Short story ... you gotta set your color management up correctly, and it's WAY MORE complex for HDR work.
IF you want to work in HDR, all the clips need to be in the same color space ... iPhones would be HLG ... and the working timeline color space needs to be set to HLG ... and anything else used on that sequence needs to be HLG color space ... and the export preset needs to have HLG in the preset name ... and your monitor/OS need to be capable of HDR/HLG work, and set so ... and your Premiere Pro Prefs need to be set for the right things too.
It's tempting, that's for sure, as the images can be stunning.
That said ... you may want to skip working in HDR for a while yet. It's the Wild Wild West out there ...
I work for/with/teach pro colorists. Some of whom were the earliest adopters of DolbyVision in pro color work, and Dolby hired to create the in-house Dolby training on doing DolbyVision HDR. So I've "been around" discussions of HDR workflows since it was possible.
Yet most pro colorists have still not delivered a single paid job in HDR. I think that will tip over the next year finally, but ... if most pro colorists haven't produced a paid gig yet, you might wonder ... why?
First, most screens out there either a) do not handle HDR forms at all or b) do so poorly, compared to their Rec.709 capabilities. That's concerning those who will view your final output.
Second ... to make it, at this time, is a total PITA. Because the vast majority of screens that you might be working on jack the color and brightness around on you for one of two reasons, and you have little control.
The first is "to enhance the viewing experience" ... and you may be able to disable those things ... if you know exactly where and how.
The second is ABL ... auto brightness limiting ... built into the system to protect the screen from pixel burnout. And you have either no control of that whatever to maybe some amount of control, unless you are on a Grade 1 Reference Monitor, a specific category of pro colorist gear, and well ... the cheapest full-on Ref monitor I know of is still over $10,000 USD ...
So to get around ABL, if you have the "technician's remote" for some TVs and monitors, you can get into special menus and reduce the funtion, but rarely eliminate it.
A recent House of Dragons episode was another long dark ep. And ABL killed that ep for quite a few users. Wait ... it's dark, wha'ts ABL doing? Well as it turns out, a LOT.
As most ABL systems only check for a sustained level of brightness for X time. And don't pay attention to what the level actually is. So ... a ten minute scene with top brightnesses at around 25 nits ... think 25 IRE on a Lumetri scopes realistically ... shouldn't involve the ABL as it's so dark you can't hardly see it anyway, right?
Wrong.
As one noted reviewer showed, on several different expensive HDR tv's, after a couple minutes the ABL kicked in and that 25 nit top brightness went down to 12 nits or so. Scale something down in the Lumetri scopes so the top 'white' brightness is 12 nits. Can you see anything ... anywhere?
How does this affect you in prepping HDR media? Your monitor will almost certainly do the same thing. So if you pause to check something, it will slowly drop brightness & contrast & sat to protect the screen.
And it is done intentionally slowly so you don't see it happening. And that makes it darn hard to really control what you're setting in as your "proper" brightnesses.
And that's only one of several "gotcha!" things I know of ... but if you want to go into HLG, I and other here can help ...
Neil
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