How to show color grading work online without compression
Send one file, untouched, and prove what arrived.

The reason is mechanical rather than rhetorical. A rate-limited encoder allocates bits according to what is in each frame. An ungraded log shot is flat, low in contrast and cheap to encode. A graded shot with crushed blacks, a bloomed highlight and grain running through the whole frame is expensive. Feed both to the same ladder under the same ceiling and the expensive half is the half that gets approximated away. The delta the viewer sees is your work plus an encoder’s opinion, and there is no way to separate the two after the fact.

So the first decision is the host, and it is a binary one: either the platform builds renditions from your upload, or it keeps the object you gave it and hands the player that. Everything else on this page, the way you cut the comparison, the codec you finish to, the checks you run, only matters once that step is off the table.

Shadow falloff, grain and the halation around a hot highlight are the most expensive things a graded frame can carry, so a ceiling spends its way out of those first while the flat ungraded half sails through nearly untouched. That asymmetry is the specific problem for a comparison rather than for a film: the encoder does not damage your work so much as narrow the gap you built the piece to show, and the encoder-side mechanism behind it, with a banding demonstration, is set out in video hosting for colorists.

Two numbers from that specification are worth carrying into a delivery decision. The documented maximum resolution for that decoder is 4096 by 2304 pixels, which fits UHD at 3840 by 2160 and DCI 4K at 4096 by 2160 and nothing larger. And hardware acceleration is guaranteed only to 1920 by 1088; above that the documentation says decoding uses DXVA if the hardware supports it and software otherwise. A client reporting that your 4K reel stutters while the fan runs is usually describing a software decode, not a bad file.

On 10-bit 4:2:2 specifically, the discipline is to say what is written down. Nobody documents 10-bit 4:2:2 HEVC decode in a video element, in either direction. Apple documents HEVC 10-bit 4:2:2 as an encoding capability added in Compressor 4.6.1 on Apple silicon Macs running macOS Monterey 12.3 or later, which is a statement about producing the format and not about a browser reading it. The full reading of every vendor document is in HEVC 10-bit 4:2:2 browser playback.

For showing the work rather than sending it to one client, the portfolio page is built from the films already in your library. Tag one Hero and it runs full width, tag two Featured and they sit side by side, everything else lands three across, in the order you choose. It lives at your own address, yourname.uncompressed.io, and you can drop text, images, buttons and a contact form between the rows. Autoplay is off by default; when you turn it on it applies only to Hero cards, muted, one at a time. The longer version of that setup is in video portfolio hosting.

The concession this page owes you, since it is arguing for one shape of host. For the public showreel, the piece that sits on your site and gets opened by strangers on phones and on conference wifi, YouTube and Vimeo are the right answer and you should use one of them. An adaptive ladder is by definition a set of renditions built to a bitrate ceiling, which is the correct engineering for a viewer whose connection you will never know, and it is free, and the embed works everywhere. YouTube even tells you what it wants at the door: High Profile, 4:2:0 chroma, 35 to 45 Mbps at 2160p standard frame rate. Grade for that ladder and deliver into it. Then keep a no-transcode link for the one thing a ladder cannot carry, which is a controlled comparison going to a handful of people who are being asked to judge the picture itself. The published ceilings on the platforms that do re-encode are laid out in video hosting for colorists.

Removing the re-encode does not remove the viewing environment, so choose the environment before you finish the export. A reel that will be opened on laptops in offices is watched in a bright room, on a panel that is probably brighter and cooler than your reference, by someone who will not dim the lights. A pass that reads beautifully at 100 nits in a dark suite can read as murky there, and the client will describe your careful shadow work as underexposed.

The practical answer is not to compromise the grade. It is to keep two versions and know which one you are sending. The reference pass stays the deliverable and the archive. The web cut can carry a slightly lifted floor when the audience is unknown, and it should be built deliberately rather than discovered by accident when a client says the night exterior looked black on their screen.

Check it the way the client will open it, which is almost never the way you sent it. A reel link is watched in a browser window, at whatever size the window happens to be, on a panel running its own default profile, often with a second application in front of half of it. Fine grain judged full screen on a 4K reference reads as texture; the same grain scaled into a 700-pixel-wide window reads as noise, or as nothing at all. Open your own export on a normal consumer laptop, in a lit room, in a window rather than full screen, before the link goes anywhere.

A wipe whose graded side sits three stops down will lose its argument in a bright office no matter how honest the delivery path is, so either choose a different shot for the web cut or say in one line next to the link what the viewer is looking at and where it was made. A colorist who states the intent removes an argument that would otherwise come back as a note.

Agree two timecodes before the link goes out, one inside the ungraded half and one inside the graded half, and ask for a screen grab of each, because the failure mode specific to this piece is not visible damage in either frame on its own but a gap that has quietly closed between them. The general checks that apply to any file, saving what the page served and reading the average bitrate off it, are set out step by step in video hosting for colorists.

So match the tool to the decision: build the comparison as one file, finish it to something the receiving machine documents, host it where nothing re-encodes it, and use it to choose between looks and to show a client what the work bought them, then move the pass that actually signs the grade off onto a calibrated display or into a room. Why no web player, ours included, can ever be that reference is argued in full in video hosting for colorists.