Over Exposed Video/Black Screen After Export

[KonrAdventures]

I will start this by saying I am an absolute beginner and am currently trying to edit my first video on Premiere Pro. I finally figured out all the previous issues I had been having and managed to work around them. I finally came to a point of being ready to export my video and my first time around, the video ended up being totally over exposed after the export. I followed some step by step tutorials to fix that and finally came to a solution that appeared to work as per my actual timeline in the program, but when I went to export the video, the final product would not play at all and just produced a black screen. 
To give more details, I filmed the video on an IPhone 12Pro and I have seen all the previous posts about working around that. Nothing seems to have worked. Hopefully someone has some recommendations or some tips for settings or something I haven't tried yet. I'm reaching a point where I am ready to give up but I am desperately hoping someone can help me out with this problem. 
As a beginner I was hoping using Premiere Pro would be a fun thing to learn but all it has led to is stress and frustrations.

Thanks in advance!

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

The 2022 Pr release has completely rebuilt color management under the hood and changed default behaviors. It's caught a lot of people, including myself, by surprise in many ways. I've got a couple FAQs on this on this forum, and do suggest you read them both:

FAQ:PremierePro 2022 Color Management for Log/RAW Media

How to Set Monitors for HDR work in Premiere Pro 2022?

Essentially, working with the iPhone media is almost undoubtedly creating "HLG" tagged files. Hybrid Log Gamma, one of the forms of HDR (high dynamic range) media formats. Premiere is supposed to be able to see that and in the new release, to auto-transform HLG to Rec.709 if put on a Rec.709 (SDR, standard dynamic range) sequence. It frequently doesn't.

So for any iPhone media at this time, if it looks too bright on a Rec.709 color space "standard" sequence, you need to take control of the color.

Go to the clip/s in the bin, right-click one or a selected group of clips, and go to the Modify/Interpret Footage options. At the bottom is the CM controls, and use the Override to Rec.709 option. You can do an entire bin in one go if you want.

Then make sure the sequence is Rec.709. Go to the Sequence Settings (with the timeline panel having the blue "focus" line around it). Go to the CM settings in that dialog, and make sure that Rec.709 is set. Do not use the "Rec.709 Scene" option.

And for exports use any standard format/preset option.

Oh ... additional suggestion: for all Mac users, and many/most PCs, make sure that "Display color management" option is checked in the Preferences dialog.

Neil

[KonrAdventures]

Ok thank you for your response. I will give this a try and see if it works. Just to be clear though in a previous attempt I had all my export settings to Rec. 709 and that was what created the issue of overblown footage after the export. When I changed that to a different option the video was black and would not even play. I then tried some other settings including some tips I saw on YouTube for using Iphone specific settings and that created a codec issue.
Do you recommend any specific settings for me? Maybe my computer is just not good enough to handle Premiere.

Thanks again in advance!

[R Neil Haugen]

Use the Overrided in the bin for the clips to make sure they're set to Rec.709.

Make sure the sequence is set to Rec.709.

And that black screen thing ... there's been a few posts here with users getting that, it's ... odd. No clue what's going on there.

Make sure the scopes panel and scales are set to Rec.709 ... two place to check. First, the lower left corner of the scopes panel has a bit of text telling the color space of the scopes. If it's not Rec.709, right-click in the Scopes panel and set them to Rec.709.

Then the lower-right corner option for the scope scales needs to be set to your choice of 8-bit or 10-bit, both of which are SDR/Rec.709 settings.

Then make sure that your exports are set from presets that do NOT have either HLG or PQ in the preset name.

Neil

[KonrAdventures]

You're my hero! Thank you so much, this has been such a pain for the past few days trying to figure this out. The video still looks a little bit over exposed after export but I think it is mostly due to the quality of my laptop lol. 
Thanks again!!

[R Neil Haugen]

Yea, having a good reliable screen to judge your media ... and in a room where you won't have much other light ... is so key to getting the best work.

I'd suggest spending some time working with the scopes, and learning how to judge "appropriate" brightnesses by the scopes. I typically have the Waveform YC/no chroma, Vectorscope YUV, and the RGB Parade up.

Waveform for pure 'tonal' work. RGB parade to compare the three color channels. And Vectorscope to see both total saturation and any color casts present.

If you make sure say that nothing goes above 90 or a bit higher on the left-side 0-100 scale, and "light" skin is somewhere around 65 or a bit below, you won't be too bright.

Neil

[KonrAdventures]

Sorry but I am back with a new update. I compared the exported video after following all of the advice and the video still looks nothing like the original video shot on my phone. I shoot in HDR and I'm not sure what's gone wrong now. Here's a comparison of post export and of an original clip shot on my phone.