In what color space and gamma videos are recorded with Open Camera?

[Friksel]

Hi, First of all thanks a lot for the app!

Using a Samsung Galaxy S5 and a Samsung Galaxy S7 as cameras I import in DaVinci Resolve, I'd like to know what color space (and gamma value) the footages is created with. Can't find anything about this in the OC manual. Could anybody please tell me the color space for recorded video footage? Is it srgb or something else? And what gamma value is being used?

Thanks in advance!

[Friksel]

Really? No answer yet? Without knowing the color space it's really just guessing. It's important to know the color space to do proper quality video editing. Nobody here knows the color space you're shooting with on Open Camera? Is it device dependent or software dependent?

(my devices are Samsung Galaxy S5 and Samsung Galaxy S7)

@mark-h ?

[Mark]

Sorry for the delay - I believe this is up to the camera driver/device, Open Camera doesn't specify anything. The next version will allow you to specify REC709, sRGB and custom gamma as video profiles.

[Friksel]

Thanks for your response @mark-h. No problem. I just expected users doing video with open camera would know the color space, so was a little surprised when there was no reaction after some days.

It's great color space get attention in the next version. REC709 and sRGB are (pretty much) the same color space. Both share the exact same primaries (red, green, blue), so the same gamut (~~color range). But the gamma is a little different in sRGB.
So guess the next version will let us chose the gamma by chosing REC709, sRGB or custom?

Will the color profile be included in the video file too? That would be nice, as our editing software can 'understand' the colors, white and gamma values the right way!

Thanks for all the great work to this app!

[Mark]

Yes, the options will be REC709, sRGB, or specifying a custom gamma value (or the various log profiles).

The details won't be in the resultant video file I'm afraid - the video file is generated automatically by the MediaRecorder API, and I'm not sure there would be support for this with the Android API. Is there a particular standard for storing profile information in video files?

[Friksel]

@mark-h Thanks for the extra info. That's very helpful. Looks like Android handles a lot of things themselves and prevents third party apps to do lower level stuff. That's obviously a problem other third party camera apps are facing too.

After some searching on Google I just found this:

"No most video formats (nearly all) do not allow custom ICC color profiles to be embedded. (Improvemet/correction: MP4s can have color profiles tagged in the metadata of a video file.) most video on the consumer end is intended for the REC.709 color space. sRGB is similar and uses the same primaries. transcoding (including compressing) will almost always result is a slight shift in color accuracy, saturation, gamma curve, or black and white level shift. This is made worse due to converting between RGB and YCbCr color spaces."
source: https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/6902/do-video-formats-support-colour-profiles

So it seems it's impossible to store a color profile itself in (most) video files anyway. But as we use well known and worldwide used profiles anyway the most important thing to know is what color space and gamma the videos were recorded/saved with. That way we let our editsoftware know what color space it's supposed to use in order to recreate the exact same colors/levels. So for me knowing what color space and gamma were used during recording is all I need to process the video the right way.

Thanks again for your help!

[Mark]

Thanks for the info!