Blacks/dark colors being crushed/losing quality on export.

[BQSH]

I'm exporting 4K with high bitrate and high settings in general. These are what my dark colors look like pre-export:

 
After export, my video looks like this:

Very visible lines and pixelation--quality looks horrible. Haven't run into this before, any ideas on what levels/curves I would adjust to maintain a smooth gradient in the final prodcut?

[R Neil Haugen]

Nope. Not being snarky, because I want to help, that's why I pop in here.

But from your post, there's nothing there for myself or anyone else to do anything with but guess. I prefer troubleshooting to guessing. But troubleshooting typically requires things like OS/CPU/RAM/GPU and for this, GPU driver. The media involved, shot by what, what format/codec.

Then also for color issues, screen grabs of the color management settings. Now all found in the Color Workspace/Lumetri panel/Settings tab. Do a screen grab of two, showing all settings there, and drag/drop onto the reply box so we don't have to 'open' an attached file to see them.

Then ... it's probably pretty quick to sort out.

[BQSH]

I'm less so wanting to troubleshoot a problem (I don't think it's a glitch) and moreso curious how other editors deal with crunched blacks since I'm new to the profession. But here are those details in case it is a technical issue:

OS: macOS Sonoma 14.3

CPU: 3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i7

GPU: AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT 8 GB

RAM: 16 GB 2667 MHz DDR4

I haven't done any color grading, so nothing to show on the Edit tab, but these are the Lumetri settings:

Export settings:

 

[R Neil Haugen]

It is troubleshooting, at its most basic. You have a problem, "we" try to sort it out. That's what troubleshooting is.

And the problem you have is as I pretty much suspected, you are not setting up proper color management throughout your project. You don't have a clip selected, so I can't see what color space your clips are.

You don't have auto-detect log nor auto tonemapping on, but do have a sequence set to Rec.709. Your media isn't being "managed" into that color space at this time.

So ... what is your media color space? And what happens if you turn on both detect log and tonemapping?

[BQSH]

Sorry for the late reply, was out sick for a while.

Settings currently look like this on the problem clip:
 

Turning on Auto improved the color and it looks fine in the preview window, but the export still experiences the same crushed black tones with visible lines. Same export settings as last time:

 

[R Neil Haugen]

Close Premiere. Start it while holding down any 'modifier' key, Shift, Alt, Cmd/Ctrl ... and take the option to clear all cache files.

Let Premiere rebuild them, try another export.

[BQSH]

Just cleared cache and did another export, no change in export result.

[R Neil Haugen]

Is this only on the one clip?

[BQSH]

It's slightly noticable on one other clip, so it's not specific to that one.

[R Neil Haugen]

What created those two clips? That could perhaps be of interest.

The other thing is how you view them outside of Premiere ... Apple unfortunately does not correctly handle the display transform for Rec.709 media in the OS color utillity ColorSync.

[BQSH]

I'm accessing a library of stock footage so I don't know what hardware the clips were shot on unfortunately.

And I have viewed the export on a PC and an Android phone and still see the same effect, so we can at least rule out Mac being the issue for that part.

[R Neil Haugen]

I'm wondering if those clips are 'full' or 'legal' range.

For information, Rec.709/YUV media should all be 'legal', but some cameras (for marketing hype) allow users to set the data range to "full". It doesn't affect the data recorded, only how it is encoded.

SDR/Rec.709 monitors runnning proper Rec.709 settings take 'legal' range media, and display it as full naturally. And typically assume to do so.

When they are given a YUV (technically Y/Cb-Cr) clip that is unfortunately encoded as 'full', and they do the normal expansion thing, it pushes both shadows past crushing, and whites past clipping.

[BQSH]

I did manage to track down the template and find the specific file in question; how do I go about checking if it's full or legal range?

[R Neil Haugen]

MediaInfo is the freebie utility app for checking file metadata around "here".

[cjill-r7d · Accepted solution]

Hello m8! Have you tried setting Profile to High10 in Export settings? Unchecl "Main" and chose High10 and you should be good to go

[brettbarley]

You just saved me!!  ive been struggling this for so long.  crushed/pixelated blacks on h.264 export.  now they look how they should!  thanks

[BQSH]

This worked for me! Thank you so much, my entire team still hadn't figured this out for months.

[cjill-r7d]

happy to hear! Took some time for me to figure this out aswell hehe