Colors change when rendering from After Effects

adobe-after-effects

I have a video composition in AE CC and want to export it. However, when the video is exported, the colors look different than what displays in AE. Interestingly enough, this problem only happens with codecs without alpha (RGBA) that only work with RGB. I need to export this to a RGB codec.

I have tried all sorts of stuff with working spaces in both the project settings and export settings and am quite sure the problem has to be elsewhere.

This is how AE displays the video and this is how I want my exported video to look: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5nb80vt8721mm8g/AE.jpg

and this is how the exported file looks: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9uudws2miux6pxu/Export.jpg

Note the difference is not only in the darkness, but also in the tone of the colors.

I'm using Media Player Classic and Windows Media Player 12, since I got to be able to play this in PowerPoint. At the moment, I'm exporting to H.264, but I also tried a lot of other codecs – DXV, XviD, WMV, …

I would be very grateful if somebody could help me with this.

Note: Due to some specific plugins, I cannot export this to a premiere project, so that's not a solution either.

Thanks,
Ondrej

Best Answer

The colours were pretty much right when I did the following:

  1. In the render queue window, click "Lossless" to open the output settings of that video
  2. Click Format Options… in the Video Output settings Choose H.264.
  3. Render the video.

It occurred to me that Quicktime player tends to show washed colours unlike other players.

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