How to achieve consistent brightness?

[Mikay²]

I recently posted a question about a problem where parts of the video that where brighter that full brightness on apple devices. I assume I have exported in a higher HDR version than the video in my sequence and the 3D rendering in the video had pixes with a higher brightness. Now we got videos from an external editor and after uploading the video to youtube we realized that a 255,255,255 white page we provided was suddenly grey on our regular screens. I am a bit confused what is going on.

How do you achieve a consistent workflow that outputs consistent brightness levels? (i.e., limit white to #fff white and get white to look like white and not grey on regular, non-hdr screens).

Can anybody recommed resources that help me understand what is going on and how we can resolve these issues?

Many thanks!

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

HDR ain't SDR and vice versa.

You work in one or the other, and you can't produce a file that looks the same in both. Or a file that has some parts in HDR, some in SDR. Again, one or the other.

And your color management for the sequence needs to be correctly setup to begin with. Only use export presets built for the color space of the sequence.

[Mikay²]

Hi Neil, thanks for your reply! Unfortunately, I do not really know what to do with that information. Are there any online courses that explain this in detail? (In particular in the context of Premiere Pro? What is the recommendation? aka the industry standards? I mean other videos on Youtube just look fine, why not ours?) 

[R Neil Haugen]

I've literally answered this in excruciating detail probably over 200 times here. So you can search through my profile and see many answers on setting color management up in Premiere.

It's a full system now, with quite a few options, dependting on what you want to do. And you need to take charge of it.

Probably auto detect log, auto tonemapping, display color management, and a few other things all found on the Lumetri panel's Settings tab .... the one named Settings.

And please ... lose the idea that video will look the same across all platforms and screens, ok? It can't. Pro colorists can't even totally match two "identical" screens fed the same signal in one room ... using high end spectros, not just an i1/Xrite puck system.

Every screen is different, even before you add the mess of Apple using a non-standard display transform for Rec.709 video on their many monitors that do not have "Reference Modes". Their monitors with reference modes, set to HDTV, show Rec.709 video correctly.

So there's a difference in basic signal delivered to the monitor even among Macs.