A Journey Through Color Space with FFmpeg
&quot;What is color space 1? And what are primaries?&quot;<p>Be thankful you have the ability to set the color space and primaries within the command. Back in the days of dinosaurs (mid-2000s to 2010ish) and when HD was just an infant sucking its thumb and before Apple updated the MOV container to hold these values, it was even more annoying to get colors correct. The big issue then was gamma settings. Windows used one value and Macs used another, and there were always issues getting them to look the same on either platform.<p>There was also the bad ol&#x27; days of when iTunes would reject your MOVs for not having these primaries and color space values in your files created by Final Cut Pro. It turns out, that within the silos of Apple, they do no communicate back and forth with each other. So the iTunes team read the white paper on the MOV file format and wrote all of their automation expecting these values to be present. Unfortunately, the team writing FCP had not updated their exporter to use these new features of the MOV. So iTunes rejected the files from not being written by an official Apple product!?!? something about left hand ands right hands can be written here. To the point, we had to have a 3rd party app developed to take the files from FCP and update them to be compliant with iTunes.<p>I still have scars from the shrapnel from those &quot;early&quot; days. If only articles like this were made at the beginning of the features rather than 15+ years after the fact and can be written after doing a google search. So hopefully future me types can find this rather than the hell of needing the feature and having to get the feature developed, and then just try it and hope for the best.