Colour grade not exporting with Premiere Pro

[jsyboy75]

Hi all, I may be doing something rather basic but here goes:

I am trying to export ANY file type from Premiere Pro CC - H264, ProRes, even still Jpeg images all have the same problem - some, not all (I cannot tell which) of the colour grades are not exporting so the Mp4 or .mov or whatever comes out is washed out - but not completely back to Slog.

It doesn't matter what the footage is - I tried reimporting MP4s and ProRes files and re-exporting them, I tried faking the grade but that just made a mess.

Any ideas? Doesn't make any difference if it's with LUTs or without - same issue

Machine is iMac Pro, Graphics card is Radeon Pro Vega 64 16GB, IOS is High Sierra, Adobe CC is up to date (brand new install)

Many thanks

Alex

[francis-crossman]

As R Neil Haugen suggests, the first thing you should do is set your display profile to Rec709 Gamma 2.4.  That is the first step in being able to trust anything you see in PPro or out.   Then - it sounds to me like you may be getting sucked into the dreaded Quicktime player gamma issue. I recommend using VLC player to evaluate your exported files.  If it looks the same in VLC player and the Premiere Pro program monitor, that rules out other issues  Quicktime player has had a LONG standing issue with displaying video at the wrong gamma setting and there is no way to force it to display correctly - in short, do not use Quicktime player to QC videos.

When you bring exported footage back into PPro it SHOULD look exactly the same as the project in the Program Monitor.  If it does not, you've got some other problem

And now on to the real fun - web browsers are also mostly displaying things at the wrong gamma.  Try comparing your video on Safari/Chrome/Firefox.  In my experience, Firefox looks "correct" while the other two do not.  One approach to mitigate this is to over-grade (as you state above) for web delivery.  Of course, this does not instill confidence, does it?

In the end, Premiere Pro does create accurately renders; if it does not, you have a problem that can be fixed.  The real problem is with players and browsers not displaying these files correctly.

[jimbo_hippo]

I've just followed your recommendations there Francis and RNH. Been wondering what the proper settings should be recently so thanks for the input. The colour profile isn't a million miles from what my MacBook Pro uses as default so at least I know everything I've created on this machine previously isn't miles out!

I think with the advent of affordable but impressive cameras like the Pannys and Sonys where even at entry level, you can get into some properly cinematic shooting, the woes of not having a proper broadcast setup will become more and more of a challenge and we'll have to find workarounds. I've returned to cameras after two decades. Last time I wielded one in anger it was the size of a house and had a BetaCam or Umatic tape in it. I now have a GH4 in my pocket. My advice for anyone not wanting to buy or not being able to afford a full broadcast monitor setup is to learn how to use and trust Lumetri's scopes. I often edit on the move in difficult environments and if you're on transport with scenery flicking by and constant shifts in light, you have to lean on your scopes to get a rough grade then return when it's more civilised. I'm sure there are a few broadcast professionals choking on their digestive reading this but that's the reality of low end production these days. Sorry for being a heathen 😉

[R Neil Haugen]

The scopes in PrPro aren't perfect. But you're correct, make sure you're within 0-100, and no saturation spikes go outside the bounding box in the Vectorscope, and for most computer/tv "personal use",  it will be usable.

Neil

[jsyboy75]

To clarify, once again.

I have Premiere open.

I change the colour profile of the iMac display.

Logically this should change everything that I see on the screen.

Adobe IGNORES the iMac settings and switches the Program monitor window BACK to what it was before I switched the colour profile of the iMac to a new settings. You can see that every other window has changed, for example pink Title slugs are now a different shade of pink but the Program monitor remains unchanged.

Again - Everything else on the screen changes to the new iMac setting - just the Program monitor reverts back to the same colour every time.

[R Neil Haugen]

So PrPro shows sRGB no matter what the computer is set for?

Neil

[jsyboy75]

I don't know if it's sRGB but it doesn't change. Agreed, however this is not for personal use - an iMac Pro may be overkill for the home user!

[rnaphoto]

jsyboy75 has put his finger on the problem and that is that Adobe has rigged PP Pro to ALWAYS have the program monitor display rec 709 NO MATTER WHAT the actual monitor profile is. This is being done behind the scenes and there are no controls to override it. That is fine if your output is ALWAYS going to be displayed on a reasonably new or calibrated TV screen, but since anything exported from the timeline in PP Pro is "untagged" in terms of a color profile, the export will display in the monitor color space, which for most of us is NOT rec. 709. If you want to see it in rec. 709 on your computer, you need to profile your monitor to rec. 709. This is true both for QuickTime and for Vimeo and YouTube as displayed on a wide gamut screen. The closer the computer monitor is to sRGB or rec 709, the closer QuickTime and Vimeo and YouTube will look to what is ALWAYS displayed in the PP Pro program monitor. Neil is correct with this statement..."One of the issues with PrPro is that some folks are now getting specs to deliver in P3 or Rec2020, and PrPro isn't really setup to do that. Which is why we all need more color managing tools so PrPro isn't only Rec709.

[jsyboy75]

Thank you. And with this in mind the iMac therefore cannot be used at an All In One machine since the only way to grade is on an external monitor. If this is not resolved and is in fact the case then I have bought the wrong machine and should have bought a tower with external monitors.

However since Adobe is able to override the display settings of the monitor it MUST therefore be able to NOT override it which would solve this problem very easily.

[rnaphoto]

well not exactly...if you set the I-mac monitor profile to rec 709 (via the system preferences>display>color), then your QuickTime, youtube and vimeo will look the same as your monitor profile in PP Pro. Unfortunately, most folks are looking at video on computer screens and not tv screens. vimeo has something called HDR video- which they say has more color depth or something- but only runs on specific HDR screens...Luminous colors, stunning high quality: HDR has arrived on Vimeo I agree with Neil that Adobe needs to give us the option of having the PP Pro program monitor show a full range of color profile options including your own monitor profile. They can do it for Photoshop- so we know they can do it...

[R Neil Haugen]

This is the grist for the mill of a lot of arguments.

Most of the pro level folks working in 'industrial' houses come down squarely on the side that one should put out material by the standards, as that is the ONLY way you can control anything in the mess that is "out in the wild" for TV, computer, or 'device' screens. And as the standards change, stick with one for particular uses.

The result of this is that any one person's material will always look the same as other properly graded/prepped material. So anyone seeing your material will always see it comparatively against other material on their screen. If all "pro" stuff from say TV programs looks X, and yours looks X, no matter what X is! ... it will seem 'correct' to them.

Many not of that group think they'd like to try & out-guess the myriad settings of screens & 'channels' and players and browsers. You seem to be in the second group.

However ... if you go that route, understand ... on one subset of screens/devices/browsers your material will look really good comparatively. And on every other subset of users, your material will look worse than "standard" pro material does. Or at least ​different from standard "pre created" media.

Choose your poison.

As to the entirely separate issue of allowing us full color management capability as Resolve does, yea, we need that ... for pro level work. With HDR coming fast, Rec2020, P3, other spaces/color forms are used for specific things, and PrPro needs to allow for those end uses. And for the media produced in the new cameras that's really ramping up dynamic range and such.

Neil

[jsyboy75]

Finally, someone who knows how to use the word ‘myriad’ correctly.

[rnaphoto]

While I understand that Rec. 709 is a standard for broadcast, many of us creating video content are being asked to create content for online viewing on computer screens and mobile devices as well as for broadcast, so we need to be able to "proof" our output for devices other than just for tv screens. Currently we have to guess what the export will look like online and that makes color grading difficult because it becomes an iterative process. If we could change the PP Pro program monitor to show us what the video will look like on other devices, then we wouldn't have to guess...

[jsyboy75]

I am in touch with Adobe about it, frankly I can’t understand why this basic essential is not already a feature - I bet FCPX does not have the same issue.

[R Neil Haugen]

So when you're creating content for various screens & devices, which do not have any standards they follow, if you set for the device you have in hand ... what happens on all other devices & screens & browsers with different settings & spaces?

Or do you upload 57 versions, each one 'smart' so it knows to load for iPhone 6, but NOT for Samsung S8's ... ? And if Chrome on Mac use this version, and Safari on Linux use this, and ... ?

That's where the problem comes in. Every browser not only has it's own tendencies & foibles, but even those are at times offset by monitor/OS settings. How do you plan for that?

It frustrates the Hades out of those only making content for full TV/cable broadcast, because after it 'enters' anyone's particular device, what happens to it is completely out of control of the colorist. Every TV on the planet is a bit to a lot off.

And even so, it's more stable than the plethora of screens, devices, monitors, and OS controls ... or  lack thereof.

I've created content specifically to look good in one browser ... and on a couple machines, it looked real good, on a couple others using the SAME browser, real bad.

Neil

[francis-crossman]

While it may be true the PPro always operates in Rec709, it is still necessary to set your display profile to Rec709 Gamma 2.4 so that files viewed outside of PPro are displayed correctly.

Also, do not use Quicktime Player . . . basically ever.  It displays video at the wrong gamma setting and can not be trusted.  Instead, use VLC player.

[jsyboy75]

So what is the correct way to export for online delivery - ie Vimeo?

[francis-crossman]

Grade your project and make it look good in PPro on a monitor that you trust - then export using one of the Vimeo presets.  It's as simple as that.

This is part you are not going to like - Safari and Chrome will display your video incorrectly - it's not Vimeo's fault - it's not Premiere Pro's fault.  But try viewing your video in Firefox, or on your phone, or on a smart TV.  As R Neil Haugen has mentioned, the best we can do is stick to the standards and not try to out-guess them. 

Welcome to the wild wild west of video color management.

[jsyboy75]

And how do I explain that to my client who asked for more colour on a washed out edit that looked fine in Premiere. I’m not really trying to out guess them, I just want to export what I see on the screen.

[R Neil Haugen]

And how do I explain that to my client who asked for more colour on a washed out edit that looked fine in Premiere. I’m not really trying to out guess them, I just want to export what I see on the screen.

Colorists deal with this every day. Of course, with sit-in clients, it gets worse: if you have a program monitor for yourself, and another screen for clients ... and they suddenly look over your shoulder at your screen ... a VERY common request is "make that screen look like this one!"

Note, they're both expensive monitors for broadcast use, calibrated with hundreds of 'points' for the LUTs in the external boxes that run them both. But no two screens, no matter how high-end, no matter how incredibly tightly color calibrated, will ever look exactly alike. So most colorists try and set their suites so the clients just can't see the colorist's grading monitor.

So ... explain to your client and demonstrate. See, with the screen setup right, VLC, Potplayer, it's fine. QuickTime ... it's not. And see ... in Safari/Chrome with their poor excuse for color management, not so good; Firefox, much better.

It's also good to have a couple reference videos to show in each of those. So, your perfect grade looks like X in Chrome ...  but see this, your skin tones match this movie/tv-show/whatever that's also professionally produced. Ergo ... you're hitting Standard Pro Level.

When they see the way it looks different on different browsers/players on the same screen with the same monitor setup, well ... that's a puzzler for most people, but hopefully they'll accept your expertise at that point.

Neil

[jsyboy75]

All good info, thank you

[R Neil Haugen]

I came out of 35 years as a pro stills photographer 5 years & a bit back, so used to setting the color in the output file and that's that. Did I get puzzled by going into video output ... like many things I thought would be the same, that wasn't.

And yea, I got real frustrated at this issue then myself. But as the colorist said, "You can't fix gramma's green tv."

Sigh.

Neil

[jsyboy75]

Also - why was this not a problem with an older iMac and Laptop? Or am I just noticing it more on a newer model?

[francis-crossman]

It's not a new problem, and it's small enough that it has gone largely unnoticed for the vast majority of people.  But video pros have been battling hardcore with this problem for something like 10 years - no joke.  It's quite possible that your eye is just now picking up on it.  I remember that moment for myself - crazy-making!

To be absolutely clear about the "wrongness" I am talking about - it's not a huge wild shift.  It's a slight lift in Gamma - meaning that absolute black point and absolute white point are not affected, but the midtones a lifted a bit.  This causes the image to look a little less contrasty and sometimes a bit washed out.  But I'm not talking about wild shifts here. 

If you are experiencing crazy big shifts, that is something YOU are doing I am very sorry to say.  This small display gamma problem will most likely sail right over your clients head.

[jsyboy75]

I understand. I’m not doing anything different to what I have done before. The problem is more pronounced on the new machine (I had not noticed it before and given my OCD levels that means it was fine until now!) Install of Premiere is new but all settings remain the same as before.

[francis-crossman]

Am I right in assuming the original title of this post "Colour grade not exporting with Premiere Pro" is a bit overstated?  Your color grades ARE exporting, they are just not exactly looking the same when you view them in certain players?