Color Space / BT.709

Color space / BT.709

Watch as an animation →

In plain words

Put a tag on the file saying "this video was made in BT.709 color," so the color and brightness don't look different from player to player.

When to use it

Final export, when moving to another program, and when colors look different on a phone and a PC.

Example videos

How to FIX WASHED OUT COLORS on export from Davinci Resolve - Quicktime and Youtube Gamma Shift FIX — Explainer: Compare how exported video looks washed out in a player, before and after the settings.
Still Getting WASHED OUT Images? Use These Export Settings To Fix It! — Explainer: How to match color space and gamma settings on export so colors don't shift.
Color Grading 101 - Everything You Need to Know — Explainer: The part that explains what Rec.709 is and why broadcast and web color spaces differ.

In AI video, like this

The Seedance 2.5 1080p confirmed version comes out as 10-bit HEVC with the BT.709 tag (color_space, transfer, and primaries all bt709, tv range), and the tags carried over to the final re-encoded with libx264 (ffprobe, 2026-10-13). I did not set the tags directly in the encode command, so if sources with empty tags get mixed in, add -colorspace bt709 -color_primaries bt709 -color_trc bt709 -color_range tv to the output. When you convert Pillow PNG (RGB) captions and logos to yuv without specifying the matrix, they may be converted with BT.601, and brand colors can shift slightly. If exact color matters, match it with scale=out_color_matrix=bt709. To check, use ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=color_space,color_transfer,color_primaries -of default=nw=1 input.mp4. YouTube also recommends BT.709 for SDR uploads.

One-click prompt

Tag and convert the export as BT.709 so every player shows the same colors: ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vf scale=out_color_matrix=bt709:out_range=tv -colorspace bt709 -color_primaries bt709 -color_trc bt709 -color_range tv -c:v libx264 -crf 17 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a copy out.mp4. Check it with ffprobe.

See it in real films and ads

Wikipedia — Rec. 709

AI-made examples

Not verified

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