Depressing. Footage in Premiere/VLC looks VERY different in Quicktime/Vimeo/Youtube

[Greg Janza]

[Alan Okey] “I’m amazed how many editors can’t read or won’t use scopes.”

Editors who have never worked in television or cable tv might never have had the training on how to properly use scopes.

But even if you don’t know scopes, If you are a professional editor delivering product to clients you need to calibrate your main edit monitor so that you can have the confidence that you’re delivering a solid color accurate product. A calibration tool like xrite’s i1 pro should be part of any edit suite set up.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Hakan Ahmet]

Hi All,

I’m totally in agreeance with those that say calibrating the iMac screen makes no difference, as premier just ignores it.

So, would connecting an external Srgb calibrated monitor to colour grade with do the trick? When people in this feed keep saying “calibrate your screen correctly”…can i assume they mean the external monitor and not the iMac screen itself?

Hakan

[Bret Hampton]

Agree with Dave and Shane

I’ve always used an external monitor attached to a video card designed for this purposed. Only way to see properly.
I use AJA Kona card, however Blackmagic Decklink is also commonly used. They’re pricey but often good deals on ebay.

Then you can stop worrying at get back to editing. Watching your video in Premiere’s window is an exercise in frustration, same for all NLEs.

[Hakan Ahmet]

Is it recommended to put the P3 to Rec709 lut above or below your grade on the time line? (both in seperate adjustment layers). You get a slightly different look either way.. which is better practice?

Many thanks

[Hakan Ahmet]

Is it recommended to put the P3 to Rec709 lut above or below your grade on the time line? (both in separate adjustment layers). You get a slightly different look either way.. which is better practice?

Many thanks

[Chris Wright]

in my experience, conforming the lut first gives easier grades. one way will give a log feel and the other a linear feel.

[Jim Elliott]

HI THERE, ORIGINAL POSTER HERE… I get notifications every now and then on this thread and am surprised at the pompous uninformed comments. Let me tell you with 100% certainty that this has NOTHING to do with h264 exports (or any export settings), NOTHING to do with Vimeo or YouTube washing things out etc etc. NOTHING to do with calibrating a monitor – it *can* be helped having a proper sRGB monitor, but seeing as 1) I have an sRGB monitor and it doesn’t help much and 2) this issue does not exist in FCP- THIS IS A PROBLEM WITH PREMIERE. The problem is people are too stubborn or just not observant enough to notice and kick up a fuss so they fix it,

This has everything to do with with the complete absence of colour space/colour profile (ie sRGB) management in Premiere (and VLC). It’s a long story, but essentially video is generally rec709 colour space, this is the same as sRGB. Now the problem is Premiere isn’t colour space compatible (mental, as photoshop, after effects, fcp all are) – this means if you have a wide gamut monitor (to be fair even most sRGB monitors are slightly different to proper sRGB) then Premiere will essentially take the colour values and distort them, making them MORE saturated to the eye. Eg let’s say a pixel is r245, b0, g0 (think of it as 95% red) in original rec709/sRGB world – if you have a wide gamut monitor that red colour will be mapped as r245 in a WIDER GAMUT (so 95% of a larger gamut) effectively stretching the colours to something more saturated (could be equivalent of r255 or ‘100/101% red’ in sRGB). So this means what you are seeing in your Premiere program monitor on your screen is fundamentally INACCURATE by quite a long way sometimes, and it’s the same for most people (especially with an expensive wide gamut Apple monitor) and it’s absolutely insane this isn’t a wider known fact. When you export to QuickTime/h264/prores etc etc and watch in Vimeo/iPhone/youtube/quicktime (anything that has proper colour space management) it will seem drained – truth is you were just watching it in Premiere at an over saturated level!

To test this, try 1) watching any video you’ve already made on Vimeo/QuickTime/iPhone – then pop it into Premiere or VLC – the colours will bump up and the video will look OVERsaturated 2) Load the same video into fcpx (if you have it) and it will be fine, no saturation bump / contrast drain at all (I think it even asks you colour space at start of project – like after affects, but premiere doesn’t). 3) Load the video in Premiere and also, QuickTime/vimeo then change the display profile on your computer (I use a Mac) – the QuickTime/vimeo one will change with the rest of the screen, Premiere will stay the same regardless – hence proving it bypasses all display profile (and therefore sRGB) interpretation – its just taking the pixel values that were in original made in rec709/sRGB and reading them from a wide gamut (lets say P3) perspective. The solution (apart from Premiere being less shit) – I use a layer or Colorista with very slight and specific adjustments to contrast and saturation just before export. When I pop that later in it looks over saturated BUT exported video looks fine in anything other than VLC (or if you dropped it back into Premiere). A LUT could also work. What would really work is moving to fcpx or premiere fixing the issue (im sure resolve doesn’t have this issue, but never tried). Again it’s a crazy issue, that I’ve made adobe aware of but they don’t care (a few updates and no changes) as it seems all these video geniuses don’t even notice their footage looking massively different on export or they blame it on something irrelevant (like on this thread) so the issue isn’t raised to Adobe

Hope this clears things up.

[Greg Janza]

Jim, thanks for your detailed explanation. I did your test and I did see a slight chroma difference but after exporting stills out and comparing the two the difference is almost imperceptible. It’s helpful though to be aware of this issue with Premiere.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Tero Ahlfors]

There’s an easy solution that has been told many times in this thread. Here’s the tl;dr

-Set up and maintain a proper color pipeline

Or you can keep yelling that Premiere is to blame for some reason.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Jim Elliott]

Yes those 2 looks very similar. Although incidentally I think it’s affects cool colours less and skin tones more. Also I found I had to go through a hell of a journey trying to get images to look like they looked to me on screen as that’s another layer of colour profile management (photoshop etc)