Why your export looks different from your edit

You finish a piece. It looks right in the editor. You play the exported file and the blacks are grey and the whole thing is flat. Nothing is broken. One number was tagged wrong.

The range problem

In 8 bit video there are 256 values per channel. Broadcast video has always used only 16 through 235, leaving room above and below for signals that overshoot. Computers use all of 0 through 255.

Both conventions are legitimate and files carry a flag saying which one they are. When the flag is wrong, or when a tool ignores it, one of two things happens.

• Full range data read as limited: the blacks lift to grey and the whites drop to off white. The picture looks washed out and foggy.
• Limited range data read as full: the shadows crush to solid black and the highlights blow out. Contrast looks punchy at first glance and all the detail at both ends is gone.

This single mismatch causes more confusion than everything else in colour combined. If your export looks flat or crushed and you changed nothing else, this is where to look first.

Gamma, and why the same file looks different on a Mac

Gamma is the curve between the number stored and the brightness you see. It is deliberately not a straight line, because human vision has far more resolution in the dark than in the bright, so the values are spent where they can be seen.

Different platforms have historically assumed different curves. The result is a piece graded on one machine that plays noticeably darker or lighter on another, with the midtones moving and the ends staying put. Modern colour management has mostly fixed this, and it still bites on older software and on screen recordings.

Judge your grade on more than one screen. A phone, a laptop and a television if you have them. The answer you want is that the piece is acceptable on all three, not perfect on one.

Log footage looks wrong because it is supposed to

A camera sensor sees a wider range of brightness than a normal video curve can record. Log recording uses a flat, low contrast curve that spends its values evenly across that whole range instead of throwing away the extremes.

Straight out of the camera it is grey, milky, and unwatchable. That is correct. It is holding detail in a bright window and a dark corner that a normal curve would have thrown away, and you get that detail back by grading.

Two conditions. Log needs 10 bit to survive the grade, because stretching 8 bit log footage back to normal contrast produces visible banding in every sky and every wall. And it needs a correct conversion, not a creative look, as the first step.

Correct first, grade second

These are two different jobs and doing them in the wrong order means doing them twice.

Correction makes footage accurate and makes shots match each other. White balance, exposure, contrast. The test is simple: find a face and something white. If the face reads as that person's skin and the white thing reads white, you are done.

Grading is the look. Cool and desaturated, warm and contrasty, whatever the piece wants. It goes on top of corrected footage so that every shot responds to it the same way.

Grade first and every correction you make afterwards fights the look you already built.

Stop trusting your eyes

Your eyes adapt within seconds and your monitor is probably not calibrated. Two instruments tell the truth.

A waveform shows brightness across the frame. Read the bottom for black level and the top for clipping. Faces generally want to sit between 55 and 75 percent. If the trace is slammed against the top, that detail is gone and no slider recovers it, because there is nothing recorded to recover.

A vectorscope shows hue and saturation. It has a line running toward the upper left marked for skin tone, and it is remarkably reliable across every complexion, because what it tracks is the colour of blood under skin. If faces sit on that line your white balance is close, whatever your monitor is telling you.

Saturation is a trap

Pushing global saturation is the first move most people make and the first thing that reads as amateur. Skin goes orange well before anything else in the frame gets interestingly vivid, because skin is already the most saturated thing in most shots.

Vibrance is safer, since it lifts the dull parts of the frame and mostly leaves already saturated colours alone. Better still, push individual hues: lift the blues in a sky, leave the reds where they are.

What to check before you export

• Every shot on a waveform, looking for clipped highlights and crushed blacks.
• Faces on a vectorscope, near the skin line.
• Any gradient, sky or wall, at full resolution, looking for banding.
• The export itself, opened next to the timeline, at least once per project.