colorproblems in AE

[skogskalle]

Hi guys,

im playing around with the trialversion of After Effects CS4 and I have a problem with the colors of my rendered movies...

Take a look at the attached image... in AE the composition looks fine, but as you can see the final movie looks way off. It doesnt seem to matter if I render the movie to an .avi or a .mpeg or a flash movie - the colors are still screwed.

If I export the movie to flash from AE instead of rendering it the colors look just like they should, but then I loose all nice things like motion blur and whatnot so thats not an option. The problem is ofcourse somewhere in the colorsettings I use - but I cant seem to figure out how to get it right...

any help is huuugely appreciated. Im going to do a couple of short animations for a client in the coming weeks and I dont think he would be a fan of the purple tint I get now

thanks
k

[Paul Oblomov]

Post ur .aep project here. No need to post footage, of course

Using AE for a couple of years. No problem.

P.S. You can try to render tga out and manually encode to needed format... Maybe it will help.

[skogskalle]

Thanks Paul!

Rendering to a tga file sequense seems to work - the colors look as they should. Would be nice though to get it right straight out of AE of course.

Ive attached the project file... please bear in mind that its my first try so dont laugh at me and my messed up settings haha
/k

[skogskalle]

In case anyone else is having the same problems with the trial - I just bought and installed the full version of AE and for some reason the problem isnt there anymore. Still not sure if there was a problem with the trialversion or if it was just me (probably) but everything seems to be working fine now.

[skogskalle]

Right, the problem wasnt gone after all... but its changed.

When I render my animation to a flashmovie .f4v (h.264) everything looks perfect. The project Im working on will be delivered as flashvideo so Im safe for now... however, when I choose another codec/container the colors of the rendered movie look really dull. Looks like some kind of gamma issue, everything is grayish. I read on another forum that this was a problem with the H.264 codec, but I get the same dull/faded result with other codecs as well. Doesnt matter if I render to a .mpg or avi either. If I render to stills it looks as it should.

Paul? Anyone? Any and all help appreciated!
/k

edit - when I render to an uncompressed "video for windows" avi, everything looks fine! So the problem is in the compression... just dont know why it happens!

[plastic_]

I think it is rather a codec or video settings(overlay) issue...how do you playback the movie?
try loading the rendered movie into after effects again, the colors should be OK there.

[skogskalle]

The flashmovie (f4v) was played in adobes mediaplayer... the others, avis/mpegs were played in windows mediaplayer and VLC (same result in both)

Ill try loading it back into AE and see what happens after the weekend.

Thanks
k

[skogskalle]

right... so I loaded it back into AE and as you predicted it looked fine.

But why does it look like crap when viewed in mediaplayers? The uncompressed version was fine! Does this mean you should never ever use divx/xvid as compression-method?

sorry if im dense... but Im new to the whole animationbusiness and I didnt expect this much trouble with something that should be so simple.

/k

[plastic_]

It's because those media players are using hardware acceleration, which uses different color settings for the video viewport. for example, you can change video brightness, contrast etc. in the display driver settings and it will only affect those video viewports of players using directx overlay acceleration.
If you have additional codecs installed, like FFDshow, there is another layer of a potential color shift. older quicktime versions had messed up gamma, this is fixed now, I think.
There is also an issue with gamma on older windows versions and/or older ati/geforce drivers, where the black and white regions are clipped, so you get a dynamic range of 16-234, instead of 0-255 black to white. sometimes this isn't considered in the video viewport and the blacks are suddenly dark gray, contrast messed up, etc.

In short, your video is OK, but there is some issue with your system settings that messes it up. It's quite complicated and frustrating. But I noticed that it gets better with every windows version, I had less video issues with vista, compared to xp, and with windows 7 everything seems to work perfectly now. Maybe updating the display drivers helps too.

[skogskalle]

Thank you so much for clearing things up for me! I really mean it, I was going nuts over here...

I do have FFDshow installed, and probably an old version as well... on top of that Im still on XP. I havent changed any hardware acceleration settings as far as I know, but maybe theyre ON by default...

Glad to hear the problem is in the playback and not in my movies!

thanks again!
/k