'Fool's errand' is kinda right - color is a mess still.
But there's a few things you can do.
Keep it as simple as possible - make sure your apps are set to be all the same via Bridge - choose edit/creative suite color settings. I use north american web/internet. This is sRGB - which if you keep everything in this mode - it's kinda no muss no fuss.
In ae - if you're rendering out h264/ or Prores etc. (mp4/mov) I've found you'll experience awful gamma/saturation shifts unless you go to project settings - enable working space set to srgb and check 'Match Legacy AE Quicktime Gamma Adjustments". Then your renders should match your comp view pretty dang close.
Pretty much everything you use will assume sRGB so I've found it's good to just keep everything in that mode.
The gamma differences, I'm sure can play a part but if I get a still that suits him, then gamma is no longer a player. So, whatever it looks like on his end should still look that way whether I render 1 frame or 4000. I mean if I rendered a white frame and sent to him and he saw black but was happy with black, then every white frame I send, should be black to him. lol If that makes any sense. :)
So, I'm just trying to ensure that the single frame example reflects the rest. And just to further clarify, I am also seeing the difference myself between a still and a video that I render.
I rendered a still that had the perfect greenish hue that he wanted then I rendered full video and the greens were several notches up.
But I will fiddle with it more tonight and see if the DNX codec helps or maybe I go to the extreme and try and press the greens to a lesser degree so that it looks good on render.
I've had good luck with ProRes to x264 through Episode Pro when played back on my own system. But the minute you send it anywhere else forget about it.
James
On Jul 9, 2013, at 10:41 AM, Teddy Gage wrote:
try out the free avid dnx codec package, it includes a 4444 lossless codec that has worked well for me in the past
like Steve said though, unless you have a $5,000 monitor and a $3,000 calibrator for every monitor good luck ever achieving this.
at a minimum you'd need a quadro that supports 10bit color output and a monitor that supports it
and the codec is going to do all kinds of hell, not to mention codec -> vimeo servers compression (they do their own compression server-side) it will be nearly impossible to maintain that exact color. I do seem to think mp4 has better color support than h264 but the temporal compression is pretty bad, so it's a trade-off
I'm working a project where the person has an eye for color like you wouldn't believe and any slight change in color after render is presenting a problem for me.
What are the best AE render settings to maintain color from my AE CS6 project? I'm spending an enormous amount of time rendering so I need this to work right.
In one shot, my greens seem to have jumped up a few notches in the rendered file.
And just some additional info. The plan is to render out the files from AE, then take in to Adobe Premiere to render out an HD file suitable for Vimeo.