Avid DNxHD/HR in Premiere Pro CC2017

[simonpeterarnold]

Its great to have native support for DNxHD in mov wrapper at last but there seems to be no option to set how the video levels in the outputed file are displayed.A DNxHD  movie has always had the options to have either video legal (rec 601/709)  or full range levels (RGB) and Avid still has this option. For the most part most Avids will output at video legal as its for broadcast. Premiere and Media encoder only output full range. Can we please get support for video legal  16-235 support please. We have an automated system for generating single shot movies of all our VFX work to submit to clients who use Avid. They insist on receiving video legal files this we can do using our bespoke generation. But we are also asked to deliver these single shots edited in to the original sequence and we need to use Premiere for this and again they require video legal, but with this update we can, no longer do this as Premiere has no support for video legal.

[R Neil Haugen]

This is a user-to-user forum, and the staffers who 'appear' here are primarily in product support, not on the product development teams. The best way to get this to the attention of the product team and especially the upper managers who determine engineer budgets is the ol' bug/feature request form ...

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Please do fill one out. They never respond, but that is where the list of things is created that does get to the 'right people'.

And yea ... this would be a big pita ...

Neil

[chrisw44157881]

even big name companies have to work around this problem and many others. They fix them all with luts.

I made one that converts rec. 709 0-255 to 16-235.

64 cube iridas lut for burning in darker 16-235 from 0-255 for youtube upload. it darkens image, then youtube re-lightens again.

CreativeCOW

[simonpeterarnold]

That alone is not enough you have to set the correct ACLR atom parameters so It knows the video content should be displays as video legal. In the old method using QuickTime this was done be changing the codec parameter for colorspace. This is not available in Premiere anymore and it's defaulting to full range for everything. So if you now adjust the levels to video legal and export you get a movie that thinks it's full range but the images are not so it looks wrong and will import into Avid incorrectly. I have tried this and this is what it does.

Its all ok if you stick with full range as this is how Avid will see it as the ACLR is being set as full range and Avid will then apply adjustment to video legal on ingest ( it works only in Video legal). Soon as you have content that is video legal with an ACLR atom saying it's full range you have an invalid DNxHD movie.

As we can't deliver full range flagged movies as our clients insist on video legal we are now left without an option other than not to upgrade.

[Jim_Simon]

In the old method using QuickTime

Perhaps choose the superior MXF container instead?

[chrisw44157881]

also, AE's utility - color profile converter will convert it and burn in the correct color space. This works for some Avid people.

set input as 0-255 and output as 16-235 rec. 709. or visa versa. I can't remember right now.

[simonpeterarnold]

Your all missing the point. Its not the colour space conversion that's the issue I have always had to do this. You have to flag the colour space correctly via the ACLR atom in the the movie it won't do this automatically or it wont display or import correctly into Avid. This was controlled in Quicktime by the colorspace options in the codec, Without this its not flagging anything and will be wrong. Infact this version no longer adds the flag at all.

Using MXF is not an option as we have to deliver to clients specification and format, Using After Effects is not an option either. This is a simple feature that is part of tthe DNxHD specification that's been ignored and should be available.

[neilb69570407]

The only workaround I found right now is to export using Premiere 2015.3.  Avid DnxHD is recognized there and shows all the presets.

Let's hope this gets fixed soon in 2017.

[R Neil Haugen]

"Avid DnxHD is recognized there and shows all the presets."

If you're talking the "old-style" naming system for Avid DNxHD/R codecs, that have a ton of different 'named codecs' using the numbering system ... no, that's not "broken" by Adobe in 2017. The 2017 release lists the Avid codecs as Avid shows them ... and as Avid is now naming them ... which is a royal PITA to me.

Which is a separate issue from the noted lack of a method for creating a 16-235 output file with proper notation of such in the file header for video players.

Neil