Community Manager

Question

Making your iPhone 12 and 13 footage look normal - avoiding blown out footage

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
January 19, 2022
8 replies
40470 views

Copied from a post by Francis Crossman, the product manager for Premiere Pro. Great advice, including how to switch off the function in your phone so you never have the issue until you are ready to embrace HDR.

Francis wrote:
"One thing that is tripping up so many people here is that the iPhone is shooting in HDR by default, and it has an HDR screen, so videos look phenomenal on it. High Dynamic Range video contains more light and color level than Standard Dynamic Range video (Rec709). Unless you have an HDR display on your computer (and have everything is set up properly), you will never see it the same way as on the phone. The vast majority of people have an SDR display. When you send the video to your computer, QuickTime player will do tonemapping while sending it to your SDR display so it looks decent. Premiere Pro does not have this capability yet.

Here's what's happening. PPro reads the metadata in the file, sees that it's HDR (HLG to be specific) and treats it that way. If you create a sequence from the file the sequence will be set up as HLG automatically. But your monitor is physically not capable of displaying the light levels in the file so that's why things look blown out. If you look at the scopes, you will see that nothing is actually lost. You could use Lumetri to grade the file down to SDR levels.

Here are a few options that I recomend. Choose the one that works for you:

Don't capture in HDR on your iPhone.

On your phone- Go to Settings > Camera > Record Video > turn off HDR video
This will create Rec709 SDR clips
Edit in PPro like you are used to

OR . . .

Override the colorspace of the files to Rec709

Select all your clips in the project panel
Right-click > Modify > Interpret Footage > Color Management > Set the color space to Rec709
Now your clips will be treated as if they are Rec709 - this is not a conversion, it just tricks PPro into thinking it's Rec709
The clips will likeley look a little flat
Make sure your sequence is in Rec709 - Sequence settings > Working color space > Rec709
Color grade to taste with Lumetri. You will never get it to look as good as on your phone because your phone has an HDR screen and your computer (probably) does not.

OR . . .

Actually work in HDR and create an HDR video

You need an HDR monitor hooked up through proper cabling https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210980
Turn on Display color management and Extended dynamic range montioring in PPro Preferences
Import HDR footage from iPhone (iPhone shoots HLG)
Add the footage to an HDR sequence (HLG)
Export using an HDR encoding preset (HLG). Either H264 or HEVC are good options.

Hope this helps. HDR is legitimately confusing!"

Formats

A

allenwp

Participant

With Premiere Pro 2024 I've had success by creating my project by selecting an HDR video from my iPhone 13 Pro to import when I first create the project. This sets up the project and sequence to match my original iPhone video format.

Then when exporting, I choose the "HEVC - Match Source - HLG" preset. This seems to give me a very good looking HDR video, just like my source, that looks great on my iphone.

jelliott2k

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the help. This is always a problem for me. I need to try this with mixed video sources like iPhone, GoPro, and Android devices to make sure it works, but if it comes out looking good this will be the fix I need.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

The first clip dropped onto a blank timeline to create a sequence establishes the sequence parameters for framesize, framerate, pixel dimensions, and color space.

Same with selected clip in a bin, create clip from selection.

Either way, the user can go into the Lumetri panel Settings tab, and set the parameters *you* want for color space.

It's up to the user to learn and utilize the options. I'm happy to help as yes it's complex and each situation may have different needs.

Itcwill get dramatically more complex in the bew Pr series due out in October. Working color spaces versus display color space versus output, with many options for all of them.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

M

Matt5C7C

Participating Frequently

Well, I began using this method (as annoying as it is) a few months ago, and it worked. Great. No big deal.

But now — inexplicably — this method has stopped working. The iPhone footage was filmed in HDR, and now when interpreting the footage to Rec. 709 or Rec. 2020 — there is zero change. It is yellow, flat, and blown out. I modify the footage before dragging into the timeline.

So, why? It worked before! Why now? No updates or changes to the software have occurred.

I do not want to have re-film everything with HDR turned off.

I'm using: Adobe PrePro 23.0.0 (Build 63) on MacOS Monterrey 12.6.1

with: iPhone 13 Pro Max - iOS 16.3.1

Any thoughts? Thank you!

jelliott2k

Participating Frequently

Thanks MattSC7C for the heads-up. I will test this to see if I have the same problem. Like you, I have been using the work-around you descrive for editing iPhone footage. Almost everything I have recorded in the last couple of years was shot in HDR on the iPhone. If this has stopped working it will bring iPhone videography to a dead stop. Seems like Adobe would know that iPhone video is extrodinarly common. Why would they not have an easy way to fix this?

M

Matt5C7C

Participating Frequently

It's not a good look for Adobe. Even having to manually re-interpret the footage shouldn't be a thing.

My workaround was opening the files in Quicktime, and exporting in H.264.

They look great in PrePro after that.

T

twin_phantom

Participant

Thank you, you help solving my problem

A

Ahmed2330115594yp

Participant

Thanks for this. I still have the issue it seems.

Left to right: Rec709, then Rec2020, then original.

So confused.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

First, I have no idea what you're comparing ... are those screen grab images from within PrPRo or a mix of Pr and a video player, or a video player? What's your OS, as that does make a massive difference unfortunately?

Second ... no camera made has a really accurate viewing screen, not even the $70,000 RED, Arri, and Sony rigs. For field work, they pay for a highly accurate heavily calibrated screen to be on-set, if not connected to the camera. Next, very few computer setups actaully show an accurate image on-screen according to full specs of either Rec.709 or any HDR.

Unless the image is run through a breakout-device like BlackMagic or AJA cards to the screen, so that neither the OS nor the GPU touch the image. That's how pro colorists work, and they never consider a computer monitor 'accurate'.

Premiere tries to give the most close approximation it can to the standards of the CM it's set for within the program. On most systems, and ALL Macs, users must set the Preferences option for Display Color Management to 'on'. And viewing an accurate SDR/Rec.709 image is a lot easier than an accurate HDR image ... period. Even though the Mac color management system uses a wrong gamma to display SDR/Rec.709 videos, within Pr, you'll see a decently accurate image. IF you have the CM for the clip and sequence set correctly.

Last ... Rec.709 has a different set of three primary colors and both the gamut (range) and volume (the actual discrete colors available) are much smaller than the HDR forms, whether HLG, PQ, or say HDR10. Which are all slightly different from each other.

So yes, there will be differences in the image when properly displayed within any color space when transformed to different color spaces. If there wasn't, we wouldn't need them, or want them, would we?

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

user8127241

Participant

Worked like a charm. It made a massive difference in how the iPhone video now appears. Thanks!

Hazlip Creative

Inspiring

I don't have "Modify" in the right click menu, and I don't see it in any other menus. Where can I find those settings? Do I right click on the clip or the preview?

Pr Pro 22.5.0 Build 62

27" iMac Retina 5k

4.2GHz Quad Core i7

Radeon Pro 580 8GB