As soon as I bring media into a project, the color is drastically different. Why?

[bryanmtm40]

The video on the right is as shot, in a quicktime window. The video on the left is what it looks like in the source window in premiere pro. Overiding the color to rec 2020 helps, but it's not perfect. Auto Tone map media doesn't do anything whether it's on or off. 

Why doesn't it just look like the source video and is there anything I can do to fix this? 

Video shot on an iPad by my client (I'm just editing, I didn't create the media). 

[Ann Bens · Accepted solution]

Color management in Premiere Pro

Tone mapping in Premiere Pro

[bryanmtm40]

I'll give the auto detect log video color space a try, but the auto tone map media set to rec 709 makes absolutely no difference. 

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

First, Macs often use a non-standard display gamma for Rec.709/SDR media ... so I would never assume that QuickTime player is 'accurate'.

In fact, no camera made ... period ... has an actually quantifiably accurate screen. Not even the $70,000 Red, Arri, and Sony rigs. When they want that on-set, they include a calibrated and profiled field monitor.

Premiere does follow the standards as best it can given the wild variables of Real LIfe. As Premiere can't know exactly what your monitor setup is.

Professional colorists of course have more invested in their Reference monitor, the breakout device feeding it (NEVER from their GPU!) and their calibration gear than you and I have in our entire computer system.

For the rest of us, you first need to set the Mac up as correct as possible. If your monitor setup in the OS has the option for "HDTV", that will actually give you a fairly decent Rec.709 setup with correct gamma. The Rec.709 setting will give a "brighter" gamma view, sadly, as Apple chose not to follow the standards.

In Premiere, go to the Color Workspace, Lumetri panel, Settings tab. Set the Display color managment and Extended dynamic range options to On.

Setting Project setting for auto detect log and Sequence setting to auto tonemap will make sure that the color space of the file gets remapped safely via algorthms to the sequence color space. 

Set the Viewing Gamma to what you want ... you might be more comfortable on a Mac with the QuickTime (1.96) setting, as that will provide a closer match to QuickTime player on your Mac outside of Premiere.

But understand ... then it will be graded such that it will be pretty dark on a gamma 2.4 broadcast compliant screen ... that's ... why the Mac choice for Rec.709 has made such a hash of things.

Also, set the Sequence color space to what your deliverable needs to be ... Rec.709/SDR or probably HLG/HDR. Use presets that match the sequence color space. So using export presets with HLG in the name for HLG sequences, but never for Rec..709/SDR sequences. The export presets without the HLG or PQ added to the preset name are all set for Rec.709/SDR.

[bryanmtm40]

I appreciate the in-depth response. The strange thing is that some of the clips show up perfectly matching the source video, but the majority do not. They're all shot on the same device and my client just points the iPad and hits record. They couldn't change the record settings even if they wanted to, becasuse they don't know how. 

Is there something going one beyond the monitor color space? Why would some clips match perfectly and others be so extremely different?

[R Neil Haugen]

Then perhaps their iPad is shooting differently depending on the light it sees. You'd have to go to something like MediaInfo, to see what differences there are.

And auto detect log must be used with auto tonemapping for seeing a difference on SDR/Rec.709 sequences, you won't notice anything on say an HLG/HDR sequence.