Color Management Panel

[R Neil Haugen]

There are a good number of new color management settings and changed color management defaults in the 2022 release. I would expect we will be getting more as we go along. This is becoming a nightmare to manage!

We need a single panel. One with perhaps two tabs:
1) The overall Default options for color management settings, and for default options for various media types.

2) The Override tab for clip or sequence overrides, covering the same items as in no. 1.

Essentially, One Panel To Rule Them All.

[Ian Allardyce]

Sony FX6 SLOG-3 footage doesn't seem to be recognised as SLOG3 which is very odd. "interperet Footage" suggests it is, but it isn't. So we have to over ride it. Infuriating.

[DroneOn]

Very annoying when using MXF clips recorded in log, on Sony FX9 camera; it has the appearance of burnt-in LUT when dropped onto the timeline.

[Cutter61]

Essential! So to speak...

[tinal10242658]

Please fix this Adobe. You just ruined easy video editing for everyone!! We will leave this program in droves to other intuitive softwares if you don't restore a default that allows all videos to not be blown out in only your program until we fiddle with advanced, unnecessary settings.

[Ben Holmes Editout]

Just off the phone with a client at a large production company - media manager practically in tears because they have footage with double burnt in LOG luts, burnt out transcodes, proxies incorrect.

Whilst the proxy issue is at least resolved in 22.5 it’s hard to overstate exactly how badly this was messed up in earlier releases of 22 and continues to be an issue.

No one - and I mean no one - wants to import FX9 Slog footage and have a Log>709 colour transform applied. NO
ONE. People shoot LOG for a reason. To add insult to injury and have FX3 footage shot with the same profile ignore the colour profile in the same project is unbelievably poor.

I see this cause almost daily confusion. It needs to be fixed.

[Afterglow]

This should be fixed straightaway. It's such a nightmare that I often open and work in the previous Premiere version . I've also been using Resolve more and more, mainly for grading, but now editing on it is looking more appealing.

Adobe, let's do it, let's fix it now.

[Nick Lear]

Standard dynamic range (SDR) Sony footage is being incorrectly "color managed" - it gets S-Log color space applied to it automatically and it gets blown out - showing that it is not simply adding the standard Sony S-Log to Rec709 LUT and even if it was, most people wouldn't want that automatically.

Karl LS has a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odwptnEhxJs) on why HDR footage will go through this process and that does make sense, but with SDR Sony footage at the moment it's not working as it should.

At the least there should be the option to not automatically apply the color management. But more work needs to be done than that.

[Mitja L]

As a Sony FX9 and FX3 user, this gave me a cardiac arrest first time and is annoying and time consuming later... Adobe is blowing it harder and harder with every new version 😞

[Clare_Major]

Double-LUTs suddenly appearing with no simple option to disable is infuriating.

[kena38091671]

I'm new to this app and editing in general, and I've spent 2 weeks trying to figure out what the heck was going on with my iphone footage.

What should have been a simple edit turned into such a frustrating experience.

[Ben Turze]

I would agree that color management needs to be in one place and must be separate from the 'interpret' dialogue. Currently, adjusting the colour management of a batch of clips, results in all of the interpret settings being applied to the batch. Alternatively, being able to 'untick' the options you do not wish to amend would solve this issue

[jag229]

This needs to be fixed. Have just bought an FX6 and having to do this with every project is unbearable. I also gave my footage to an editor to do some cuts for me and they hadnt experienced this and called me freaked out about the footage, i had to explain what to do, i dread the time i send footage to someone and they dotn call me and just assume i was awful at my job and didnt meet their technical spec shooting LOG. Get rid of this feature please, just make log footage be log dont assume its HDR let us tell you if its HDR

[Peter26179174i7pd]

This issue has gone beyond a joke, to the point were I have to abandon Premiere and go back to Final Cut. I shoot SLog 3 on Sony FX9, FX6 FX3 and A7S3 and Premiere doesn't recognise any of their files as SLog 3, so the whole override 'fix' is irrelevant. And as for the export window, no option to click on an existing file to avoid having to type sometime lengthy filenames you want to change by version number! What is needed is a mass exodus from Premiere to programs where developers listen to users instead of Adobe's public service attitude of this is what you get because we say so.

[sleered]

Please fix this! iPhone 13 footage looks fine in the sequence and once it is exported it is overexposed. This is nightmare, especially when using footage from different phones.

[Richard van den Boogaard]

Much like in Resolve, perhaps you could also create a global correction option, which will color grade all edits of the same original footage file with a single grade.

[R Neil Haugen]

That is of course happening only if you don't use the current color management options. You can fix it fairly easily when you know where to go.

The idea is to have one obvious ALWAYS 'open' visible place for CM settings.

[Fergus H]

We hear your frustrations about color management and we are working on multiple improvements.

I recently posted a note on Alister Chapman's excellent xdcam-user.com ( http://xdcam-user.com ) forum, in response to a post he'd made about color management in Premiere Pro.

While my response doesn't go into details on our long term plans, it describes what we're doing in the short term to make handling of log footage easier.

Here's what I wrote:

Hi all,

I’m a product manager at Adobe, on the video team. I thought I’d chime in to provide some info on what we’re doing.

Color management is not going away – quite the opposite. As HDR-capable cameras and displays are becoming the default, and shooting in log or raw is becoming the norm, color management is critical. Gone are the days of only Rec709, the one color space to rule them all.

You might have seen reports about HDR iPhone media not looking good in Premiere Pro. And you might have seen the great video my friend Karl made to explain the issue: https://youtu.be/odwptnEhxJs ( https://youtu.be/odwptnEhxJs )

The problem occurs when HDR media is displayed on an SDR timeline. We’re attempting to squeeze wide color range footage into a small color space. Without a manual change, either to the footage or the timeline, the results look blown-out and bad.

Our vision for color management in Premiere Pro is simple. You can drop footage in any color space onto a sequence and we will automatically convert the colors and range with pleasing tone mapping, and provide controls to tweak the tone mapping. You don’t need a LUT, the result is likely to be more accurate than using a LUT, and there won’t be any concerns about clipping. Of course, if you’d prefer to work with a LUT, that workflow will still be supported.

Some of this is available now, like us recognizing some (but only some) color spaces. But that’s the problem with color management: it is complicated enough without having to worry about which pieces are available and which are not.

So, as we are adding the remaining pieces, finessing our math, and working out the user experience, we are first going to add an application preference. You’ll be able to choose whether you want Premiere Pro to automatically use the color space of your log footage or whether you’d prefer that it is treated as Rec.709. There’s more than one way to do color and by adding this preference, you’ll be in control of how you’d like Premiere Pro to work by default (a default you can easily override for specific clips).

Regards,

Fergus

[Jonah Lee Walker]

Thanks for that response Fergus, that would all be amazing.

And I for one would also love if like in DaVinci, if you do the color space all correctly, the color shift issue stops happening with quicktime on mac as well!

And stop forcing the AMIRA lut on Alexa Footage!

[R Neil Haugen]

The issue on Macs is that the OS installed ColorSync utility uses a display gamma of 1.96.

Rec.709 standards requires a display gamma of 2.4 ... 2.2 for "bright-room" viewing. Which is what both Adobe and Resolve use.

Unless, of course, in Resolve you use the Rec.709-A export option, which is A for Apple, quite literally ... which mods the file and file header with an odd NCLC tag, so it is displayed correctly when displayed at gamma 1.96. But of course, the file doesn't work correctly on any b-cast compliant straight-up Rec.709 system then, does it? I've exported from Resolve on my system with the Rec.709-A option, and ... in straight up Rec.709 calibrated/profiled viewing, it's not the same, is it?

Because you can't make a file that looks the same at two wildly different desplay gammas. No pro colorist can do so, and yes, I work with/for/teach pro colorists. Mostly Mac based, who are ticked at Apple over this. If everyone including Apple used the same display gamma, there'd be no issue.

Sadly, that's not likely to happen any time soon.

Neil