
If you are using an NVIDIA graphics card on Windows, there is another possible solution for washed-out videos. If you have more information on how to get better results, please add a comment below, or email me (see “contact” above). The results are not perfect, but much, much closer. You should probably also check the “High Quality” checkbox (of course you want that!), though exactly what it does is not clear.Ĭlose the Movie Properties dialog, and save your movie as a new (self-contained) file. At this point you should see the colors change and get better! In the dialog that shows up, select the Video Track, go to the Visual Settings tab, and change the Transparency setting to “Straight Alpha”. (You need to purchase QuickTime Pro (for about $30) for the next step.) Under the Window menu in QuickTime Player choose “Show Movie Properties”. So far you will see NO change in your color.


This is the most important step to perform in After Effects:Įxport your H.264 video using the settings you like, with the Color for your Video Output set to “Premultiplied (Matted)” and with Color Management off (same working space as your project): In the After Effects Project Settings dialog (under the File menu) turn on the checkbox for “Match Legacy After Effects QuickTime Gamma Adjustments”. As long as the working space and export color space are the same, you should be good to go. It does not matter if you do this by having no Color Working Space and export as pure RGB, or if you set your color space to sRGB and export as sRGB. The only fix that I found worked for me was: Here is a side-by-side picture of (a piece of) the After Effects project, and the result in QuickTime Player, VLC Media Player, and Windows Media Player, followed by the HSV values for the background color in each: (Windows Media Player on the other hand is a dark horse, displaying the correct brightness but over-saturating the result.) The darks are too bright, the saturation is too low. When I open it in QuickTime Player, or VLC Media Player, the colors appear massively washed out. Then I export the video to H.264 so I can get good quality, small file size, and a format that works well on YouTube.

I load the AVI into Adobe After Effects (at which point the colors match what was on screen exactly).
