Keyframe fine tuning

[Liveshots]

I'm a long user of Vegas. When I wanted to tweak a value in a keyframe I had made; I just selected it, all the values would appear and I could change what I liked by mouse or numerics. I'm not finding this feature in Premiere. I select the frame to light it blue but nothing seems to be adjustable. To make a change, I have to delete it and create a new keyframe from scratch. Is this right??

[Meg The Dog]

Select the clip you are working on in the timeline then go to the Effect Controls tab to see the  parameters for the keyframe you are working on. The numbers in blue can either be adjusted by click down and sliding the mouse, or you can enter a value:

MtD

[R Neil Haugen]

Context for tools is available via right-click so say setting the type of keyframe action  ... bezier, continuous bezier and on.

The main controls, like Meg showed, are set in the ECP. Twirl downs allow a very fine granulated control of acceleration and other factor. 

Neil

[Liveshots]

I was using it for animated cropping and I see what I was doing wrong now;

On the effect timeline I was pressing the 'add keyframe' diamond and going straight to the scale controls. The scaling was happening, but just by adding the keyframe it doesn't actually 'select' it. So you've got to add it from the controls, go select it, then make your changes.

Seems a little daft that the keyframes aren't auto-selected when you add it.

Right now I'm more bothered about why my 0-255 spectrum videos are only rendering in 16-235.

Thanks for the pointer

[R Neil Haugen]

What are you needing 0/255 for? That is a specialized spec.

As to the 0/255 vs 16/235 thing in general ... VERY few formats/codecs are by standards supposed to be 0/255. Essentially only some 4:4:4:4 and DPX ones.

Everything else by standards is expected to be 16-235 for the broadcast standard Rec.709.

I know and work with a lot of colorists and they all work 16-235 for the vast majority of things. A typical comment from them when someone asks about running in 0-255 (outside the above mentioned formats) is the person asking is bit uninformed.

Premiere is designed to follow proper professional practices and standards.

Neil

[Liveshots]

I do multicamera gig videos in Vegas because I prefer the camera switching process and it has better audio functions. I need to work with proxy videos though, which I create in Media Encoder. I am prepared to do a 16-235 conversion at the final output, but I need my proxy videos to match the raw footage so I can do all my colour and contrast at that stage too.
Why can't I just have the option to break the professional paractices and standards with a check-box when I have a very specific requirement?
These are raw freeze frames from the GH5, see why I'm fussy about what my black looks like?

[R Neil Haugen]

I understand being fussy ... I certainly am!

I've worked some GH5 media, and ... it wasn't natively 0-255. Stock Rec.709. Do you have a short clip you could upload to check? That puzzles me.

Neil

[Liveshots]

No short clips of the above freeze frames. I set my GH5 to 0-255 (with raised shadows & dropped highlights in the curve) so that I would capture the dark environments I have to shoot in.
Here's a brief slice of untouched B-Roll from another gig, same camera settings; https://www.liveshots.uk/video/B-ROLL-Set-Up.MP4

If Adobe is going to be so strict about my image, even when I'm creating 'work-in-progress', then I'll just have to live with it - as I do with many other moans about Premiere. I only use it when Vegas won't do the job

[Liveshots]

I'm fairly new to video, after 25 years in photography, and I'd not heard of cRGB & sRGB until a few months ago. Seems it's all just about compensating for crap screens. Vegas allows me to set my output spectrum with a 'levels' filter and after shooting in full 0-255 I usually apply a custom 8-245 filter at the final step which I call 'Meet you half way'.
IE; Got a cheap screen or viewing on Chrome? Suffer it. Got a good screen and viewing on Firefox? Sorry the jet black piano is a bit grey. Render in the Vegas default colour space and I get what I set, not what Adobe deems suitable.

[R Neil Haugen]

Unless you're using a full broadcast monitor like a Flanders or Eizo with internal LUTs created by calibration and checked by profiling  ... how do you know for certain what you shot? Period.

I did check with a colorist about shooting 0-255 with raised shadows and softened highlights  ... he's seen that attempt before.

But running that "type" of media through Resolve with his external scopes shows there ain't nothing there that couldn't have been achieved by straight 16-235, plus it wouldn't require the colorist juking around his settings to make it work.

Unless it's a first time ever, the only difference in 16-235 to 0-255 in-cam is how the data is mapped when recorded to the card in metadata, not how far out the DR is captured.

And he's seen a lot of experienced DPs test this out. And checked the results on his system.

He doesn't see any use in setting the camera for 0-255, nor using some oddball export settings either.

What professional colorists do is setup their system for broadcast standards. And export to that, unless 1) it's a theatrical delivery needing the dark-environment DCI-P3 or Theater-P3, or 2) an actual HDR delivery where they need perhaps a Rec.2020 output.

The second is still pretty rare. Most pro colorists still are not set up for in-house HDR. Too expensive when the monitor alone will run $30,000 or so.

But what about what the viewing audience sees?

You have no control, so give it up. NO ONE has control after it leaves your system, not even a colorist working a network b-cast show.

All you can do is produce to the professional standard  ... period. Then when it's seen on screens which will be all over the place  ... on any one screen ... it will look *relatively* the same as all other professionally produced media on that screen.

Neil

[Liveshots]

You don't reckon I get anymore dynamic range shooting at 0-255? With a 10ft black piano to left, and a shiney drum kit to the right?

[R Neil Haugen]

I think you misunderstand what is happening ... those are simply mapping numbers within the file. It doesn't make any difference to the total DR of the file at all. Just how they're mapped.

And SDR video ... 90% or so of video currently made for viewing ... is sRGB/Rec.709/gamma-2.4/100 nits for standards. Some use gamma 2.2, but that's the only difference.

Neither 0-255 nor 16-235 mapping has anything to do with the captured DR of the camera. You have some controls there by setting a lower contrast, or using the log modes the GH5 has available.

One of the first things many people coming into pro color correction think they need to do is to setup for data levels ... 0-255 ... to get the widest dark to light signal through the system and on the screen.

I am a contributing author on the mixinglight.com subscription site for training for colorists ... and

one of the first things that Patrick Inhofer and Robbie Carman spell out is you do NOT want to mess with 0-255 setups. Period. Except for specialized things ... and until you understand a lot more about color standards and expectations, you shouldn't even think about changing anything to 0-255.

They work heavily in Resolve, as I do at times. Resolve's "auto" setup will do the same essentially as Premiere ... almost all media comes in "seen" as 16-235 standard video range except for the formats with specifications to be mapped to 0-255 as noted.

Any media that needs to be 0-255/0-1064 WILL be so ... such as some of the 4:4:4:4 stuff in DPX or EXR and 12 or 16 bit.

One of the first things that happens when improperly setting up for 0-255 with 'normal' media is that after export viewed on any standard system, the blacks will be crushed and highlights clipped.

Which is the opposite of what most people think they'll gain by setting for 0-255. Because why?

Because the monitor knows to map video 16-235 to screen 0-255 on displaying the file.

It's what ALL Rec.709 pro media is produced at.

Neil

[Liveshots]

Thanks for that. The piano gig is a Vegas project, I know how to get my correct output on that, but I've got collective vox-pop videos that I'm about to start arranging in PPro. The 600GB of footage is all 0-255 MP4, lots of high contrast, so how do you recommend I avoid getting my blacks crushed in PPro without losing too much contrast?
It's not a Hollywood movie, just shot in all the bars around town hosting ameture 'open mic nights'. The scenes are hardly glorious so I'm not looking for perfection. The sound is more important and I've got that nailed.

[R Neil Haugen]

First you need to know what your monitor is actually giving you. At the least, check the pluge files ... in the Project panel, the New Item icon, select HD Bars & Tone.

Drag that to a sequence panel and check your monitors. In the Lumetri panel, color wheels, bring up the shadow wheel luma slider just a bit to check out the four black/charcoal areas lower right. Then clear the effect ... do you still barely see the one sort-of-right narrow charcoal strip compared to black around it? If so ... that's correct. There should be a black area with one very dark but discernable narrow vertical strip. If so, your darks/blacks are ok.

And of course, you've got the scopes up, right? I prefer the Vectorscope yuv, Waveform (in YC/no chroma mode) and RGB Parade. As shown below ...

Vectorscope YUV, Waveform (YC no chorma) and RGB Parade

The Mark I Eyeball is a great relative tool, but absolute lousy at "absolute" things. Use the scopes to verify where your black, white, saturation, and well ... all other tones lie. For most things, black at the bottom of the scopes should be around 2-5, and outside super-bright whites up to 100. Saturation never going outside the Vectorscope's bounding box.

Next to the video image ... the first thing to nail is "tone" ... the brightnesses of the various parts of the image. After that, adjust color. Some people will drop saturation to low or completely gone to adjust tonal values. Can be a good idea.

Best black settings in Lumetri are either using the bottom of the RGB Curves tool in the Curves tab, or the shadow wheel luma sliders in the Color wheels tab. The Blacks slider in the Basic tab is both odd and broken for anything but a very minor adjustment ... I avoid it mostly.

Then set white points with either the Curves tab RGB Curves tool, the Whites slider in Basic, or the Highlights wheel luma slider in Color Wheels.

Then use which tools seem most comfortable and effective for you to adjust contrast across the image, including curves, shadow, highlights, and contrast controls.

After the image looks "clean", bring the color saturation back up and work with both the Saturation and Vibrance controls in the Creative tab to get "good" color visually without blowing out any area of the Vectorscope.

Then adjust color tones & cast. Note that "White balance" controls are precisely that ... whites balance tools. They work by setting the relative white points between the three color channels, R, G, and B. So they affect mostly the whites, highlights, and to some effect, the upper mids. They don't do much for shadow color.

So quite frequently I'll use the Creative Tab's Shadow/Highlight "tint" wheels to address tonal casts that include shadows. And ... the center of the Vectorscope is "neutral", no color. White through gray to black. Check that your neutral areas are indeed at the center of the Vectorscope.

Neil

[Liveshots]

Thanks for the info, I'll give that a go when I'm done on the piano project. Is this going to solve the issue of contrasts being different in VLC/FFox/Chrome etc? (Same device, different media player)

[R Neil Haugen]

No. As you have no say of controlling anything outside your system. And give up having any control as it is impossible.

Produce to the widest professional standard. Period. Then ... relatively ... on any given screen, your material will appear professionally done. As any professional material appears on that screen.

Neil