Charting Gamma Curves, Revisiting REC-709a, and Premiere Pro 2022 Color Management

Another great show, looks like the table of contents on this page is from another show.

I re-watched this discussion today – I can’t thank you enough for the superb answers you gave to my question!

As is often the case, just properly defining the actual question is half way to the answer. And Cullen’s demonstration of the steps involved from capture to display was perfect. When trying to teach the overall concepts to people unfamiliar with the subject these visual demonstrations are incredibly useful.

I came across a great resource from Nick Shaw…

https://antlerpost.com/colour-spaces/

…really handy details for all the various transforms out there – although this raises questions of its own. The graphs don’t directly relate to the demo you did, different axis.

Also, where is the Reinhard tone mapping discussed?

My goal now is to come up with visuals for every step from camera to display, including 18% grey, what a CRT did vs what we have our LCDs do, what our eyes do… What Resolve actually does when it generates a Grey Scale(!) etc.

Thanks again!

I know this is a bit of an older one, but man… I’ve already gotten great value out of my Mixing Light membership, and yet I feel like the whole cost was worth it for finding this video alone. Thank you all.

I have a question hopefully anyone from the group can answer, or at least bring up to date.

My post unit largely works in what Peder describes as a “baked-in” workflow, as neither our media nor our editors are centralized. Offline is done in Premiere on a Mac, and then usually a single render of the whole timeline is spat out to the colourist.

The question is, what is currently accepted “best practices” for the format of this video from Premiere, that least affects the inherent colour and tone profile of the original camera footage, while also offering the most image fidelity to the colourist?

Because we work mostly social media, our OCF can range from something shot on an iPhone up to BRAW.

Knowing our source type and settings, I’m hoping to come up with an optimized, up-to-date workflow that offers the colourist the best quality image which is completely effective in a colour managed workflow.

Manny thanks in advance,

Sunny

There are lots of good tips on the ‘baked-in’ workflow here https://mixinglight.com/tutorial-series/davinci-resolves-pre-conformed-workflow/

For many types of camera files, a flattened ProRes 422HQ might be sufficient, raw formats you want 444. Make sure you know and test how raw is debayered (Film Gen4?) in the NLE before the flat file is made. Make sure you get EDL comments in the EDL and a reference guide with burnt in record and source timecode but also source file name, helps take the guess work out. Be careful with Premiere Pro and how it assumes RGB files should be exported, regarding the data levels, Full vs Legal video.

Jamie’s got good comments there. Especially that bit about RGB files. Premiere will almost always export RGB files as full, YUV (Y-Cb/Cr of course) as limited. Which, especially with Dnx variants, can be not what is expected. As Dnx 4444 according to Avid can be either.

Another crucial data point is that you must set the Sequence Settings to Max Bit Depth and the Export Settings to both Max Bit Depth and the bpc option to 16-bpc. Or you may actually get an 8 bit file exported. Thanks to Jarle Leirpoll for sorting out that issue. Which didn’t used to actually be a problem.