Video Colors Are Reversed

[guitarZ]

I used TA on a recent trip to record some driving. When viewing the recorded video, I noticed the colors were not right. The hood of the car is red, but in the video, it's purple. The other red cars are the same Here is a photo of the front of the car and a screenshot of the video. The day had bright sun with fair skies.

One good thing I can say is that things in the distance are the right colors, like trees and grass.

This is the real color of the car:
June 27 05.JPG

This is how it looks in the TrackAddict video screen:
Screenshot_20160907-201841.jpg

I would think that the red paint would be closer to the real color.

[Weston@HPTuners]

Video recording uses system-wide service, so if it's was just a freak thing, then restarting the phone may help resolve recording issues in future sessions, but my suspicion here is that this particular camera is having an issue with the selected resolution or other settings. Unfortunately, we have seen a few cases where Android cameras report that they support certain modes, when in fact they don't, and users end up with messed up footage when using them. This typically appears to users in the form of camera focus problems or color-shifted video. That's difficult to work around because the phone is usually telling us that the camera supports that mode and a bunch of others, so there's not any good way to know which ones to trust or not trust. What you might try doing is to select a different recording resolution in the future and seeing if that resolves it. As for the existing color-shifted footage, although there's not a way to adjust that within TrackAddict, a possible solution would be to try the Hue setting in RaceRender (or other video software).

[guitarZ]

Maybe I forgot to mention in the OP, but I an using the Nexus 7 2013 tablet, not a phone. I first thought the bright sunlight is throwing the exposure off, but I think I get the same color skewing even on days with less sun- I will try a video today, as it is overcast with storms. Another possibility was that the distance from the camera lens t the glass is short; about 8 inches.
I don't suppose that using a different video recording application will get a different result?

[Weston@HPTuners]

The color issue here definitely looks like a color conversion or channel encoding/decoding issue, rather than a physical optics effect... Adjusting the color Hue on your image can get it looking better, but what really seems to be needed here is to completely swap the red and blue channels, and then it comes out looking correct.

It sure looks like there's a bug in that device's video camera or encoder that swapped the channels, or it could instead be on the decoding/playback side since you are seeing these effects in the in-app video player. One way to tell would be to transfer the raw video file to a computer (with RaceRender or just a plain video player) and see if the problem appears there or not. If it's bad there too, then the problem is in the device's camera or encoder. If it looks ok on the computer, then fortunately the problem is only in the playback on your tablet, which could be impacted by a number of things but is quite possibly only a display problem.

If the problem is actually in the recording itself, then other video recording apps could stand a decent chance of having a different result, just by playing the odds that they'll be using some different modes and settings, thereby avoiding the apparently problematic ones that we've run into here. We don't give the video recording any direction with regards to color spaces, conversions, or encodings, so it would be some sort of weird indirect video bug causing it. In this case, you may also be able to find different results by simply using a different recording resolution in TrackAddict... If you were at 1080p, try 720p, etc.

[guitarZ]

I tried a different lap recorder, in the same sunlight conditions, as well as the same hardware setup, and the color of the video was fine; everything in the video matched the color of the car. That tells me that the video software of the Nexus 7 2013 is not what making the colors wrong in TA. Sorry about that.