importing iphone footage losing quality

[Joe27109551ft8n]

Importing .mov files into a project and they look over exposed/massively reduced in quality. There's lot's of youtube videos on this - mainly suggesting to modify color management to Rec 709 or Rec 2020. This can improve quality but is still poorer quality to the unmodified original file. More like papering over a crack solution really. Has anyone found an official solution to this yet? Seems to be another pointless flaw in premiere pro with regards to losing video quality. It's getting to the point now where cancelling my subscription seems very sensible. Final cut pro allows you to move around footage freely with no threat of this nonsence.

[Ann Bens]

Premiere Pro V22 - Understanding Color Spaces, HDR, and what that might mean to you - YouTube

Making your iPhone 12 and 13 footage look normal

[Ann Bens]

FAQ: How to fix saturated/over-exposed HLG/HDR clips

[R Neil Haugen]

"Original" is always an interpretation of the data given the device, and it's capabilities and settings. Including the room or space you view it in.

It is not necessarily an accurate or perfect interpretation. Plus, no two screens and viewing situations will ever be identical. This is something that colorists understand and most non-colorists struggle with.

For instance, Apple for some reason chose to apply only part of the official standards for displaying Rec.709/SDR video files. So while one can, if one knows how, see a correct Rec.709 image on a Mac, most users will not see one.

And past that, HDR is very much still the Wild Wild West. I work for and teach pro colorists, some of whom were amongst the earliest adopters of DolbyVision, and were hired by Dolby to create the official in-house DolbyVision teaching materials.

But most colorists have yet to deliver a single HDR project for a paid client. The discussions between colorists of the difficulty in getting an accurate image in their own suites, let alone for clients not in-person, are all about the vagaries of the image across different systems.

So to assume there is one correct image that all apps will show on all screens is both physically impossible and incredibly difficult to achieve.

I'm hoping we will get a single unified color management panel in Premiere. My UserVoice request is now listed as "in development" ... but hasn't even made public beta.

But getting an accurate image in Rec.709/SDR is hard enough for colorists. Getting an accurate HDR image is even more difficult. And that's on their systems, where their calibration gear cost more than your entire computer setup.

Is this frustrating? Oh Hades yes!

But any video, let alone HDR, requires a fair amount of user knowledge and care to get a decently close image on screen.

Neil

[Phillip Harvey]

This is a little cringy to read, honestly, since it's likely user error.

The over exposed aspect is because you're changing color spaces. Ann has already posted solutions to that. If you want to film in one color space and edit in another you need to understand that there's a difference in how those color spaces are mapped. You recorded Rec 2020 and put that footage in a Rec 709 timeline. It's not Premiere's fault for doing what you told it to do. 

Regarding other quality settings, what else about your sequence differs from the source media? Do the sequence settings match the source media? At what point in the process is the footage degrading in quality beyond the color space issue? In the timeline? Playback? Export?