chromalux: Lost in Translation

Whether it's NTSC, Mac, or PC color space, how do you know your images will translate correctly and look the way you want them to?

Color Management... I know, sounds a little, well, dry. Yeah.
It is, but it's also pretty darn painless. With a few clicks and a couple of pull-down menus, you can know:
1. How After Effects sees and interprets your footage, and what that means to your output.
2. What you can do about it.
Doesn't that sound good?

First, we'll look at the Project Window. After highlighting the file, you can look at the top of the project window and see how AE sees your footage:

"Millions of Colors" in the top box and JPEG under "Type". That's all great, but this only tells me it's a still photo with pretty good color...
But, if you hit the bit depth setting at the bottom of the project window, the project settings window will be displayed:

Here you get a lot more info about what's going on, and what you can do to change it.

As you can see, the box is broken into different sections that deal with different things:
Display Style, Color Settings, and Audio Settings
The only one we're concerned with now is "Color Settings."

This is where the action is, as far as what your footage looks like.
The first thing I would recommend is:
Always use 16 or 32 bit color. 16 is good, 32 is very good, but 32 can slow your machine down to sloth time.
(The speed of your machine and the quality of output you need will dictate which you choose.)

Next, and just as important, are the "Working Space" settings. If this is set to "None," it will not interpret your footage and give the generic "Millions of Colors" description we saw earlier. For this project, I'm going to set the "Working Space" to SDTV NTSC (and a bit depth of 16).

By changing the "Working Space" settings to anything other than "None", AE will start seeing your footage, as opposed to looking at it:

As you can see, suddenly we have a "Profile" sitting under the "Millions of Colors" declaration. This is good. Now AE sees the photo and can read the color info embedded in it.

There are times when you might want to override the original color profile. One reason would be moving between platforms: Windows to Mac or vice-versa.
Images saved on a Windows machine will be saved as an sRGB color profile. These will look a bit washed out on a Mac. Images saved on a Mac will use the Apple RGB profile, and these will look dark on a Windows machine.

If you select the file in the Project Window and hit command-F, the Interpret Footage window will be displayed: