Premiere Pro - black levels issue

Ulan, thanks for cool info. I hope things get worked out fast so you can keep working and be happy with your product. It's hard to be happy sometimes cause we are our worse critics.

Got a few ideas but it's just general stuff and I'm not a genius by any stretch of imagination.

a) try to make initial exposure ( iso etc ) as best you can ( sometimes means using lights).

b) when in ppro try to adjust equivalent of lift gamma gain ( basic levels ) from using resolve to get your luge in bars.

next images are yours and then the smpte 'correct luge area circled'.

That's basically as good as it gets for broadcast and most movies.

Now a note about bits.

I have a dslr nikon d800 that puts junk mov h264 files into sd card in camera. It is 4.2.0 8 bit.

BUT I record using hdmi out to atomos recorder using DNxHD 220x which gives me info off the chip into the new codec ( more friendly for editing for me than highly compressed h264). When I put that stuff into resolve ( or cs6 creative suite ) it becomes 32 bit but that's ONLY THE SPACE AND BITRATE). It does NOT add better color. It's the same stupid chip color in a new color space capacity.

NOW, if during my edit I put other stuff into it ( graphics, special effects, etc. ) I will get a better PRODUCT on export. Plus I don't struggle with the stupid compression ( codec means COmpression-DEcompression so the CPU has to work really hard to deal with that ).

I have to re-read your response re: what monitors you have etc. cause I'm having a beer and can't deal with looking up brand and model stuff and all that to understand what you got right now but I'll get back to it. I doubt it will make a difference. You gotta try to shoot it from the get go with a good exposure and most pro DP's have their own little tricks regarding that. For some it's raw and relationships ( highlights vs shadows ). Some over expose a hair. I have no clue why cause I usually HATE blown out whites.

Anyway, good luck and I'm sure you'll figure everything out so you can tell cool stories. That's the important thing.

🙂

Ulan, it's nice you shared so much re: what you see.

It would cut to the chase if you did the color bar thing as suggested... even though you'll end up doing screen grabs to internet rgb color ( like png is jpg, etc. ) It would be close enough.

Nobody on earth knows what you shot and how it looked when you shot it.

So, the color bars attempt to cut through that to a more or less standardized baseline for blacks, midtones, colors, etc.

If I shoot a tree right now in my front yard, in MN. with my window open and set up camera in apt. I'll get colors from lamps in house ( 27k ? ) but am aiming at sunlit stuff ( 56k ). Nobody on the planet knows what I shot except me and what I saw and wanted to get.

So use something as a sample that everyone on earth has been using since the invention of film and tv broadcast and now digital broadcast.

cut to the chase.

🙂

I agree with you Ulan. It's not a big difference and it really doesn't matter much for you.

There's a thing to generate color bars and if you stick that into timeline and adjust it to look right on your monitor, and then export it and look at it again... to see if it's the same.... then you'll be on your way to solving you concern.

🙂

good luck

I found out an issue about incoreect displaying blacks in Premiere Pro. It isn`t big diffrence but it is really imporant to see correct colors when it comes to color correction.

Premiere Pro is bog-standard pro broadcast specs setup to run on systems with monitors profiled to Rec.709 ... sRGB primaries, D65 white point, gamma 2.4 in a semi-darkened room (2.2 allowed for bright-room working), monitor at 100 nits brightness.

Plus ... something so many new users get wrong ... setting either their monitor or video card settings to "0-255" rather than "16-235" which is the proper setting for video work. This does NOT mean it will show the image between 16-235, but that it should expect to remap 16-235 images to 0-255. Normal behavior.

Neil