Question / Help Can't get the contrast/colors right

[starship]

I'm making demo videos of some Reason devices, and these use bright colors that are showing up about half as bright in the final video. Whatever settings I change I can't seem to affect this.

Screenshot attached of the original on the left and the OBS studio result on the right, pretty much for whatever settings I choose. Note if I save this as a low quality jpg, it looks similar, washing out the bright colors. But I have set the bit rate to 10000, changed the color formats, partial to full, used more cpu, changed file formats, toggled options, etc., and nothing seems to change that color.

I'm trying to sell these devices, and these videos are just not reproducing the colors well. I had an earlier help thread but I didn't know what I was doing and I think I mistook my problem for a windows media player problem. :)

And this is all for uploading to youtube. The poor color shows up in the mp4 file I make before uploading. It isn't just a youtube problem. And again, I keep making changes and it all looks the same pretty much. Full colors seems to screw it up more than partial, reliably. :) Other than that, I'm stumped.

 

[starship]

Here's my youtube page, which is new. I think the best result was with the latest video. But you can see that the bright reds and greens of my menus are not reproduced in the video, making the final result looked washed out but kinda normal for other reason devices. Some of the colors are duller. But it's just the worst with my narrow menu texts. Which makes sense, as it's narrow and going to be fudged a bit. But the problem is, it looks so much duller when recorded than when using, it's not really representing the look of the device well.

Help! :) Also I love the software. It's invaluable. It's easy to use. And it's in development and still is all of these things. Yay for this software! :) OBS multiplatform I mean.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8jXbmCSJGnUYc_iptFeRPQ

 

[starship]

I don't have blues represented well in this shot, but the reds and greens and "gold" are lacking. You can see it in the Matrix and in my device. But the reason bottom control panel looks completely the same, down to its blue-ish color around the "blocks". Which makes me wonder if it's the red and green channels that are f'd up. In the combinator, which they are both inside and I cut off in the shot to get it under 1mb, it's a grey pattern. That pattern and the colors are reproduced real well. The worst is the bright reds and greens and golds(yellows). Other than that, I honestly don't have the color scheme to vouch for on my setup. :) This is just what I'm using. But it also seems like an issue of single-pixel-widths with bright colors being blurred out no matter what. The knobs with a red/green color are similar--just single-pixel-widths among a background of a dark version of that color. And the video result is that it's all washed-out.

 

[Lain]

I think you're referring to the blur, which feels like the wrong downscale filter is being used. Which one is it set to use? Can I have a log of this from both programs? EDIT: thought he was comparing OBS1 and OBS2. I was totally confused here. Ignore this.

The colors themselves seem fine as far as my own eyes can tell.

 

[DEDRICK]

You are going to lose colour, there is no avoiding it due to chroma subsampling. You are going from RGB to YUV 4:2:0. Even if you capture Full RGB, the second you upload it to Youtube it will be converted to YUV 4:2:0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling

The blur is also caused by chroma subsampling, reds blur the most. Single pixel widths are also very bad at converting

The reason jpegs look the same as the encode is because Jpegs compress using chroma subsampling

 

[DoAGoldeneye]

Even if you capture Full RGB, the second you upload it to Youtube it will be converted to YUV 4:2:0

It's a shame really

 

[Lain]

Chroma subsampling is normal, though you can bypass it by recording with I444 with a dedicated recording encoder (though most decoders don't support I444 encoding with h264). You can change it in advanced settings, then use a custom recording encoder in outputs (don't share the stream encoder, the stream encoder always uses NV12/I420). The video programs that can play it back typically can't play it back very smoothly at high resolutions though due to the fact that there's no hardware decoders that support I444 h264 decoding (at least I'm pretty sure)

You can also record full unmodified RGB with some lossless codec like huffyuv using the FFmpeg output if you really want, though just make sure to have a ridiculously large hard drive in the order of at least a couple terabytes. Change it to RGB in advanced settings and then use FFmpeg recording output with huffyuv video encoder to do so.

 

[starship]

Well, crap! OK, now I get the YUV 4:2:0 business.

Yeah, it's not downscaling at all now.... Makes me wonder if I could upscale and get that color back :)

 

[starship]

If youtube is going to convert it to YUV 4:2:0 anyway, it seems like I'm just out of luck.

 

[Lain]

Oh wow I completely misread the post, I thought you were comparng OBS1 and OBS2 or something, but you're comparing the before and after of uploading to youtube. Thought you were using the wrong downscale filter or something because they both use the same exact shaders.

Yea, youtube transcodes everything, as well as always converts it to NV12 as well. Nothing you can do about it except upload in the highest quality you're able to reduce transcoding artifacts.

 

[starship]

Heh, that's cool. OK, thanks!