Adobe Premiere and Colour Gamut limited to BT.709

[Ze_Povinho]

Is it true that if I import video footage shot in a wider colour gamut the BT.709 (such as S-Gamut, S-Gamut3 or S-Gamut3.Cine) , Adobe Premiere will clip the wider colour space to BT.709?
While doing some research I found that if I import footage into Adobe Premiere and drop it in a timeline and if I do any colour grading inside Premiere using the lumetri colour, the colour space will be reduced to BT.709. This made me worry because I shot footage with the Atomos Shogun Inferno and the Sony FS700R which allows to record Sony RAW. When recording I set the Gamut in the Atomos Shogun Inferno to S-Gamut. I know should had use a smaller colour space such S-Gamut3.Cine. But I used what was set by default in the Atomos Recorder. I was planing to do the editing and the colour grading in Premiere CC 2018. But then I read some people saying that if I do grading inside premiere, Adobe Premiere will convert the orignal  colour space to a reduced BT.709.

If this is true, Adobe Premiere is not recommended at all if you want to do colour grading for films that will be screened in theatres / cinemas. The wide colour space is clipped by premiere.
If so, doing colour grading in Adobe Premiere is not recommendable if one is working with footage that was recorded in colour spaces wider than BT.709. The only solution is to edit in Premiere but not apply any colour correction or grading and export the timeline in a XML format that can be used by a Professional Grading Software such as DaVinci Resolve. !
Is this true?

Thank you in advance

[Ze_Povinho]

Yep is the DeckLink Mini Monitor 4K. Thank you!

[Ze_Povinho]

I posted this in "Adobe Premiere Pro Editors on Facebook" group, regarding how Premiere handles colour spaces. It was deleted twice be the Admin and then they blocked comments.

So much for open discussion and knowledge sharing.

After complaining and asking why were my posts deleted, here is a response from them:

" Diogo Pessoa Andrade, I skimmed your original post and I assume that what the admins saw (as did I) is that you walked into a barbecue restaurant and started screaming at people for not being vegetarian.

I disagree with your premise, as would most editors in this Adobe Premiere group."

I wonder why are they avoiding this topic to be discussed?

Here is what I posted there:

"Is Premiere a good solution for Professional Cinema? I am concluding that it is not a good tool if you aim to produce for Cinemas in a professional way, mostly due to the way Premiere handles colour spaces (Gamut).

It looks like that premiere can´t handle gamuts / colour spaces. As far as I realised Adobe Premiere works with BT.709 colour space. If you have footage that was recorded in a wider colour space such as S-Gamut, S-Gamut3, S-Gamut3.Cine or DCI P3, once you import footage in Adobe Premiere the colour space is affected and Premiere will clip the colour space to BT.709, a reduced color space used on the web non professional screening and displays.

It seams that the only way to avoid this is to do the editing and export a XML file. This won´t change the colour space because you will be working with native source footage when you open this XML file in another program such as DaVinci Resolve. Although, this may be tricky and you may experience problems when importing the XML file in DaVinci Resolve. So my conclusion is: If you shot your film in a video format using a wide colour space such as S-Gamut3.Cine or wider and if you plan to produce a film for professional theatre release, Adobe Premiere is not recommended to be part of your workflow. You will loose colour information at some point. You will start with a wide colour space, which will then be reduced / clipped when you do the editing in Premiere and then you will increase again the colour space to DCI-P3 when you produce the final version for digital movie projection. As far as I see it, Premiere is not a tool recommended for professional Cinema production. It might be cool for TV, Web production. But not for professional film production such as what is produced by Hollywood or any other professional Cinema Studios.

I have been using Adobe Premiere for many many years.... But this limitation of Premiere and the current project I am working now which involves footage shot in a wider colour space than BT.709, is not giving me many options. I think I will have to start learningis Davinci Resolve.

And in order to avoid any delays and possible issues when exporting a XML file from Premiere and importing it in Davinci Resolve I think the best way to go is to start with DaVinci from the very beggining of the workflow process.. This is my conclusion. It has nothing to do with having an HDR monitor. It has to do with how Adobe Premiere works.

I did import into Premiere video footage shot in S.Gamut3.Cine and also did tests with footage shot in S-Gamut and S-Gamut3 colour spaces and the result was the same. There is no way to keep these colour information once you edit and export footage in Premiere. No matter the export format and settings you choose.

In this Article from Sony they mention that:

"Often, gamuts used in professional video applications conform to ITU-R BT.709 (Rec. 709), established for HDTVs."

Premiere seams to do that but in a destructive way. There is no way to keep the colour space along the workflow if you edit, grade and export inside premiere. You will end up with a reduced colour space not suitable for professional cinema distribution.

Any comments are welcome.

http://support.d-imaging.sony.co.jp/support/ilc/movie/en/grading/02.html"

[R Neil Haugen]

There are quite a few productions with wide gamut media using Pr. Just daily.

As someone who spends most of his time dealing with colorists this sort of thing is discussed a ton. The VAST majority of b-cast and cine work is still processed in Resolve even in Rec.709 working space. Then exported into DCI-P3 or whatever for theatrical release.

Most colorists still have as their confidence monitor a Flanders or other spendy rig that is Rec.709. Their basic grade work will be done on that. Then say they have a big screen capable of wider gamut, they'll pass through again modding the image to that view as necessary. And use the capabilities of Resolve to change the data to DCI-P3.

The bits are still there. As long as you keep exports in a high enough bit-rate format. Export into H.264/8-bit, yea, you lost something. Export into a 4:4:4:4 12-bit, you haven't lost a thing. The assigned color space doesn't matter.

So you're chasing down a rabbit hole that doesn't exist in reality.

Neil

[chrisw44157881]

Now, I haven't fully tested every option in the new cc 2019, as there are some interesting export options. So take everything I say with a grain of salt and test yourself.

Here it goes...

Coming from an AE background, even the AE adobe manual says that if you don't have a working colorspace as big as the biggest footage in your 32bpc project, you will clip your gamut. and this is from adobe! If you think about it. It actually is pretty interesting that a floating point color can get color clipped. Some long time users actually disabled color management to avoid this. (Note the gracy article)

Now unless adobe overhauls the lumetri engine so it acts more like ACES/lossless, that would be a great thing. There is a reason the HDR is disabled when luts are enabled. When I used an arri_color wide gamut lut to rec709 and back again, I got artifacts in premiere,but only if I used an effect. (This must trigger the disable bypass feature or something.)

Not so, with AE and the plugin called opencolorio(made by ACES) EXR's actually got clipped to 16bpc and I lost superbrights, so there is something going on with lumetri in general.

The rec 2020 scopes don't work quite right for me yet, so still beta. It may have something to do with the the legacy rec 709 timeline, I'm not sure.

First off, many people make big movies with premiere. like Gone baby, Deadpool etc.. What's not known mainstream is that they were edited on premiere but XML'd  to deadpool graded in baselight and gone girl in quantel Pablo system.

Still though...

Many professionals use rec 709 and dump it into P3/rec 2020/XYZ DCI later on. This is perfectly normal as P3 encompasses all rec709 colors.

You don't have to grade in P3/rec 2020,  but the more expensive monitor you have, the more colors you can grade for the big screen. Or let's put it this way, if your film is black and white, you don't need a large color gamut and your contrast 2000:1 is all you need.

If you film has low color contrast, you can get away with missing very dark/bright but colorful colors. Since, film colors look good at 128-140 RGB with low luminance(except animated films which are very saturated), you are usually fine.

A small caveat to all this: HDR cinema is coming soon, so if you only grade in P3 if (and rec 2020 monitors are available at that time), you'll have to re-grade everything for rec. 2020 if you want those new colors on the big screen.

[R Neil Haugen]

Excellent post, Chris!

A friend is fully DolbyVision certified, produces both b-cast and screen deliverables, and also teaches D-Vision stuff for Dolby.

He's noted in one comment that it isn't exactly what people think ... there are two main differences (and a ton of smaller ones):

1. More delineated subtle detail in the shadows ... even though the overall upper-shadow/midtones are only up a VERY few nits from a Rec.709 workflow, it's amazing how that tiny shift gives more details into the deep subtle shadows.
2. Smoother roll-off on the speculars/highlights. You don't actually 'see' that much more bright content, as realistically, there isn't much more than a stop or two or real usable details the eyes can handle. However, the roll-off from bright-highlights to specular points of light is much smoother and more subtle.

And ... when he shows a good HDR bit on his high-end fully certified gear to family & friends/colleagues ... some go "wow, that's ... cool ... " and some go "Um ... this is still video, right? ... um ... well, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be seeing here ... "

For some time, I've been pushing the engineers that we users NEED full HDR/color space controls for input/working/output-deliverables and for internal scopes/monitoring of the program data. You can certainly edit HDR and wide-gamut material in Pr, but you clearly can't finish that material in Pr. So rather than a round-trip out to color & fx, back to edit ... it's got to be out to color/fx, then output from something else.

Neil

[rodneyb56060189]

The point was made that black and white doesn't require so much color accuracy. How true. Tonality of that black and white matters to some extent but people love even the most basic black and white stuff ( some movies have been made in the past 5 years or so that are not only black and white, but also one was silent ! )

The lighting and choice of lenses, and quality of those lenses ( and proper exposure) makes a big difference on a product no matter HOW it is edited and delivered to the public. Let's not lose complete sight of those facts of life in the movie biz. Writers seem to have a big influence on the products. Cinematographers, Directors and Actors and tons of people ( designers and so on ) have a huge impact.

Everything boils down to a final product where the editor is a HUGE part of that teamwork and overall workflow.

Let's not lose sight of that to the point where we begin to think things are behind backwards. That should keep things in perspective re: a nice coherent and realized mutual importance in teamwork and production.

[excited_Genie16B8]

It may have something to do with the the legacy rec 709 timeline, I'm not sure.

I think there's the hitch.  PP has no ability to set the color space of the timeline.  It's locked at 709.  So anything you put into it get's converted to...709.  Which means everything you export will be...709.

This is one of the great strengths of Resolve.  You can set your Input, Timeline, Output and Monitoring color spaces separately to accommodate pretty much any media and work flow.

Adobe has a lot of catching up to do.

[R Neil Haugen]

I'm wondering if say the ProRes 4:4:4:4XQ ... with the options chosen to say do 16 bit ... would be a usable choice. Looking up the S-gamut data from Sony, and the data from various sources on that ProRes ... it's designed for high dynamic range and wide gamut media.

Have you tried an export with that setting from Pr? I'd be very curious as to what that delivered out.

Neil

[rodneyb56060189]

Please don't be angry with me, but I do have some impressions from this thread.

Firstly, Jim suggested you just switch to Resolve right off the bat, early on in this thread. That way you can SEE on calibrated monitors with proper project settings, as close as you can get to DCP ( digital cinema projection) with current high end monitors. It won't be perfect, but close. Basically you can't grade color for cinema unless you do it within a cinema projection setting.

So that's one thing.  Jim suggested you just jump over to resolve for all of it. And you'll find out eventually what the limitations are for absolute control of cinema projection stuff as you refine your workflow to delivery.

Neil tried to explain that ppro does NOT clip or restrict the source material unless you export to a codec that is limited to rec 709. BUT you can't SEE your better colors in the source or program viewers, due to current workspace options in ppro. Plus he tried to explain that using the scopes with current scales is not very cool.

I tend to believe what Neil says cause he does an amazing amount of study and research and yappin with people about this stuff.

YOU claim that your tests PROVE that no matter what you do the color space is destroyed ( clipped, etc..) by ppro, as tested by you scientifically.  So, we have some fundamental difference of views.

I personally think you should be happy and satisfied with what you are doing and how stuff looks and how it ends up being exported, etc. I think the most important thing is that YOU are happy and satisfied.

This isn't Hyde Park Corner. Not a place to stand on soap box and rant nicely, but rant it is if there's no way to reconcile the conflicting viewpoints.

I know you'll do great stuff no matter what you do, so try to focus on the work ( the story and the magic of telling them to people who want you to express those stories to them ).

[rodneyb56060189]

P.S. I was typing my message while Neil uploaded his, so I didn't see it until now.

What you will find on the black magic forums AND sony forums or ANY forums, basically bears out what Neil is saying in terms of most common work flows, but that isn't the main point. The point is that you are NOT getting your original stuff destroyed by PPro.

It doesn't matter what most people do, unless you want to study the best way to do what you HAVE to do to get out the product for various media ( different TV's, DCI, etc. )  There's tons of info about that and the link I sent about stuff recommended by Netflix, believe it or not, is very informative.

Neil, unfortunately, has a habit of simplifying conclusions to the detriment of individual feelings. That you are chasing down a rabbit hole that doesn't exist is fundamentally insulting. You are just trying to state something you believe ( and happen to be angry about ) and trying to learn how to do what you want done.  It's a learning process.  You don't tell the children you love they are idiots because they don't hold the paint brush correctly the first time they are helping you paint the garage ( I still growl when I think of when my father did that, as I was just having fun and trying to help ).  People have to have patience and respect one another.

Conversely, trying to get some reaction beyond what you've already stated ( you belief and your anger ) is not being productive either. Time to move on.

[R Neil Haugen]

I wasn't trying to or meaning insults in any way. Don't say something you have no basis for. ANYONE can get off chasing down a rabbit hole, I've certainly done that *more* than my share of times. It's just being human.

As is informing someone that what they're chasing isn't what they think, and has become a rabbit hole.

The OP,  it seems, is perhaps confusing or conflating the actions of LUTs and color spaces. They aren't anything equivalent.

A LUT *will* clip any data outside the set range of the LUT. When using most LUTs, either for technically correcting media (such as a log to Rec.709 LUT) or a LUT used to apply a look or feel, you need to be able to trim the media into the LUT with luma/chroma tools applied before the LUT. While viewing scopes with the LUT in place.

Color spaces DO NOT CLIP.

They don't have that knowledge, skill, limitations or whatever.

All they are is a map ... they take the data in an image file and place each bit for hue/luma as THAT color space interprets THAT specific set of luma/chroma data on THIS map.

Change the map, the color space, the data points change to fit their appropriate new location.

That's all they do. A smaller color space has no means for clipping data. It just moves it closer together.

Which is why the colorists I know just work the media as best suits their setup, and worry about the output space as they need to.

Where Pr falls terribly short isn't in working the media or really passing it along.

Pr currently has two big holes, first you can't really see HDR or wide-gamut media correctly. So ... yea, don't try to do color or tonal work on that media. Second, it's limited in the ability to directly export a reliable DCI-P3 as you can't see the blame thing correctly to begin with even if you have such an export setting.

So it needs to go from editing in Pr to finishing in Resolve or Avid or Baselight.

But Pr isn't clipping or damaging the data. IF you know what to export to. A friend is teaching DolbyVision for Dolby. Has an incredible facility. And takes projects that came from Pr into Resolve and outputs full DolbyVision high-nits work regularly.

It's all in knowing the craft.

Neil

[excited_Genie16B8]

[PP] needs to go from editing in Pr to finishing in Resolve

Or, just do it all in Resolve.  Media Prep, Editing, Effects, Color, Audio, Delivery.  Resolve is a one stop solution for independent producers.

[Peter5E09]

"Color spaces DO NOT CLIP."  - (not true)

If a 0 - 255 space is converted to 16 - 235, then some loss will occur, and that's clipping. You can't go from higher bit depth to lower and still magically preserve it all just like can't move from a villa into a jr. 1 bedroom and fit all the same furniture.

It's called color SPACE for a reason.

[R Neil Haugen]

Not sure why you're commenting in an old thread that doesn't have that much to do with the current Premiere Pro cycle.

Going from 0-255 to 16-235 does not actually require or even imply clipping if it's a transform-type function, as then the values are just remapped.

Now ... displaying 0-255 media without proper color management on a monitor properly set for Rec.709, meaning that 'limited' or video range media is 16-235 and the monitor is expecting it ... that will clip of course.

Neil

[Peter5E09]

"Going from 0-255 to 16-235 does not actually require or even imply clipping"

In 8-bit color space it does. And in any other color space it reduces the number of colors - some people don't care, some do.

Just keeping you honest.

[R Neil Haugen]

Please re-read my comments. If your gear is properly remapping, there is no issue. If your color management through the OS and monitors is set correctly, and yes even with 8-bit media:

16-235 media should be displayed on the monitor as 0-255.

0-255 media should be displayed on the monitor as 0-255.

You should not see a difference between "limited' or 'full' media on playback.

8-bit or 10-bit doesn't factore in here if your color management is setup correctly.

In fact, if your color management isn't setup correctly, 8/10 bit doesn't matter because your system will still screw it up. The display of limited & full is supposed to be handled by color management.

Too many people think "Oh, I definitely want 0-255 showing on my monitor" and go into their GPU settings and tell it to treat all limited as full. WRONG. Leave that alone.

And it will treat limited as limited but displayed 0-255, and full as full and displayed 0-255.

Which is actually easy enough to test with a color bars clip. If you can plop a color bar on a 'limited' sequence, and on a 'full' sequence, and they show the same, your system is working correctly.

Neil

[excited_Genie16B8]

Neil, unfortunately, has a habit of simplifying conclusions to the detriment of individual feelings.

I think that's more my shtick than Neil's.

I use the ACES work flow myself in Resolve and love it.  I heartily recommend it.

[rodneyb56060189]

Thank you Neil. I know you don't mean to or try to be insulting. The fact that you say things that may be construed as insulting has nothing to do with your heartfelt intent. It's just a fact of life.  I won't bother trying to explain this to you anymore because you just don't get it.

No problems.. I understand what you are saying technically and you are helping so many people understand the technology what you might lack in diplomacy is of no consequence.   hehe...

I just chased down a rabbit hole just now. I shot 8 seconds of a house across the frozen lake the other day with a 300mm lens for full chip on a bmpcc 3/4, with crop factor of 2.88.. makes it 864mm. Raw 1080p, 23..97, cinemaDNG.

Wanted to see what vimeo would do with an export of mov DNxHD at 720p. I don't have pro version of vimeo and it was limited to 720p for me. I expected the conversion by vimeo to be to 720p, and whatever they do with the codec. They sorta like mp4, h264 I think.

For some stupid unexplainable rabbit hole reason, they made it full HD and it didn't fail to convert ( I had doubts if it would work).

Is 8 seconds.

It's very grainy ( noise) which I kinda LIKE. It adds another very subtle plane on top of image.  Like grain on prints you used to make in your darkroom.

[rodneyb56060189]

Jim, do you use the aces workflow for full Hd , like for bmpcc raw cinema dng  type stuff ??  which will be exported to rec 709 anyway ?

[excited_Genie16B8]

At the moment, still HD and 709 for me.  (Damn Pocket 4K's aren't in stock at B&H.)

[rodneyb56060189]

I should mollify some of the adobe monitors, etc. by stating I still use CS6 sometimes.. but mostly use audition for some stuff ( like converting some stuff to WAV and basic volume adjustments before ingesting ) and bridge …

   Don't want adobe to think I don't love them.

[rodneyb56060189]

Jim, they are incredible energy hogs. get very warm pretty fast (wasted heat energy). get lots of batteries. I have 3 and 3 little chargers and the ac to dc adapter for inside type stuff. If I had 6 batteries it would be nice.  Just a heads up. Don't believe what they say about batteries lasting a long time. They go dead very fast ( like 10 minutes ? ), so I turn off camera every opportunity. I hear that in cold it's even worse.  Is still worth it though, in my opinion...  you'll like them. I have the older one ( not 4k ).

[R Neil Haugen]

Waiting on the new one myself ... sigh. Waiting, did I mention waiting?

Neil

[rodneyb56060189]

If necessary, if you need one,  the metabones adapters are really well made. I got one for the nikkor lenses I have and the one zeiss cine lens I have with Nikon mount.  Some of the stupid auto nikkor lenses don't have F stop rings, hence that adapter is different than the cine lens one. Probably won't need shims for your back focus no matter what lenses you have,

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

I just got a reply to my request for information from a color engineer for Premiere Pro, and permission to share ... so here's the full scoop on exporting HDR/wide-gamut from Premiere 2019 ...

Neil

PPro currently is hard-wired to Rec709 – so everything needs to get converted into Rec709 at some point.  But we do this conversion in such a way that we retain the data that is outside the Rec709 gamut – we call this over-range 709.  Grading operations can recover this data, but upon export, detail outside the Rec709 gamut is definitely clipped.  The only way to retain wide gamut data is to choose an HDR output, but this only really suitable for HDR workflows.  I have attached a doc on encoding HDR.  I don’t know of a way to export P3 specifically.