah, i always figured okay monitor + scopes was good for color CORRECTION, i.e making stuff look "right", but if trying to give it a look, you need something more accurate.

to get really anal about it, i believe youre supposed to work in a neutral grey space thats painted a very specific way (to avoid desensitizing yourself to any colors that your "grey" maybe tinted with), also I believe there's supposed to be a specific type of lighting for the same reasons regarding brightness/contrast.

I think youre even supposed to avoid looking at the screen for more than a certain length of time without a break to "reset" your eyes by looking at the grey (that blue tint on your image can start to seem less blue as you continue to stare at it)

is there a monitor that can display the color spaces for both web and broadcast?
 
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Josh Bass said:
yeah, i always figured okay monitor + scopes was good for color CORRECTION, i.e making stuff look "right", but if trying to give it a look, you need something more accurate.

to get really anal about it, i believe youre supposed to work in a neutral grey space thats painted a very specific way (to avoid desensitizing yourself to any colors that your "grey" maybe tinted with), also I believe there's supposed to be a specific type of lighting for the same reasons regarding brightness/contrast.

I think youre even supposed to avoid looking at the screen for more than a certain length of time without a break to "reset" your eyes by looking at the grey (that blue tint on your image can start to seem less blue as you continue to stare at it)
Click to expand...

Correct, neutral gray walls (you can buy specially made paint for this or buy an 18% gray card and see how well a local paint place can match it), daylight balanced, full spectrum lightbulbs (and a little light placed behind your monitor to help your eyes), no windows (or windows that can be covered with blackout curtains), and I think it takes about 20 seconds or so for our eyes to 'compensate' for color shifts so that's about how long you have to work on a shot before moving on... lots of nitty gritty stuff. Philosophically it's not really that different than building out an audio mixing room except you are attempting to control a bunch of visual variables as opposed to a bunch of aural variables.


-Andrew
 
Audio mixing to me (I am an hobbyist musician who records/mixes his own stuff sometimes) seems so much harder than color grading/correction could ever be. Something about eyes vs ears and the fact that you can look at a static frame and compare it to whatever in video. . .you can't really listen to a static "frame" of audio (I mean you CAN, but it sounds awful and is useless for mixing). Way off topic but anyway.

When you say "move on" from a shot you don't mean to another shot. . .you mean you have to look away after 20 secs and "reset", right? I would think you'd have to work on the shot as long as it takes.
 
Josh Bass said:
Audio mixing to me (I am an hobbyist musician who records/mixes his own stuff sometimes) seems so much harder than color grading/correction could ever be. Something about eyes vs ears and the fact that you can look at a static frame and compare it to whatever in video. . .you can't really listen to a static "frame" of audio (I mean you CAN, but it sounds awful and is useless for mixing). Way off topic but anyway.
Click to expand...

I have not mixed anything since college (had to record and mix a band for a class) so I am beyond amateur when it comes to mixing, but one think I remember enjoying about it is that it was dynamic. There was a rhythm (literally) that you could feel and feed into. With grading it feels much more choppy to me. You park on a frame, do some stuff (maybe have to render to get full quality playback), play it back. Stop it again. Tweak it again (possibly render it again). Play it back again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. And once you get enough shots done you can go back and watch a bunch of them together to see if they play. I wish there was a bit more of the fluidity to grading that there is to audio mixing. Of course I'm sure the guys that have run Resolve with 4 or 5 GPUs have plenty of fluidity so maybe I just need a faster rig. lol

When you say "move on" from a shot you don't mean to another shot. . .you mean you have to look away after 20 secs and "reset", right? I would think you'd have to work on the shot as long as it takes.
Click to expand...

Yeah, 'reset' but that can be looking off onto something neutral in the room or just moving to the next shot. You just need to stop looking at what you are currently looking at. I A/B a lot when grading to help with that. I don't like spending a lot of time on a shot anyway because I do feel like you start getting 'lost' in it even if you try not to. If I'm feeling stuck I'll just move on and come back later.

Sometimes I'll go through a whole project and grade a few shots from each scene first and save what I've done as stills so I can use them as reference later. That way I've kinda sampled the whole movie when my eyes and mind are still fresh and having those references helps keep me on track later in the day when I'm might be getting fatigued. One time I found myself 'drifting' over the course of a day so the shots I did at the end of the day were off from the shots I done in the morning (t was a very gradual shift so I didn't notice it while it was going on). It's not just about matching the shots next to each other but about making sure the work stays consistent from the beginning to the middle to the end.
 
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