Dark and muddy render from After Effects

I've been working on a composition in After Effects, doing both color correction and lightsaber effects so far. There's still a lot to do, but just to see how things were looking, and to show some people what I was working on, I rendered out a copy. The weird thing is, it looks a little different from the Composition window in AE -- the image is darker, and the colors are muddied.

I rendered out a couple of versions, just to make sure it wasn't a settings problem. I tried both Animation and Sorenson 3 renders, both set to maximum quality, but they both look bad. I checked my Project Settings, and I'm in 16 bit color. I'm rendering through the Render Queue, with Best settings. In the composition window, the video looks as it should -- it's only in the rendered files that things look bad.

Here's something to make things that much more confusing (but will hopefully help to elucidate the problem for knowing souls) -- I also tried rendering out still images (single frames, not image sequences), and those look as they should. I tried both TIFF and JPG (lossless and lossy, respectively), and they both look great. So I know it's not a problem with either my composition or my overall project settings, since if it were, those images wouldn't have rendered correctly. Something seems to happen when it's dealing with video, though.

I've included a screenshot that shows a comparison between different renders. The Animation render is on the top left, the Sorenson 3 render is on the top right, and the still image (which looks the way it's supposed to) is on the bottom.

[image=http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii15/tfnsojourn/Picture2.png]

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks, and take care,
Sojourn

 

In my encoding experience, The Sorenson 3 codec is always darker and of a slightly different hue or color saturation when you render out to it as opposed to an uncompressed AVI or still image/image sequence. At one time it was really bugging me so that I actually changed my QuickTime Player to play back my Sorenson 3 encoded .mov files at approximately the correct brightness, contrast, saturation and hue. Of course one should not have to do that and nowadays I don't bother.

You could try upping the brightness/contrast levels as well as playing around with hue and saturation until it looks like it should after rendering. That would probably be your best bet.

 

Thanks for your input! Animation, though, is a lossless codec, so there shouldn't be any changes with that. And what about the fact that the stills rendered out properly? Since they are correct, I would think that I shouldn't have to adjust my brightness, contrast, hue/saturation, etc. to get the video to look the same, right?

Take care,
Sojourn

P.S. While we're on the topic of codecs -- I'm editing in Final Cut Pro, rendering out sequences in Animation to bring them into AE, doing my effects work, and then rendering out Animation from AE to bring back into FCP. Is there a better codec to be working with for this type of work? I don't have Automatic Duck or anything like that, and I'm pretty sure that the Logaryth/Logarith codec is not particularly Mac-friendly at the moment.

 

What I meant was that the Sorenson 3 codec does not encode the source video properly and may always be darker and with a different hue or saturation so when encoding to that specific codec, adjustments may need to be made before it will look right. It's what always happened to me anyways when I encoded to that codec.. As far as the Animation codec goes, it may not be as lossless as it should be.

Example: If I take an uncompressed AVI and convert it to a Sorenson 3 .mov and Divx 3.11 Low Motion AVI file, the Sorenson 3 file will be darker and off color where as the DivX AVI will be the proper brightness and color. It's just how Sorenson 3 is... at least in my experience. You may try PM'ing Ryan W. or Dorkman as they may have have other solutions to your problem.

Yes, an image sequence in the PNG format would probably be better as well as an uncompressed .mov or AVI file (if you have the hard drive space for this that is). Since I use a PC, back when I did not have the HD space for uncompressed AVI files I used a variation of the Microsoft DV codec (Pinnacle's version which only works if you have one of their video capture cards installed). Not lossless but damn close to the naked eye.

 

Both of your output codecs are quicktime types, whereas when you rendered in still images you wouldn't be using quicktime. Try rendering into some lossless (or near lossless) format that doesn't play in quicktime and see what happens. Animation is lossless and i've not noticed too many problems with that in the past, but i've definitely come across this change in hue with renders as well.

 

So that you know you're not nuts, I've seen this as well.
The bad news is I've not figured it out.
The good news is my director did not care about the darkening,
so I soldiered blithely on. ;-P

For the record, I had assumed it was something to do with me using DV-PAL data, since I'd never noticed it before in my NTSC work.

 

Render it as best viewed on an ntsc monitor or something like that.

Render it as an Mpeg or mpeg-4 because I think that's what dvd burning software converts all video files (avi. wmv. mov.) to anyway. Burn a test video onto a dvd, play it in your home dvd player and see how the final video looks on your tv.

If it's still dark, or not to your liking somehow, you can lighten or otherwise change
the look of the video in AE.

Is anyone really going notice or care if the your lightsaber blades don't look like the ones in the SW movies or whatever else you are concerned about?

An amateur movie probably will never look like the movies put out by Lucasfilm LTD. It's just not.

No one outside of ILM or Lucasfilm LTD. is going to make lightsaber blades as good as they do.

Judging from your still image, you are talented, but,............You're not Steve "Spaz" Williams. You're not Dennis Muren. You're not Mike Knoll.

Capeesh?

Other than that,...um,...well,,,,, go for it.

 

Oh, God, there's a can of worms opening here, I hear it.

 

We had this problem on RvD2 as well. As far as I was able to figure out, there was some kind of issue of color-space. Whatever the reason, we did experience exactly this problem on every shot.

Our solution was to throw a gamma correction of 1.2 onto the footage at the final stage before the render, to brighten it up more like the original source. It wasn't a perfect solution, but doing it as a blanket correction made it appear to be a conscious "look" as opposed to a work-around.

I'd really like to better understand why this happens, but I haven't had the opportunity to do that kind of research.

As far as your question re: a better codec, Apple's ProRes 4:2:2 is a much better intermediate codec than Animation or uncompressed. Unfortunately it didn't exist at the time that we did RvD2, or we probably would have used it.

 

Dorkman is right - it's a gamma conversion issue.

What's happening is that AE is rendering the data with a specific gamma curve, and supplying it to the encoder. When the compressed footage is decoded, it's using a different gamma than the one AE supplied, and gets it wrong. This didn't usually happen often when using AE 6.5 Pro, except in a few cases such as the Sorenson3 codec.

In AE CS3, I'm finding it a much more common problem, especially when working with specific colour spaces. You just have to try a few colourspaces in AE to see which one the decoder is using.

-Spiff

 

Sorry for my delay in responding -- it's been quite a crazy day! Thank you all for your insight and input.

After doing a bunch of test renders with varying settings, the one that has worked the best for me so far has been the gamma adjustment. While it's still not perfect, it's much, much closer to my intended color balance than anything else has been. I've also been rendering out in Apple ProRes 422 HQ, which looks fantastic (and takes up an amazingly small amount of space!). I think I'm going to start using that as my go-between codec for FCP and AE. Thanks for the suggestion, Dorkman!

For those of you who have been experiencing my problem, but still aren't quite sure what to do to fix it, I made an adjustment layer (Layer > New > Adjustment Layer), placed it above my footage (but under my lightsaber composition), and put an Exposure effect on it (Effect > Color Correction > Exposure). I then set the Gamma Correction (under "Master") to 1.20. I used an adjustment layer instead of placing the effect directly on my footage because my footage had been split up into several smaller clips for the color correction, and I didn't want to have to change the gamma for each individual clip. Using an adjustment layer meant that I could affect all of the footage throughout the entire sequence with one setting change, and could also turn it off if necessary with one click.

I took another comparison screenshot so you can see the results: the original dark and muddy Animation render is on the top left, the gamma-corrected ProRes is on the top right, and the original single-frame-that-inexplicably-looks-oh-so-good is on the bottom.

[image=http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii15/tfnsojourn/Picture2-1.png]

Your explanation helped a lot, -Spiff- -- though I still don't understand why AE can decode the video properly when rendering a single frame, but not when rendering a video. Any thoughts?

Thanks again, and take care,
Sojourn