Premiere Pro export very undersaturated, low contrast when exporting with Media Encoder vs Premiere

[Jon Doughtie]

What is the wrapper/codec/bitrate of your original footage?

I am curious, noting that although you have a variable bitrate selected for your output, you also have both the target and max bitrate at 8MBps. Why not simply do a fixed bitrate?

System:
Dell Precision T7600 (x2)
Win 7 64-bit
32GB RAM
Adobe CC 2015.02 (as of 6/2016)
256GB SSD system drive
4 internal media drives RAID 5
Typically cutting short form from HD MP4 and P2 MXF.

[Chris Wright]

If your monitor is not color calibrated to srgb, nothing will look right as premiere
is hard coded to srgb and will ignore any color profile on your monitor.

You can use transform luts from p3 or adobe rgb to srgb with lumetri. Also,
Set vlc to opengl video to match opengl driver gamma in premiere. Quicktime
Uses direct drivers with 16-235 pixels which changes the gamma.

[Duke Sweden]

Chris’ suggestion to set vlc to opengl video is what fixed the problem for me.

[Colin Ruggiero]

Hi Chris,

I’ve been struggling with these issues for a long time and have read a lot of your posts on these threads. I don’t understand your suggestion to calibrate your computer monitor to the color profile that Premiere works in for two reasons. One is that, no matter how I calibrate my monitor, the program monitor display inside Premiere looks the same. And the other reason is that material in Premiere looks identical to me as it does in color managed After Effects and a host of other players. I know that lots of different issues get conflated in these gamma shift/color management threads. Mine, for now, is washed out videos in QT, Youtube and Vimeo. But I just can’t see how calibrating your monitor, or using LUTS inside Premiere could be related to this particular issue. And when you talk about calibrating your monitor you must be referring to hardware calibration in a broadcast monitor rather than software profiling a computer display? Otherwise I just can’t see how it makes any sense. Any thoughts you might have much appreciated.

[Chris Wright]

when you setup dispcal, set it for lut. use that calibrated lut in premiere as premiere will not support any color profiles by os.
if your monitor is p3, premiere only understand srgb so a translation lut is required. vimeo is 16-235. youtube is 16-235 or 0-255 depending on many factors.(see item#1 below)

1. “going to your YouTube channel’s edit options, choosing ‘retouch’ for one of your videos, and then saving without even changing anything. Sometime in the next two to ten hours YouTube will re-encode it to VP9, and then it will display properly on most browsers.”
this thread has most of the youtube fixes.”
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2297635

2. youtube
Solution/workaround to NVIDIA control panel’s dynamic range setting to 0-255 changing the appearance/gamma of YouTube-uploaded videos (even though other videos on YouTube don’t react to the setting):

3. https://f1.creativecow.net/10598/fixmyyoutube
it doesn’t work with adjustment layers directly
you have to use it in the dropdown for the export in adobe media encoder. or you can NEST it first.
its a premiere bug. also it needs to be copied in both premiere-lumetri-technical and adobe media encoder-lumetri-technical

4. VLC will match premiere exactly the same if you set its tools-prefs,video output to OpenGL to match premiere’s opengl . quicktime doesn’t use opengl so its going to wrong most of the time.

i have tested youtube inside chrome and it matches exactly from my monitor using a pixel sampler. I have tested using ame vs premiere, they both match
and import correctly. the main reason why this fails is that people have 3rd party video codecs installed on their computers. in medinfo, it should say quicktime RLE main or something similar, not lavsplitter or something weird.

[Colin Ruggiero]

Thanks a lot for your quick reply, Chris. And thanks for all of the info you provided – I’ve seen your posts all over the place on these forums and it seems like you’re really doing a lot to try to help people, which I really appreciate.

I’ve read the stuff you posted here in other posts of yours though and I feel like what I’m currently experiencing is something else. Might be easiest if I reply directly to the numbers in your response:

1. Youtube is definitely re-encoding my content and mapping the levels inaccurately. No matter what codec, and I’ve tried everything, I upload, the rec.709 0-255 file that I’m uploading displays as 16-235. I’ve done everything I can think of, including retouching, to get Youtube to re-encode the file as VP9 but it won’t do it. When I check the stats on my videos, even 3 or 4 days after “retouching” the files are still encoded as AVI/MP4.

2. I’m using a new iMac Pro (but I’ve had the same issues on other computers and other monitors) that doesn’t use an NVIDIA card so this is not an issue here.

3. I’ve used your fixmyyoutube LUT and been very thankful for it in the past but it always crushes my blacks a little too much. Saturation in the image is restored and matches what I see in Premiere but the blacks end up really crushed.

4. VLC already matches what I see in Premiere exactly. I also don’t have any issues with AME vs. PP exports.

Thanks for the info about using DisplayCAL to create a LUT. That’s valuable and I may do that in the future to get a more accurate image inside of PP. But that is not my biggest issue at this point. My PP Program monitor matches what I export when played back in VLC and other players except QT. QT and Youtube match and are washed out. Exports from Premiere that I then import into color-managed AE also look identical. For example, I process a time-lapse in AE and export out as ProRes 422 using a completely color-managed workflow. I know you often recommend turning color management off in AE but I’m a fan of keeping it on. If I import that ProRes file into Premiere and then export it back out of Premiere using a variety of codecs they all match what I saw in both After Effects and Premiere. Those files opened in VLC or other players (except QT) also match with each other and with what I saw in both AE and PP. I have a second HP monitor that is just calibrated with puck and software and everything matches there as well. When I upload those files to Youtube they look like shit and no amount of retouching or tweaking causes them to be recompressed in a way that fixes the issue. I should add that they look bad on Youtube in various browsers also, not just one. This is not a monitor calibration issue. It’s possible that it’s some sort of browser issue but I doubt it. Any thoughts? And thanks!

[Chris Wright]

does your graphics card have a video gamma overide?
in premiere’s scopes, what does it say the black level is at?
did you try ae’s utility color profile converter to burn in rec. 709 16-235 input/output darker?
what is your monitor gamma set to?
premiere only understands 2.2. premiere isn’t affect by monitor gamma but web browsers are, could be a discrepancy there.

[Colin Ruggiero]

Thanks Chris,

I can’t find any way to override gamma settings on my graphics card. It’s a Radeon Pro Vega 64 card and there don’t seem to be drivers available for Mac as they’re built into the OS. I can change system wide gamma in the calibration panel or Display settings in System Prefs but that seems to be it. Gamma is set at 2.2

Black levels are at 0 on Premiere’s scopes.

I haven’t tried AE’s color profile converter. I want to be working in the full 0-255 range and should be able to maintain those levels throughout the pipeline without problem.

Everything matches and looks correct except for Youtube and Quicktime. Starting to think that QT is just QT and is always messed up and the issue might actually be some sort of video playback and/or web browser gamma discrepancy with my graphics card but I can’t think of anything I can do about that. You know, since I spent a fortune on an iMac “Pro” that is not really pro and doesn’t allow me any access to graphics card settings. The video looks fine in non-QT video players though so that makes it seem like it’s likely some sort of browser issue. I’ve tested on both Chrome and Firefox and had the same issue.

[Colin Ruggiero]

I already responded to your previous post but this is a follow-up. This is looking more and more like a browser issue at this point. I swear I controlled for this earlier but now looking at my test videos in other browsers I’m seeing strange differences. When I watch on Youtube in Firefox I see “proper” colors that match what I see both in Premiere and in After Effects perfectly. I looked into color issues with Chrome and found a whole bunch of info on washed-out colors in chrome after version 6,1 due to some color profile matching feature. Thought maybe my whole current issue boiled down to that. But then colors in Safari match what I see in Chrome. So my questions at this point is it it’s possible this is a wide gamut display issue and that everything I’m seeing in After Effects, Premiere, VLC, etc. is over saturated and Chrome and Safari are actually closer to the correct values? I don’t see how that could be the case since my computer display is accurately calibrated, After Effects is color-managed, and in Firefox the uploaded video colors match perfectly. But I also don’t understand how the image I’m seeing in After-Effects, which is color-managed, is the same as the image I’m seeing in Premiere, which is not. Seems like the only way this could be the case is if my monitor were calibrated to the same Rec.709 color profile that PP and AE expect by default and the colors were just “passing through.” But my display is not set to a rec.709 profile.

I’m aware of the futility of trying to make everything match and that’s not what this is about. I’m completely accepting of the fact that there will be differences in every viewers configuration and that my videos will look different in each of those. I just want to make sure that the washed out colors I’m seeing on Youtube in Chrome and Safari are not a result of something in my control.

[Greg Janza]

I did a test on my system. My monitors are calibrated using the x-rite x1 profiler.

I have a perfect match with the file in Premiere when playing back in Firefox and using Vimeo or Frame.io.

I get a slightly washed out look in Chrome in both Vimeo and Frame.io.

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