[Simon Fly]

Hi Pat, thanks for the input.

So how would I find out which levels my original footage is using and can you recommend tools for level mapping (on windows)?

[Simon Fly]

Well going from lossy to lossy is always going to introduce some degradation of the footage, no matter the quality of the two codecs.

Oh by the way, I’m using Windows so for using ProRes I would need some funky third-party software? Is it still worth it?

[Simon Fly]

Sorry, MPC stands for Media Player Classic, a modern light weight video player, similar to VLC.

I will see if transcoding it beforehand helps, but usually I try to keep the number of transcoding iterations as low as possible to reduce quality loss.

[Simon Fly]

Hi Oliver,

thanks for the reply, I made some discoveries in the mean time that indicate that this isn’t premieres fault, which is why I tried to delete the original post, because I felt this wasn’t the proper forum for this issue anymore.

Apparently, the footage was recorded with “limited” RGB (16-235) and VLC somehow extends that to full RGB 0-255. MPC doesn’t do this, but there is a shader, which will extend the range to 0-255 as well, making the footage look the same in both programs. Because Premiere displays it as MPC would without the extra shader (i.e. using 16-235), I believe that this what it should be displayed like.

I couldn’t find an option in VLC to display the range extension, however I managed to use Lumetri settings in Premiere to adjust the footage to my liking (i.e. remove that “grey curtain”).

Do you know of any way to analyse the original footage whether it is “full” or “limited” RGB / YUV?