exporting video from flash for html5 video changes colors

Question

I'm exporting video from Flash CC 2015 to video - it renders a quicktime (.mov) file which seems to retain the quality and color palette of my original flash file, but then when I use adobe media encoder to create an h264, the colors get washed out, which would be ok except that there is a discrepancy between the background color of my website and the background color of the video.

I can't use alpha channel video to get rid of the background since h264 does not support it. Anyone have any pointers on how to retain the color palette of my flash file / best way to convert flash into a video file?

Answer 1

Broadcast video codecs such as H.264 (typically) store color as YUV, not RGB. Conversion from RGB to YUV will cause a subtle color shift but also the YUV range used to represent pixel color value is compressed compared to RGB, which may also affect the hue. And finally there's the chroma subsampling, a technique used in video where a block of pixels share the same color values.

If the specific hue of your webpage BG cannot be changed then there are two broad ways to go forward:

1) Avoid a sharp interface between your video and the surrounding page by feathering the edges of your video or flash canvas.

2) A cruder, trial & error solution is to apply a tint overlay over the HTML5 video canvas so that the resultant look matches the hue. This will be a subtle tint and will affect the other colors in the video as well.

Of course, you can always take a screenshot of the webpage with your current video in it, sample its color in an image processing app and make that your webpage background color.