Proper color range for export

Help/How To
1

I was going through my export settings and comparing with my source videos (all videos are recorded on our DSLR, so the input will always be the same). I matched the quality such that the output video bitrate was at least as high as the input bitrate (I figured I didn’t want to lose information). The next thing I looked at was the color space. Once I saw that the source videos are full range, I changed the default in export to full range (figuring I, again, don’t want to lose any information).

But after looking at a few posts here, it seems like maybe I should still leave it to limited, just because that’s what a lot of different pieces of the stack are expecting anyway? The end goal here is uploading to YouTube, and I figure I want to give it something as close to the source as possible. In the case of audio, I’m using a lossless codec (ALAC), but I’m slightly confused on the best settings for video. It seems like I should still tell Shotcut to compress the colorspace based on what a few people are saying, but it also seems like I’m effectively throwing away information from the source clip if I do that…

[Edit] Actually, to add to that, how can I ensure that Shotcut imported the clip with the full color range? I had set the Video mode to Automatic when creating the project, which perhaps implies that the color range defaulted to Limited anyway (Settings → Video mode shows “HD 1080p 29.97 fps”). At the same time, Shotcut definitely knows that the video itself uses the full color space (going to its properties shows Color range to be “Full”).

2

Most DSLR cameras are good about tagging the color range they used in the metadata. Shotcut reads that metadata and processes the video accordingly. The process seems to be reliable since you noticed the range already set to Full on the clip Properties panel.

YouTube will compress the range of uploaded videos to limited range anyway because that is the delivery standard. Therefore, if you upload a limited range file, there won’t be any quality loss compared to a full range file from the audience perspective. A full range export is only useful for intermediate exports that you bring back into Shotcut for additional processing. The final export should almost always be limited.

1 Like
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Got it, thanks! I’ll stick to limited color range then (still playing around with audio and video codecs - I found that YouTube is happy with an MP4 file with a FLAC audio track, meaning I can basically preserve the audio as-is). Basically, given that we have really high-quality source material, trying to ensure YouTube doesn’t destroy it beyond what is ‘necessary’. Already changing from lossy AAC to ALAC or FLAC (both are 24bit 48KHz so same as source material) and upped the quality on the video output to 80% (from the default of 55%) to get a similar bitrate on the video end. I think these are all small adjustments, but yeah…it’s fun to play with!