Questions about color range

[justcurious]

Hi everybody!

I was encoding a video recorded by a PS5. It’s a VP9-file and this is the media info:

As you can see it says “color range: limited” but also “colour_range_original: full”.
When I import the video, Shotcut sets the color range to “limited(MPEG)”. But unfortunatly, the colors in the encoded file look a bit washed out:

Here’s a zoom to see the difference better:

But when setting color range to “full(JPEG)”, everything looks fine:

So I wonder, is this a bug or is this my “fault”? I don’t really get what the difference between “color range” and “colour_range_original” is. Can anybody explain pls?

edit Looks like the forum software heavily compresses uploaded pics, hope it’s still good enough to see.

[daniel47]

I don’t have a clear answer for you, but maybe this explanation helps: colors are usually displayed by a screen as individual values from 0 to 255 (for each red, green and blue pixel). Think 0 is completely black and 255 completely white. This is “full range”.
For some technical reasons data in standard video files is limited between 16…235 instead of the full 0…255. This is the “limited range”

Any mismatch between what data is actually recorded and how it is displayed will cause one of 2 issues:
full range interpreted as limited will “ignore” the edges = very dark and very bright areas
limited range interpreted as full = darker and whiter areas will look very dark and very white
Conversion is possible between the ranges as long as you know which is what.

You can manually change the color range of the video in shotcut properties to full range for all your PS5 files because I assume it records full range by default for all files.
For export it is your choice if you go with the standard limited (recommended) or full range.

Once shotcut interprets the correct range of your input file, it will do the necessary limited → full or full → limited conversion and it will look ok

[justcurious]

Hi and thx for the answer and explanation. I understand how this works, but I don’t understand why the PS5 video has full color spectrum.
I was searching the net before posting here and I found a few discussions on this topic, even here. For example: What does 'color range' mean and which setting should I use?

Here, I found the following quotes:

@st599

The easy answer is that the HD video specification (ITU-R BT.709) only has what you call broadcast limited.

Or here: Three questions [screenshot included to make it easy]

@shotcut

from now on I have to manually set all videos on all tracks to Full (JPEG)

If your video source is not RGB(A), then that is likely to cause a problem.

“Broadcast Limited (MPEG)” nonsense, what an unnecessary artificially induced nightmare, this is not 1995 anymore

99% of video in 2019 is still broadcast, streamed, or otherwise distributed using limited MPEG range.

That and the other answers I found gave me the (obviously) wrong impression, that most videos on a non-professional level are limited. I mean, the PS5 video is BT.709 and I don’t see anything about RGB or RGB(A) in mediainfo. Confusing!

[Austin]

How is the PS5 being recorded? With OBS or something similar? If so, maybe that recorder is writing a full range file but not flagging it as such, which means every other program downstream like Shotcut and MediaInfo may default to limited range interpretation if not specified.

[justcurious]

I don’t use a capture card. The video is directly from the built in screen recorder. And I guess Sony knows what they’re doing when it comes to video, so I doubt there’s wrong flagging on those files. But ofc everything’s possible.