Shebbe's been very helpful here, as always.
As someone who works with/for/teaches pro colorists, HDR is definitely still the Wild Wild West. Most colorists still haven't delivered a single paid job in HDR, though that may change this year. (2024). And some of the colorists I work for were the first to be certified on the East Coast for full on DolbyVision workflows, and are the folks that produced Dolby's in-house training vids for colorists.
Most screens still can't "do" HDR, and of those that say they do, many handle it incorrectly if at all. And they only work with one or two of the several competing forms of HDR media. It's similar to the VHS/Betamax "war" days.
So your PC laptop may say it does HDR, but ... which form does it work with? And if it only goes to 275-400 nits, which is pretty common, well .... ahem ... that's rather "low" for actual HDR shall we say?
And of course you have to tell Windows that the HDR needs to be "on", the monitor needs to be in HDR, which some do automatically when the OS goes into HDR, some don't. Some are supposed to auto-switch, but users have noted they have to manually set the monitor to HDR.
Dynamic Range and Color Space are NOT the same thing!
Next ... you can have clips that have HLG as the color space, yet ... the clip's dynamic range is still Rec.709. Conversely, you can have a wider dynamic range like "Rec.2020" or "Rec.2084", yet Rec.709 primaries. I've seen several cameras that can do one or both of those, which confuses the hades out of the users.
Then later, in post, they're so confused ... they're sure they shot in HDR but it's saying Rec.709 color! Yea. But ... no.
They have a clip with wide dynamic range but full-on Rec.709 color ... the sRGB primaries and saturation limits of Rec.709. Which means that media is designed to capture a wider dynamic range that will be 'compressed' in post to fit within Rec.709 sequences.
So it's a lot harder to get all the stars to align correctly for HDR ... that's even with the mess of Apple using an incorrect display transform for Rec.709, that gets neither the correct display gamma nor apparently a real good converssion of Rec.709 data to a P3 screen. So the old "gamma compensation" issue is actually two things, the first being the wrong gamma, the second being a less than perfect color transform. Oh. Joy.
Working Color Management in Premiere 2024
Use the Lumetri panel's Settings tab ... the tab named Settings ... for all CM work, so you can see and correlate all settings in one place.
Color Managed/Non Color Managed Media
What is "Color Managed"?
This is a very confusing thing in Premiere at this time. In practical terms, it only means that Premiere 'sees' that specific form of camera log encoding and can, when set to auto detect log and auto tonemap, "normalize" the log encoded data to show as full range media on the (mostly) linear space of the display.
While it can sort out many Sony, Canon, and Arri/Red log media, even some Fuji or so ... it doesn't 'see' many others from the same camera ecosystems. So setting the auto-detect log and auto tonemapping works great for some clip, totally misses the deal on others.
Further, some camera "log spaces" are actually only log-like profiles ... they aren't encoded as logarithmic data, they're simply a setting that pushes the camera to minimum contrast and saturation so it "looks" like a log file. But it isn't, and when shot with that low of both contrast and saturation, it's often too low in actual pixel data for making good tonal/color clips later. I hateses that the camera makers do this but there it is.
How do you know which log forms Premiere works with? Well, the list of color managed codecs, of course!
Where do you find that list? Well ... good freaking luck is all I can say.
I went hunting for it myself through Premiere's Help and general online searches, and gave up. I'm rather a noted expert actually on Premiere color/Lumetri outside of Adobe staffers. If I can't find that list, I don't think most users will.
I finally did find it ... and it's listed in another post I put up on the forum a few days ago, and is from a staffer's post on here like a year ago.
That's the only place I can find that list. A staffer's post here a year ago. Wow.
Manual Color Management as of Pr 24.3
Is sort of experimental in my experience. There's a staffer who will disagree with me on this, and post here telling folks that I'm wrong or don't know what I'm talking about or whatever .... but users don't know the stuff he does, and can't find the answers!
Well, there's a ton of questions I can't find the answers for. Nor get responses from the 'correct' staffers. And I know a lot of the folks from meeting them at NAB or MAX or whatnot. I teach this stuff professionally, to pro colorists, right? I poke the box and the staffers for information all the freaking time.
if they'd actually give the users the full information, well ... that would be a joy!
So for practical purposes, you have to poke the box until "it worked there ... huh". Supposedly, there are strict logic chains for how it works with different media. But I have so many times been through hunting down an issue, when finally a staffer says "Oh, with that media for that workflow, you need to do X not Z." Right.
So ... I poke the box all the time with different media, and sometimes it works, and sometimes ... wow, that's ... odd ... 😉
Not my favorite way of working, but well ... what works, works, right?
Practical Manual Color Management Advice
What you need to end up with is a clip conversion to match the color space of the sequence if it doesn't "on its own", the sequence color space must be what you will export to, and the third part is the export preset must match the sequence for color space!
All three of those must align.
EXPORT PRESETS COLOR SPACE
Export presets have built-in color spaces. Use only those built for the color space of the sequence you are exporting from! As there are several picky details that must be set correctly to change color space properly in the export preset.
All HDR Presets have their form of HDR in the preset Name
So if you have an HLG sequence, use only export presets with HLG in the preset name. The same goes for PQ sequences, use only presets with PQ in the preset name.
Rec.709/SDR presets do NOT have a color space in the preset Name
Use the presets without a color space in the name for all Rec.709 sequence export processes.
Do not use a preset without a color space in the name for any HDR form export.
1 Correct answer
29
Replies
AdChoices