H.264 is one of the more beneficial codecs out there today, especially if your final delivery is to the web. It offers remarkable quality at a surprising small file size. It's one of my most used codecs. In fact, I rarely use anything else outputting to web, as Sorenson flash offers some really nice compression, but it often lacks at picking up the fine level of detail that I personally like to preserve. In my mind, it's so close to being the perfect codec, except for a problem that's been maddening people since its inception. I've been finding that when outputting from both After Effects and Nuke, the gamma is nearly always boosted, causing footage to look desaturated and milky, such as you might see when working in the wrong colorspace. The problem seems to lie with a hidden uneditable gamma tag within the movie file. There are plenty of solutions and "non-solutions" out there on teh interwebz, and all come with a mixed bag of results.

ProVideo Coalition's Chris Meyers article gives an excellent idea, pull H.264 to the side and use its free open-source alternative, x.264.
Mac users can get it via MacUpdate, and Windows users should try Free-codecs.com. Though I have been unsuccessful getting it to work in Windows, hopefully you will have some better luck.

Once installed, it should show up as another codec in your Standard Video Compression Settings.


Another article by PVC's Art Adams suggests rendering using an intermediate codec such as Animation and Photo-JPEG, and then exporting out of Quicktime using the open-source x.264 codec, in order to insure proper translation of the gamma tag, which I would highly recommend.

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Another PVC writer, Mark Christiansen, points out that the gamma tag may be able to be stripped off with a neat little app from FuelVFX. "It requires a bit of hunting: hover your cursor over the red bar, select Software, and then click on the QTGammaStrip folder icon. Make sure you also download the ReadMe.txt file, as it includes (extremely) terse instructions on how to run it inside Terminal. " -Meyers.



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Popularized by Andrew Kramer of VideoCopilot.net, this method involves altering some settings in Quicktime post-render, but comes with mixed results across the board. It seems that in VLC, the gamma will still be boosted, whereas in Quicktime, Safari, and Firefox the video shows up as it should.

H.264 Fix by AVillabon.


SOLUTION: After rendering into a QuickTime/h.264 file, open it up in QuickTime and select “Show Movie Properties.” Highlight the video track then click on the “Visual Settings” tab. Towards the bottom left you should see “Transparency” with a drop-down box next to it. Select “Blend” from the menu then move the “Transparency Level” slider to 100%. Choose “Straight Alpha” from the same drop-down and close the properties window and finally “Save.”

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Hopefully the fine folks at Apple will fix this soon. Are there any other solutions that you would recommend?