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budiliscious1
Participant
May 13, 2025
Question

Dropping HDR footage into an SDR Timeline

  • May 13, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 577 views

I messed up and shot some HDR footage on my Pixel 7 Pro.  Everything else is Rec 709 and I prefer to keep it that way.  The subjects are in a trailer that literally has whiteboard as the interior sides to the trailer so the whites of these boards is super blown out.  When I right click on the clips and modify them (override media color space - rec 709) the highlights on the whiteboard get better but the skin tone on the subjects turns from pink tones to sickly gray.  Can anyone recommend best practices for moving forward with this footage?   I would really appreciate it.  I wish I could just transcode everything in media encoder and have new clips to work with.  

1 reply

mattchristensen
mattchristensen
Legend
May 13, 2025

@budiliscious1 Make sure you're on the latest version of Premiere Pro (25.2 or later) and you can make use of the automatic color management to make the HDR material sit nicely in SDR color space.

 

Sequence Settings > Color Management should be set to Color Setup: Direct Rec. 709 (SDR).  With this color setup, any HDR clips put in the timeline will be tone mapped into SDR and should look pretty good. Note: with this new color management, you do not need to override the source clip. You should go back into Modify > Color for that clip and set it to "Use Media Color Space" which should be listed as Rec. 2100.

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budiliscious1Author
Participant
May 13, 2025

Thank you Matt!!!! 

I have a selects sequence already created and when I switch the sequence to "Direct Rec 709 (SDR) the HDR clips already in the sequence are not affected, but if I re-cut the clip into the sequence the clip looks normal.  If there's a work around for having to re-create this selects sequence please let me know.  And if there's not I'm just glad that something will work at all!

R Neil Haugen
R Neil Haugen
Legend
May 13, 2025

Matt gave the quick fix that normally works. For the full meal deal and what I'd recommend for your color management settings in general, see below.

 

Set Display Color Management, auto detect log, auto tonemapping all to on.

Set the Sequence to Rec.709, use the option for most tonemapping in the dropdown.

 

Doing the above may well fix your sequence, but you may need to close Premiere and relaunch to see the effect.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...
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