Proxy Color Management Broken with Log or HLG media on Rec.709 Sequence

[R Neil Haugen]

With any log or HLG clips, that you 'override' to Rec.709 for use on a sequence.

Then make proxies from.

Toggle proxies on the sequence, and the proxies are NOT following the CM for either the clip or the sequence.

Useless, blown-out mess is all you have. With no workaround to fix CM on a proxy clip.

@WesHowellPPro @Trent Happel @mattchristensen 

Neil

[Trent Happel]

Thanks, Neil. This is still under investigation & planning by our Color team.

[R Neil Haugen]

Thanks all!

Yea, it's kinda messy at times ...

Neil

[siobhanp18048166]

Have you got anywhere with it yet? I'm trying to deal with massively blown-out proxies that I don't know how to change

[R Neil Haugen]

Download and install the public beta version. You can have that installed along with any other including the current 2022 "shipping" version.

For many cameras, they have a different process that respects the modified color space of the original clip when making proxies. So you can make the proxies with the public beta, close out.

Open the 'regular' 2022 version to that project, and it will use the proxies made in the beta.

Neil

[MHoecker]

The new color management is killing me in both Premiere and Media Encoder.  I get what it's trying to do.  It sounds smart, but like too many Premiere features, in my opinion, it just came in without basic consideration for how to integrate the new feature in a way that would be intuitive. 

With their implementation of Color Management, Adobe has basically said, "Change everything about the way you're doing things with HLG and Log formats.  We've provided ways to work the way it did before, sort of, but it will take a lot of extra effort, and only parts of it will work.  This applies to all your projects past, present and future.  Don't like it?  You shouldn't have upgraded to the newer version of the software you pay for, dummy!  What, did you actually want to use the new features we implemented?  Did you actually expect it to work?  Go back and install the last version..." (and yes, I always keep the previous version when it comes to Adobe updates, because this happens a lot.)

Here are some thoughts about current state of Color Management:

• Any project done before 22.0 that includes HLG media will display the footage completely differently when opened in the new version.  You will always need to keep an older version of Premiere installed if you ever want to edit these projects again, or go through a potentially (depending on the complexity of the project) painstaking time to convert it manually to the new color overrides.
  • Common sense would say make sure there's a way that older projects stay the same with automatic color overrides etc.  The previous system worked just fine for Rec. 709, it should have continued to work on old material automatically.  It should have been part of basic user testing.
• New proxies created in 22.0 do not respect color space overrides, so you need to create huge HLG Rec.2020 proxies instead of quick and easy 422 proxies as you always have in the past (at least for the ProRes proxy workflow I use.)
  • You cannot get correct Rec.709 proxies from your HLG media without a custom LUT to help with conversion (which I don't have) because:
• Even Media Encoder now has a color/exposure shift when converting HLG media to a Rec. 709 format.  In the past the color would be the exact same between the Rec.2020 original and the Rec.709 Proxy file.  You could do basic color grades on proxy footage and then make any final edits on the actual media, and nothing would change between the two outside the expected loss of detail in the proxy.
  • Again, you cannot get correct Rec.709 proxies from your HLG footage.  Premiere is trying to be too smart, and just assume that you want to convert footage on their terms.  See the attached images for the differences in Media Encoder, mostly in saturation.

The bottom line is the old workflow just worked fine for Rec.709 projects.  I toyed around with some HDR stuff, and it was a pain.  I'm sure that this makes that more manageable, but it's at the expense of ease of use for Rec. 709 projects, which is still what I'm sure 95% of our projects are.

[R Neil Haugen]

The reason the color was the same before for SDR and HDR projects is simple: it was all Rec.709 with "extended range values" used to work with HDR dynamic range brightness values. The color was underneath Rec.709 with again 'added values' applied over the top of it. Which was in some ways a very simple transform to mostly sort of a wider color gamut but not ... necessarily ... really so.

Now, they really are working with different color spaces and gamut. And yes, it's a stage 1 version. And they actually do want to hear the issues users are having with it because they need that data.

Your comments about the broken proxies are rather noted here on the forum and within the engineers. And covered in the FAQ I wrote about this whole new color management/default behaviors thing a week or two back.It really is a mess for any HLG and much log-encoded media that you don't actually intend to use as HDR. Premiere sees some log-encoded media and just goes into HDR with it ... because HDR values are log encoded.

I've also got a FAQ here about what seems to be the monitor setup in use. Before, you really needed to use a breakout box to have any idea that you really were in HDR, with actual proper values displayed on the screen.

Now, it seems, with the OS set to enable HDR for a screen, and the screen set and calibrated for it, you can work directly from Premiere via a GPU connection. Not as accurate as a breakout device with a loaded calibration LUT of course, but workable for at least "playing" with HDR.

I would really love it if you would post your entire comments over on the public beta forum. The engineers do pay full attention to comments there, and that's where the development discussions tend to take place.

And your post is a very good one.

Neil