How to avoid gamma shift on export?

[Mike Hannon]

I'm editing on Premiere CS3 on a PC and I'm trying to find a file format for delivery that will meet the following criteria:

1. To be played in Quicktime on a Mac
2. No gamma shift - what I see in Quicktime is what I see in Premiere
3. Plays smoothly in Quicktime
4. Compression artifacts at a minimum as the footage has fine tonal gradations
5. At least 720p, if not 1080 (to be shown on a digital projector, resolution to be confirmed)
6. CD quality audio at a minimum

So far, i've been trying various Export Movie options from Premiere as well as Adobe Media Encoder. I can't get good quality, smooth playback and correct gamma in any single configuration!

According to Chris Meyer's blog, the x264 codec avoids the gamma problem. I've been trying to figure out how to get that running on Windows. Would my best bet be to export losslessly from Premiere and then use some frontend GUI for x264 to transcode to mp4?

Or would I be better off forgetting about running it from a Mac and getting a Bluray player and burning it to Bluray with Encore?

Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated.

[Joe Russ]

why not just render an animation compression quicktime?

if the playback device has a good speed harddrive, you can play this back in real time and its visually lossless compression.

since you have gradations, you are going to get banding if you render to something like h264, though adding noise/grain/debanding (which is precision noise) can help.

You can also make a 720/1080p h264 quicktime (aac 192 kbps audio) and then strip the gamma information away (there are free apps out there to do this)...which should fix the problem.

[Mike Hannon]

Thanks for that tip Joe.

The Animation codec gives huge file sizes, so I think I'll settle on a Cineform AVI and install the NeoPlayer on the machine I'll be using. File sizes are not so bad