Spent three days fixing a simple color profile mismatch on a video project

I was editing a short film for a local theater group in my spare time. Everything looked fine on my monitor, but when we projected it for a test, all the skin tones looked sickly green. I thought it was the projector at first, but it was a color space issue. My editing software was set to Rec.709, but the footage from their camera was shot in a weird log profile I didn't recognize. I had to manually match the color by eye, shot by shot, because the automatic correction looked awful. It took me three full days to get it looking natural again, when I thought it would be a two-hour fix. Has anyone else had a project derailed by something that should have been simple, like a technical setting?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_piper2mo ago

Ugh, color spaces are the worst. I feel your pain on that one.

matthewbarnes2mo ago

Which project is it killing?

emma_young9d ago

Oh man, color spaces are such a hidden time sink. I mean, you think you've got a perfect image, then you export it and everything looks washed out or too saturated on another screen. It's like every app has its own secret language for colors, and they refuse to talk to each other. I've spent way too long trying to match a logo's blue in a photo editor only to have it look like a different color when I put it on a website preview. Maybe it's just me but sometimes I wonder if it's even worth obsessing over, especially if the final project is just going to be viewed on random phones and monitors anyway.