Rec 2020 Primaries / HDR Grayed out

[Jerry235]

I have been trying to export my footage in HDR for youtube, and after looking at the proper settings, when selecting H.264, the selection "Use Rec. 2020 Color Primaries" is grayed out, saying I must turn on High 10 profile. However when High 10 is selected, its still grayed out, and no amount of any other settings will get it to unlock, with "High Dynamic Range" locked under Rec 2020 being on. I am quite lost at this point and YouTube does still not recognize the video as HDR with these current settings. The original video is 4K HEVC Main 10, 5.1, 10 Bit, 4:2:0. Using Windows 10 19043.1826 and Premiere

22.5 None of the other formats or settings have worked either, have tested exporting in HEVC, ProRes 422HQ, and ProRes4444 to no avail.

[Jerry235]

Additionally HEVC with these settings plain refuses to export, giving me an encoder error every time.

[Richard M Knight]

Is your sequence set to HDR?

[Jerry235]

It should be, these are my sequence settings. 

[Richard M Knight]

Does it work if you set the sequence and export to 29.97fps instead of 30.

[Jerry235]

Nope, Still grayed out 😞 these are my sequence and export settings 

[R Neil Haugen]

They provide HLG and PQ presets. Why aren't you using one of those already set up for HDR?

Neil

[Jerry235]

My goal here is to upload my videos to YouTube and have them be recognized as HDR. See details here My current settings, and the default H.264 and HEVC HLG/PG presets that you mention dont properly appear on YouTube in HDR. I am thinking this might be a lost cause, but still looking for any help/advice.

[R Neil Haugen]

Those have been used by a lot of people for uploading to all sorts of services.

I've seen a number of comments from people that had to figure out both how to get YouTube actually setting their uploads as HDR, as well as their own systems to play them correctly.

HDR is still far more of a challenge than most think. I know a lot of pro colorists, and most have still not delivered one HDR program to/for a paying client.

Neil

[Jerry235]

I beleive I have finally figured something out! Lots of head banging and trial and error, but its "working" I beleive the only issue now is I think I need to use my HDR monitor to grade properly before exporting. Part of the issue is YouTube seems to take at least an hour after the video is processed in 4K to register as HDR, and I too quickly dismissed some test cases as fails, not klnowing it took that long. 

[Justin27854680igk0]

What did you do to stop it being greyed out? A year ago I could do 4k HDR videos but after the newest version it's still greyed out even if I set it to High10 like it's asking. Idk what to do.

[R Neil Haugen]

If you have an HLG sequence,  use an export preset with HLG in the export preset name.

Then you have a preset already set for HLG. Don't try to mod a regular SDR/Rec.709 preset.

Neil

[Justin27854680igk0]

I'll try it and let you know if I get a video in hdr. It's so strange, I never had this issue until the update. I could click High 10 and that HDR option would open immediately, now it's completely different.

[Justin27854680igk0]

So it processed a HLG HDR video, which was fine, but noticably different in it's light contrast and brightness from typical hdr, if anyone had any tips on how to use the old hdr features, I'm all ears.

[R Neil Haugen]

I've no way of knowing what difference you're seeing from your post.

Is the difference between the clip on the sequence in the Program monitor and export when re-imported into Premiere?

Is the difference between the clip on the sequence in Premiere an a player on your system through your computer monitor?

Is the difference between in Premiere from the sequence and the export via YouTube or a browser?

And in specifics, what is the difference?

Neil

[Jerry235]

These are the settings i used that worked on YouTube. 

[Justin27854680igk0]

There's a difference between HDR 10 and HLG HDR. When you play a 4k movie on netflix or even youtube, it's encoded as HDR 10, typically your TV will say just "HDR" in the corner. HDR 10 focuses on brightness and lighting contrasts as much as color. with HLG HDR it doesn't refocus shadow and light the same way. It's a ridiculous complaint to have, but I'm more confused as to why I used to be able to use the High 10 setting and activate the basic High Dynamic Range, and now it just remains greyed out.

[R Neil Haugen]

We're in the middle of the process of moving Premiere to a better color management ... operation. And yea, it's kinda messy. I've got my gripes too, especially:

• no over-all Color Management Panel, like the EGP and ESP, for setting and checking all color management items with any clip and while timelines are active and all. Though I've been notified a couple months back that my Uservoice request had moved from under consideration to 'in process' ... whatever that means. There's nothing out in the Public beta yet on this, so I'm hoping ...
• When they first allowed HDR as "overrange Rec.709" for that cadged-together approach, "we" users had four color wheels in Lumetri ... Shadows, Mids, Highlights, and Speculars. They dropped the fourth area, Speculars, but we really desperately need that control.

At this time, you are supposed to simply grade in HLG with the scopes set to 10 bit values, then if you need to check highlights vs speculars, switch to HDR mode in the scopes for a final pass. Which ... is awfully hard to see any particulars and misses the whole point.

We don't have any reliable way of setting that all-important "graphics white" level of our programs while grading!

Spo at this point, for ALL HDR headed for YouTube, use HLG color space for the clips, HLG for the timeline color space, and presets that include HLG in the preset name. After uploading, give YouTube at least four hours to do their re-encode before even checking the file.

And understand ... HDR is still the Wild Wild West. Most screens do not handle it at all or at least decently, and the ones that "do" will show an image all over the place from a different screen with the same media. (Plus unless you've spent enough to buy a late-model mid-price car, your comptuer monitor is not playing nice with you, guaranteed.)

I work for/with/teach pro colorists, including some of the earliest professionals delivering DolbyVision for streaming. And as of this time ... most pro colorists still have not delivered a single paid HDR job.

Neil