Color Management Part 24: Corporate Branding Colors and video manufacturing by Chris Zwar

Adobe After Effects is the business normal app for movement graphics, and but working with shade administration can strike concern into the hearts of these producing video content material with company model pointers.

All massive corporations have model pointers that have to be adopted, with strict directions for design components similar to logos, textual content and colours. But maintaining model colours correct all through the video manufacturing course of is just not so simple as it might sound, and so it’s not unusual to search out movement designers and different content material producers barely fearful of doing one thing which may “change the colors.”

In an earlier video in this series, I mentioned that the time period “color management” means various things to totally different folks. Before we had HDR video production, the primary function of shade administration was to maintain colours constant throughout a number of gadgets, and throughout a number of levels of manufacturing. Although this feels like a great factor – and actually, shade administration is your pal – the underlying concern of the colours “changing” has meant many designers have merely ignored all of it collectively. But as we’ll see on this video, ignoring shade administration could cause its personal set of issues. In truth, the commonest reason for shade shifts in movies rendered from After Effects is simply the results of anticipated, default behaviours. The video explains all of it:

The notion that “the colors have changed” isn’t only a widespread concern amongst movement designers, however it’s additionally a really actual, quite common downside. I’m certain that each After Effects consumer has observed, sooner or later or on some challenge, that the ultimate renders don’t fairly match what they’re seeing in After Effects. This downside, the place outputs and deliveries look a bit totally different to the After Effects composition window, has been incessantly mentioned on-line for years. It’s fairly widespread to listen to this shade shift blamed on some kind of “Quicktime gamma bug“. But though the colour shift is actual, it’s not the results of a bug. It’s truly to do with the way in which Quicktime recordsdata – particularly Prores – are dealt with by different purposes.

Once you perceive the issue, it’s straightforward to repair – and also you not have to fret about getting cellphone calls out of your company or consumer in regards to the colours wanting mistaken.

While there’s a Quicktime gamma “bug”, that’s a separate matter that others have explored in much more detail than I have. It’s additionally value realizing that the “real” Quicktime gamma bug solely impacts these on OS X. If you’re an After Effects consumer rendering to Prores, then any shade shifts you’re seeing are much more more likely to be attributable to the situation outlined above – rendering an sRGB Prores which is then assumed to be Rec.709. And should you’re engaged on Windows then you possibly can ignore any dialogue a couple of “gamma bug” altogether.

In the very first video in this series, I discussed how I’ve discovered a variety of on-line recommendation about shade administration to be merely mistaken. Something that continues to annoy me is when folks ask for assist with shade workflows and are instructed they’ve to purchase an costly reference monitor. While it’s at all times good to personal skilled tools, and an awesome monitor is a superb asset to have, merely proudly owning a reference monitor is just not going to repair any shade workflow points. You should buy the costliest monitor in the marketplace however that’s not going that will help you should you’re rendering sRGB Prores recordsdata, or working in Rec.709 however typing in sRGB values from the company model bible.

This video covers typical video manufacturing utilizing Standard Dynamic Range – the sRGB and Rec.709 colorspaces. Even so, there’s a variety of data right here and I needed to cease as soon as it acquired over 20 minutes. Once we begin working with ACES and High Dynamic Range, then working with branding pointers turns into much more complicated – as a result of we don’t simply have to fret about colorspace conversion, but also tone mapping. So that’s arising subsequent…

This is a component 24 in a protracted sequence on shade administration. If you’ve missed the opposite components, you possibly can catch up right here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO

Part 12: Introducing ACES

Part 13: OpenColorIO and After Effects

Part 14: Combining OCIO with After Effects

Part 15: Logarithmic file formats

Part 16: RAW video files

Unscripted: Looking at ACES and OCIO in After Effects 2023

Part 17: Linear Compositing

Part 18: Bit Depth

Part 19: Introducing High Dynamic Range

Part 20: High Dynamic Range Compositing just looks better!

Part 21: HDR Formats, Colorspaces and TLAs

Part 22: Introducing Tone Mapping

Part 23: HDR Tone Mapping

AND – I’ve been writing After Effects articles and tutorials for over 20 years. Please take a look at a few of my other ProVideo Coalition articles.