Noticeable color saturation change when I imported video into Premier on a Mac

Question

c.When I shoot a video on my Fuji XT3, the color looks good on the camera monitor. When I upload it to YouTube, the color matches. When I open it in Quicktime, it matches. But not in Premier. I tried color correcting in Premier to compensate, but when I export, it's totally different. Very muted. I'm sure its a preview or color space setting in Premier but I've tried everything I could find and was not able to solve this issue.Ayttached is a sample.The image on the low right is how it looks in the camera and quicktime and when I upload it to YouTube.The image on the upper left is the same file in Premier. As you can see, the situation is exaggerated.Any light you can shed on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated.

R Neil Haugen · Answer

First, NO camera made ... not even the $70,000 Red, Sony, or Arri cameras have an accurate viewfinder. Which is why when needed, they have properly calibrated pro monitors on set for evaluation of images. Your Fuji isn't a perfectly calibrated screen.

Second, Apple's bonkers idea of using the camera transform from the Rec.709 standards, as the display system transform, is wrong. And is not done anywhere else by anyone. So your QuickTime player view, technically, is wrong also.

The Mac ColorSync utility not only applies a display gamma of 1.96, instead of the correct Rec.709 broadcast standard of 2.4, they don't properly remap chrominance ... color hues ... within the monitor's native P3 color space. So there's two issues, improper display gamma affecting tonal (brightness) values, and hue remapping affecting color values.

So how to work within what you got?

Color Workspace, Lumeter panel, SETTINGS tab. The tab that says Settings at the top, which has all of Premiere's color management options in one place.

Set Display color managment and extended dynamic range to on.

Set auto log detect AND auto-tonemapping to on.

Whatever you choose for sequence color space, choose a matching export preset. Rec.709/SDR presets simply list the codec/framesize or whatever in their name. HLG presets list HLG in the preset name.

And ... for display gamma for the Program monitor ... pick your poison. Literally. Let's review the choices.

QuickTime gamma 1.96 ... this matches the Program monitor pretty closely with the QuickTime player outside of Premiere. Your media will look similar, on your system, within and without Premiere.

Problem: on all non-Mac systems, and on all newer Macs with Reference modes using the HDTV setting, the image will be dark with crushed blacks and over-saturated. Including Android, PCs, and all broadcast compliant systems.

Broadcast gamma 2.4 .... I work for/with/teach pro colorists, mostly Mac based, and this is the setting they simply use. NO PROFESSIONAL MEDIA is graded to the 1.96 of the Mac. So all media you watch on that was graded at 2.4. Period. And then let go "out into The Wild" where the creator has no control, and every screen will show a different image than any other.

(And yes, my Mac-based colorist acquaintances are furious with Apple over this mess.)

Web 2.2 ... this is kinda sorta in-between, and some people do use it trying to be not too dark, not too light.

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