Color of video imports as another color. Help?

[travdaman]

As you can see, the image I am importing is purple.  Once it's imported, it's blue.  I cant seem to find out why.

I don't think I did but just in case I turned a filter on, How do I reset everything back to default? 

[Ann Bens]

QT has a gamma issue.

Use a differenct player such as VLC.

[travdaman]

The purple on the left is the correct color. When I import it to Premiere, it's blue.

[R Neil Haugen]

What Ann was referring to is that QuickTime has no color management ... and is noted for being off. Added in, you may be running a newer Mac monitor that's a P3 (not sRGB) monitor, which is a much larger color space and shifts colors all over the place without a very carefully performed transform.

The color of the original image being filmed may have been purple, but there is no guarantee whatever that what is shown in QuickTime player is the actual color of the file for that frame. PrPro is internally set for proper broadcast standards, sRGB/Rec709 and gamma 2.4, which is the standard for 95% of video material captured these days. PrPro will attempt to show in the internal Program monitor the chroma (color) and luma (brightness/contrast) of the file exactly as it is by the numbers.

PrPro's color evaluation of that image as the file exists is vastly more reliable than QuickTime player on any computer. Making a slight change to correct the cast of the image capture is very quick & easy in the Lumetri Color Workspace panel.

And when checking the output of PrPro, VLC and PotPlayer are color-aware, as is Firefox.

QuickTime player, Chrome and Safari browsers, are not ... more like color stuupid.

Neil

[travdaman]

In the image, Quicktime is showing it correctly and Premiere is off. 

[R Neil Haugen]

Um ... there's some technical nerdiness here that at times is hard to get explained.

What created the file ... camera, internet download, what?

And how are you determining that QuickTime player is showing it correctly? Compared ... how, and to what? If it's a download, say, as to what it looked like maybe over Chrome browser?

The problem there would be neither app is at all color-managed or aware. Period.

So we get back to ... how do you reference "correctly" ?

Neil

[Ann Bens]

travdaman  wrote

In the image, Quicktime is showing it correctly and Premiere is off. 

Its actually the other way around.

[francis-crossman · Accepted solution]

This is a deep and frustrating issue.

Short answer: PPro is displaying the color correctly, QT player is wrong.  Instead, use VLC player to QC your files outside of Premiere.

Longer answer: QT player uses a different gamma curve from the official specification for HD video - ITU BT 709 (Rec709).  PPro uses the correct specifications. The difference between the two is why they look different.  Way back in the 90's when Apple created QuickTime they chose to deviate from the spec - probably to suite computer display technology which is a bit different from CRT televisions, which is what the Rec709 spec was created for.  Nowadays there is very little technical difference between a computer monitor and an HDTV and there have been efforts to address this.  Unfortunately, most internet browsers have adopted the QuickTime version and display colors in the same "wrong" manner as QuickTime player.  In my testing, I have found that Safari and Chrome yield these same "wrong" values as QuickTime, but FireFox yields "correct" values which match Premiere.  You may be saying "but wait, who cares about the standard if the majority of the industry has agreed to do it a different way - shouldn't we just make that the new standard?"  Probably! Luckily the difference we are talking about is not so huge that it bothers most people.  You have a keen eye, welcome to the club of pixel peepers!  We do not have a solution to this problem, because it is not actually a bug, but I have heard of people developing LUTs that they add on export so the colors match what they see in QT player.  The problem with that is then the colors will be wrong if you bring the file back into Premiere.