[Chris Wright]

if i understand your post correctly, you tried premiere’s fast color corrector with white balance eye dropper but it didn’t match well enough. and later, you had various exposures you need to match up? Is that right?

you can try speedgrade via dynamic link with shot matcher which will match with one easy click.
https://tv.adobe.com/watch/creative-cloud-for-video/adobe-speedgrade-cc-shot-matcher/

or…

click wrench-enable reference monitor with yuv/hls/rgb scopes
and use fast color corrector to match up black point, white point, gamma, contrast, saturation, and hue.
————

the basic idea is first match all clips to each other called a “one light” where everything is conformed out of RAW and looks similar.
Then a coloring stage to get the artistic look which can be almost anything. color, contrast, saturation, like magic bullet mojo or Technicolor. Basically the feel you want to convey. Here is a simple 3 step process to initially match all the editing clips to a standard candle in premiere, although it should be pretty similar in any NLE with scopes. Remember to calibrate your monitor so that you get a consistent look.
——————–

-A Quick How-To-Guide for matching all clips to a standard waveform in 3 easy steps in Premiere.

Before you begin, open up vectorscope HLS, vectorscope YUV, and Waveform type luma

-add effect fast color corrector to clip
1. View waveform luma:
using effect fast color corrector:
set black point ire 7.5
set white point ire 90
if black and white points are already maxed out, set output level so they are set.

for grey point(the middle slider), view HLS vectorscope, make as small a dot as possible, increase just until you see other parts increase. a large part of shadow will also automatically match 30% on the waveform luma. You’ll find this also creates a consistent slightly Log look so its easier to grade and match later on.

2. White balance(click white balance eye dropper) or… if you can’t find a white spot, temporarily set saturation so that it all fits inside HLS vectorscope. Watch the HLS vectorscope so that the large Hue wheel sets the weighted brightest part in the center.

There’s a secret trick to get all skin tones to match and thus a faster color match between shots, the “skin tone line”.

Temporaily set Saturation 200% to easily see bright saturation line.
Set -Fast color corrector-Hue Angle – line up brighest line in HLS(not YUV) vectorscope between where line red and yellow would be in the YUV vectorscope(around 11:00 o-clock). This is the overall Hue angle for skin tone.

3. Set saturation in fast color correctior to 90% of YUV vectorscope edge from center(100% is touching sides) so all clips have same saturation.
you’ve now perfectly matched black point, white point, contrast, gamma, saturation, hue in like 10 seconds per clip. And the best part is, they’re all easily gradable.

a tip:
don’t forget to keep an eye on your histogram for any sharp spikes, this means your footage is probably 8 bit and you could introduce quantization errors into your grade.

[Chris Wright]

neatvideo is better/faster/cheaper $74vs99

neatvideo has optimize function to render faster and gives better results without blurring.
denoiser doesn’t multithread very well as you have probably found out.

the pincushion effect moves? i’m just trying to imaging a simple distortion that could be alpha’d out in AE as shift effect lightness, then again, I don’t know what it looks like.

You could probably make a simple AE script that averages 5 adjacent frames’s lightess level and mattes parts of frames in combination with my auto flicker repair template or read how RE-delicker removes rolling bands which is way more complicated.

In essence, reverse engineer it:

It would probably be 10 duplicate layers offset in time, on top of each other-precomped over and over again till a final luminance survives with, probably a standard deviation to remove errors(ie. camera moving or new scene), then just add/subtract brightness as an adjustment layer alpha matted.

[Chris Wright]

1. AE 2014 can open AE 2015 projects. you can easily download previous adobe versions so I don’t see a problem there.

2. RE deflicker fixes rolling bands and flicker
https://revisionfx.com/products/deflicker/

3. does the exposure change like a square of brightness moving across the image?

[Chris Wright]

de-select it.

[Chris Wright]

AE can network render image sequences, then simply reimport into AME for final output

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/installing-after-effects-cc-render-engines-with-adobe-creative-cloud/

quick video how to setup AE multimachine network render
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDJO380VQok

There is no premiere or AME render farm solution yet, but if you wanted, render out different parts of the premiere timeline as custom sequence on different computers with shared network folder.

[Chris Wright]

are your media cache files and footage on different hd’s? Random access speed may be the problem as MB/sec performance drops
sharply.

do you have a benchmarking tool?

[Chris Wright]

if the rendered segments are a larger file size than the native, the hd disk access speed would most likely be the bottleneck.

also, the more luts/warp stabilizer you add, the bigger the project file size(ie. slower playback). and the more clips you have that aren’t nested, the slower the program view will be.(slower interface)

all in all, premiere isn’t a database NLE like Avid and gets slower the more stuff you add.

[Chris Wright]

in AME preferences, is “Import sequences natively” selected?

[Chris Wright]

are you grading to neutralize or getting the “look”
anything too low/high and 8 bit effects/renders will get clipped so keep that in mind.

[Chris Wright]

here’s what youtube recommends.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

also, there’s a rumour that uploading a slightly higher resolution file to YouTube grants a higher bitrate when it encodes for web.

don’t forget color management as the wrong 16-235 or 0-255 will shift the gamma and show ugly macro-blocks.

Another option that works well is DnxHD as it will keep perfect color management throughout the pipeline.
you can use DnxHd or another codec and use AE’s utility profile converter to burn in rec. 709. It will pre-darken up youtube
because youtube lightens video after conversion.

I get a lot of likes on this tip so I recommend trying it.