Hey everyone,

I have been editing a short video for a local dance company. Inside Premiere Pro CS4 the video looks fine. Once exported from PPro as H.264 the video still looks great and exactly as it looked within PPro during editing.

However once I upload it to my Vimeo account, it gets a huge highlights / contrast boost. Anyone know what might be causing this? Is this just Vimeo's compression? Some sort of gama shift? I looked around in PPro CS4 and couldn't find any way to change the workspace color or gama to make the preview match the blown out look of Vimeo. At least then I could edit as my audience will see the final product and compensate by lowering the highlights a bit. Please let me know if you can help. Thanks!


Exported video as viewed on my desktop:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v255/addicus/dancecompanyVLC.jpg

Video as viewed on Vimeo page. (looks this way on both firefox and google chrome)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v255/addicus/dancecompanyVimeo-1.jpg

There is a gamma shift issue with Quicktime on PC's which appears at least as recently as 7.6, I don't know if this has been overcome in the current version, whatever it is. If quicktime is involved in your mp4, possibly that might be a factor. Just casting about for a possible reason, I do not specifically know that this is involved in your issue...

What data rate did you use on your h.264 encode??
Because Vimeo, Exposure Room, etc. do re-encode your file for presentation, it is usually recommended that you send them a file that is at least 6 mbs data rate.
Then, when they re-encode from your large file, down to their streaming data rate, the fidelity is better.
I will also sometimes boost the color sat and tweak the gamma (make the mid tones "pop" a bit) on my file in anticipation of it getting watered down.
I have always found it to be rather tricky to get the hosted web version to be totally faithful to what's sitting in my NLE.

Only response i got on the Vimeo forums was:

"I suspect the levels shift and slight posterization of your clip is due to compression algorithms. I've tried H.264, the Vimeo HD preset in the CS5 media encoder and finally got decent black levels and bit streams by uploading High Quality HDTV. Go figure, NTSC color space! The file sizes are not much larger than the previously mentioned formats and you can choose min/max bit rates etc. Good luck."


I tried uploading HDTV codec exports and different types of H.264 and Flash, but same problem continues...

bitrate on my files is always well above 6mbps.

I just cant believe Vimeo is giving me this much of a shift

Shawn
Hard to know what's going on.
I've had a variety of issues with hosting re-encodes, but never this particular problem with highlights.
If you haven't done it already, it might be interesting to burn out the video out as h.264 BD and watch it on an HDTV to be sure that it looks identical to your PPro preview. I usually do this as a matter of routine (on a re-writable BD) before I send anything out that I care about. Occasionally what you see in the NLE is not necessarily what you've got, and the Blu Ray will often tell the tale.
Good luck...