Automatic "Black Crush" with GoPro footage

[Avid-Indoorsman]

I'm experiencing some odd behavior with Premiere 2022. Essentially, the timeline seems to be crushing the blacks by itself. I'm also seeing some blockiness, tearing and exagerated noise inside the timeline. Odd thing is that when I go to the Creative tab and click on the Intensity slider, the "black crush' goes away momentarily, but when I move around inside the timeline the issue reappears. I have tried to fix the issue by overriding the color space inside the interpret footage menu, by using different LUTs and then setting the LUTs to none, etc; but nothing has worked. Any clues as to what this could be? Essentially, I want the image to look like the one that appears momentarily when I click on the Intensity slider.

*Attaching images for reference

[Ishan Y]

Hey Felix,

Welcome to the community, and sorry for the issue. Which version of Premiere Pro are you currently using? Would it be possible for you to share a screen recording of the issue? Do you also experience this issue with exported media or is it only limited to preview? Also, let us know in which color space the media was shot in.

Thanks,

Ishan

[R Neil Haugen]

The problem is the full range used in the camera. The ONLY Rec.709 media that is expected by standards to be encoded in 'full' is the 12-bit 4:4:4:4 RGB stuff.

You can fix this by either changing your camera to properly encode Rec.709 4:2:0 YUV data as limited, which doesn't lose ONE bit of image, simply encodes it to file differently.

Or you can go to the Effects, and get the Lumetri Full to Legal preset, drop it on (preferably) the clips in the project panel bin, so it's applied to all such clips in all uses on any sequence as a Source effect.

Neil

[Avid-Indoorsman]

Yep. Had to poke around the app for a while. Dropping in the “Full to Legal” preset seemed to be the only workable solution. Still a pain to the deduce where issue laid though.

Weird question: is there a feedback forum for this type of thing? Ideally, in situations where we don't have control over what a third party shot (like this one) I don't want the program to "expect" anything as far as footage goes. At the very least, we should get a prompt with options for how we want the Color Management System to ingest/translate the data coming in. The default of having the app determining it feels backwards.

I’ll say this, having to problem solve this type of issue -blind- really proved to be an unwanted and unwarranted time drain. It seems to me that we are being put “on the back foot” more and more as end users (and it’s starting to feel uncomfortable). My peers and I keep encountering these small issues that, alone, are simple to solve for, but as they compound, they start to negatively affect other parts of the editing process. I think the general feeling out there is that as editors, we can and should be expected to problem solve different technical issues, but to be expected to keep up with all the internal changes that the app doesn’t even inform you about, is another thing entirely.

Thanks for responding quickly btw and sorry for the vent at the end 🙂

I just keep seeing this simple quality of life issues that can have bigger repercussions on projects with quick turnarounds times, etc.

Felix

[R Neil Haugen]

Premiere is slowly  getting more user-controls for CM. Painfully slow, as it seems.

In the public beta, we finally got transforms for most log-encoded media from Sony, Canon, and Panasonic a month or two back. Which has been the beta for the next series, the 2023 version for the last couple months also.

And Adobe's practice for four years has been to drop the next major version between 12:05am and 7:25am US Pacific time on the opening day of Adobe MAX.

Which is Tuesday, 18 October this year. So I expect that will be in the shipping version, which

I'd bet a lot of money on getting next Tuesday morning.

But that's only a guess. Some things in the current public beta stay in beta when the new shipping version drops. We'll just have to see what comes in the 2023 shipping.

I've been pushing the entire year for a completely new "Essential Color Management Panel" ... where all defaults and user-settings would be in ONE  panel that we could open, dock to a part of the UI, or leave floating and open as we wish.

This is the UserVoice request for it, how about going there and upvoting the thing?

Color Management Panel

Premiere has up until the 2022 version been a total hard-coded Rec.709 app. It assumed the user would setup their monitor system 'tight' to the full Rec.709 standards, and work with media according to those standards.

Well ... the underlying color system is no longer whatever tied to Rec.709. But they still expect the media to be created within the "proper" standards. And they also expect the users to have the experience to suss out things like this.

But I work with a LOT of colorists, I teach colorists ... they'd realize this within a minute or two.

But very few editors would have a frickin' clue. It's just not something most of us deal with all the time, you know?

So yea, that leaves you hanging. And that's frustrating. But then, I work with Resolve, which as noted has the awesome 4,000 page manual, with search features.

One ... leetle ... problem: if you don't know all the proper and correct technical terms, that search don't get you Jack. So basically, IF you understand it mostly going in, the manual is very useful to explain precisely how that feature you mostly knew how it worked works.

if you don't have that knowledge ... um ... good luck even finding what you need!

Yea, these apps are complex, complicated, and at times incredibly frustrating.

Neil