Why does the saturation of my video change after import? (it seems to happen randomly)

[arielle_rae]

So I've been searching for an answer to this question, and most often I see people talking about how it can be due to things like seeing media on different screens, or import settings, but neither of those seem to be my issue.

In the attached screen capture, you can see that the video displays properly when opened in quicktime, but desaturated once imported into Premiere. So it's not my screen making it look strange. Additionally, I record on the same device (iPhone 14 pro) every time, go through the exact same import process every time (export from Photos to my external hard drive, then import into Premiere) and about 25% of the time this problem doesn't exist at all, everything looks great. The other 75% of the time, this weird desaturation happens.

Lastly, when I go to export the final product, if I don't manually set the SDR conform down to about 5 brightness, the export looks overexposed (but this problem only exists if the media didn't import properly to begin with). This is illustrated in the screenshot attached.

Here's a list of what I'm working with:

MacBook Pro running Monterrey 12.6

Premiere version 23.0.0

Recording on iPhone 14 pro (although this problem also existed when recording on my previous iPhone 12 pro)

I'm not sure what other settings are important to helping solve this problem, but I haven't messed with the defaults on anything I can remember. It's just so weird that I seem to be doing everything the same each time, and sometimes have this problem and sometimes don't. It's been happening off and on for almost a year now and it seems to be happening more and more often, so I really need to figure out what's wrong.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

[Ann Bens]

Premiere Pro V22 - Understanding Color Spaces, HDR, and what that might mean to you - YouTube

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

As Ann's links will tell you, you are dealing with HDR media in HLG from the phone and not doing proper user color management with those clips in Premiere.

Right-click one or more selected in the Project panel. Modify/Interpret Footage, set the Override-to option to Rec.709.

Now make sure your sequence CM is set to Rec.709 in the Sequence Settings, redo your color correction.

Then export with standard presets that do NOT have HLG or PQ in the preset name.

Of course if you go to your phone and turn off HLG/HDR, then you won't have to do all this.

Neil

[arielle_rae]

Ok so that was informative but I have some follow-up questions after watching the video.

1) Why does this only happen some of the time, when all my footage is in HDR and I haven't messed with these settings before?

2) My monitor supports HDR, so it should look ok on my screen anyway, shouldn't it? Or is it showing me how it would look on a non-HDR compatible screen?

3) In order for someone to view the finished video on a non-HDR compatible screen, do I need to always edit in Rec 709?

[R Neil Haugen]

You can check the Properties of the files as Premiere sees them, right-click in the Project panel, Properties.

It should be consistent.

It isn't about your screen, it's about having color management within Premiere set properly front to back. Internally correct mathematical processes, which varies dramatically between SDR and the various HDR formats.

And then if working in HDR, both the OS and monitor need to be set to whichever HDR format you are using.

Your Premiere preferences should have Display Color Management checked and when working HDR also set the Extended Dynamic Range option for HDR.

As to your last question, bluntly, HDR is still the Wild Wild West. I work for/with/teach pro colorists. Some were amongst the earliest adopters and were hired by Dolby Labs to create the in-house training for colorists working professionally in DolbyVision.

Most colorists have still not delivered a SINGLE paid HDR project yet. Including those working networks/streaming.

Is it coming? Yes.

But very few screens actually handle any HDR forms completely properly if at all. No consumer screens especially. Besides being all over the place for how bright they are, even worse, what color volume they can sustain at higher brightness.

And all consumer screens do all sorts of things to "enhance the viewing experience" that juke the color, contrast, brightness and such. All different from each other.

It really is the Wild Wild West.

SDR, standard Rec.709, is so much simpler and more reliable at this point.

Neil

[arielle_rae]

Thanks for taking the time to explain to me.

[R Neil Haugen]

I do work daily a lot of pro colorists, and this is all very, very puzzling for them. And they can typically talk color management tech-geek to make your head and mine turn to mush. Seriously.

Neil