Losing color quality after conversion

[vain]

I have a video file of a short animated film that our team has done. Its a video-out from Adobe Premiere after editing. We exported in animation so we got excellent quality output but it has a size of 16.5GB [duration of the video is 5 mins]. I want to compress to 500MB but no matter what I do it tend to loose quality. Color tone gets lighter. I can't take output again from Premiere so whatever I do I've to do with this video file[16.5GB]. Here's the screen capture samples[Same are the attachments],before and after:

After conversion from source video :
http://bayimg.com/KAMLMAADI

Source video quality :
http://bayimg.com/LAMlCaADI


Pls help me in this regard. Also: I tried AVS converter, Handbrake among others.

[vain]

enlarge it to notice the difference clearly.

[poisondeathray]

How are you determining this? How are you taking screenshots ?

The difference is in the gamma, looks like a TV vs. PC levels issue

What format are you encoding the QTRLE (animation codec) to ? Note it's in RGB, but your destination is most likely Y'CbCr - that alone will cause degradation, especially if you subsample the chroma (4:2:0)

[vain]

hi...thanks for replying so fast. Both screenshots are from PC. I dont know technicalities too much. How should covert now...under what settings.

[poisondeathray]

There might not be an actual difference. What software are you using to take screenshots ? What renderer ?

The method in which you use to take screenshots (convert the exported video back to RGB) will change the appearance. E.g. if you use a different renderer, it might look completely different, but the actual video is the same. Even 2 identical, bit for bit videos can look different, for example if one uses the graphics overlay, but the other doesn't. You cannot use 2 instances of media players to view videos because only 1 can use the overlay. ie. this might be a playback problem, not an encoding problem

[vain]

I used Fraps to take screenshot of the video. I'm sticking the Gspot details of the video so that you can see all details.

[vain]

first one is after conversion. last one is the original video

[poisondeathray]

Use mediainfo (view=>text) on the original mov file, copy & paste the text results back here

BTW you will get significantly better compression (better quality at smaller filesizes) using h.264 rather than wmv (wmv3 at that...not wvc1)

[vain]

Thanks...well here it is. 1st one is after conversion

[poisondeathray]

Everything seems to be in order.

Hanbrake should have converted the video properly

How does the exported video look in VLC or another media player ?

Test this video - does it look (in terms of levels/gamma/brightness) same as the original? Or is it brighter? Use only 1 instance of your media player

[vain]

No...its what I'm getting too. what else can be done?

[poisondeathray]

That test video is too bright for you?

How about in a different media player like VLC, MPCHC ?

I think you have calibration setup issues with either your graphics card, monitor, or renderer, because that "1.mp4" test video is very close to the same brightness as the RGB screenshot of the original on a calibrated setup

The reason why the MOV looks different is animation is in RGB, so there is no conversion for display (it's already in RGB space). But the encoded videos are in a different colorspace (Y'CbCr). How you have things setup may affect how that video is converted back to RGB for display

If you uploaded that test video to youtube, or made a dvd , it would look the same too (same levels as original) on a proper setup

[vain]

let me check on that..play it somewhere else too. i'll get back to you