Does The New Limiter Effect In Premiere Pro CC 2018 Catch Gamut Excursion?

Testing The New ‘Video Limiter Effect’ In Premiere Pro CC 2018

June 11, 2018

Adobe re-built their Video Limiter Effect in Creative Cloud 2018. Can you trust the new effect to remove gamut excursion errors that will fail you in QC? This video Insight answers that question.


Does the new Limiter effect catch gamut excursions (and pass QC)?

As anyone who colors or finishes for broadcast television can attest, network Quality Control (QC) rejections are something that you work to avoid at all costs, both for time and reputation reasons. As someone who works quite a bit in the broadcast, you can imagine my curiosity when I heard Adobe completely revamped their Video Limiter effect in the most recent release of Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018 and Media Encoder CC 2018.

In a previous Insight on legalizing video in Premiere Pro, Patrick walked us through the legacy video limiter available in CC 2017 and earlier. He provided a great rule of thumb to not entirely trust software-based limiters. Why? Video limiters have never been known for their 100% accuracy. And unfortunately, even a 1% miss causes a QC rejection. Well, its been a few years and things have come a long way software wise.

Should we consider software limiters again? It’s worth another look, if only because Premiere’s Video Limiter is revamped.

Nothing about this images passes QC, as evident from the YC waveform and the hard edge visible on the vectorscope.
Nothing about this images passes QC, as evident from the YC waveform and the hard edge visible on the vectorscope.

Using a Stress Test with the Video Limiter Effect

In this video Insight, I put the new video limiter effect available in Adobe Premiere CC 2018 (and Media Encoder CC 2018) to the test with footage literally intended to fail QC. I went to the extreme of ensuring the footage fails in about every way it can; luma, chroma, and RGB gamut. After running this test footage in QC testing software, I re-ran the QC after applying the new video limiter effect. The results were interesting, to say the least.

I also show you how to apply this effect on render – if you forget to apply it as an adjustment layer on the top layer of your timeline.

The new Gamut Warning false color feature is a handy addition, especially when you're in the creative phase.
The new Gamut Warning false color feature is a handy addition, especially when you’re in the creative phase.

Special thanks

Many thanks to The Africa Channel for providing access to VidCheck QC services and the stock footage used to create this insight.

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Comments

Homepage Forums Testing The New ‘Video Limiter Effect’ In Premiere Pro CC 2018

  • Is there a video limiter plugin like this in Davinci Resolve, that solve the gamut excursion.??


  • Joshua Howey
    Member

    Is limiting necessary for online delivery? What is the advantage of using a video limiter if the video will never see broadcast? Thanks!


  • Jordan Mena
    Member

    I’ve had situations where I finished an edit that was only going to be online but the client would always send their stuff to a QC house regardless. It’s always good to limit just incase.


  • Willian Aleman
    Guest

    Hello Mixinglight community,

    Thanks for the insight.

    Since this insight is related to Adobe Premier, I would like to know how to view Premier timeline viewer on an external reference display with Blackmagic Mini Monitor or the UltraStudio 4K I/O. I have dedicated more than 3 hours on Premier’s different Playback Preference Settings, and searching on the web for a solution without any positive result. BMD hardware doesn’t appear on Premier Playback, Video Device Preferences.

    I’m using Adobe Premier CC 12.0.0, 2018 and Blackmagic Desktop Video Setup 10.9.5. BMD doesn’t appear on Premier Playback, Video Device Preferences.

    Thanks in advance


  • Robbie Carman
    Guest

    in my experience. every time premiere pro is updated I have to do a reinstall of the BMD Desktop Video drivers.


  • Willian Aleman
    Guest

    Thanks a lot for the info.


  • Willian Aleman
    Guest

    It’s working now after following Robbie’s suggestion


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Limiting keeps you within the boundaries of the gamut you’re working within. Whether you’re delivering online or to broadcast, staying within gamut is essential – otherwise the software you’re using (or if not, the compression software) will do a hard limit on you and deliver some very garish-looking (and unexpected) images. Something you always want to avoid.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    You can use LUTs or Resolve’s own Limiter (in Project Settings > Color) that is also selectable. We’ve covered Legalization pretty extensively on Mixing Light. Start here: https://mixinglight.com/tutorial-category/legalization/ Also, check out our scopes category for related Insights: https://mixinglight.com/tutorial-category/legalization/

    Both of these topics are excellent ideas for our upcoming Flight Paths. Thanks for sparking the idea!

  • Thank you Patrick for these insights. I watched them several times.
    But the problem is always the same:”The gamut excursion”, and I can not solve it only with the resolve limiter or with hard+softclip,curves,hsl etc..For monitoring the signal I use scopebox with channel plot. and I’m always careful to handle the low lights. But often I fight against gamut excursion in the lowest signal part.
    Often I receive clips shooted with drone in h264 8 bits (I hate them), already with a gamut excursion in the low lights (mostly in blue channel), that I can recover only lifting too much the blacks, which I don’t want. I tried the vidchecker software. It is perfect for solving this problem…but it is so expensive…I’m surprised that inside resolve there is not a plugin like vidchecker, or a licensed software, to be used as a final step for gamut legalization


  • William W
    Guest

    Hi. I have a question about the Premiere limiter effect used in this video (I’m working in CC2018). I apply the limiter to an adjustment layer and configure the effect settings as described in the video. However, looking at the Lumetri YUV Vectorscope, some of the levels are going outside of the boundary lines that, to the best of my knowledge, are the broadcast safe levels (the line that connects the inner set of squares). This is for UK broadcast. Am I doing something wrong here or is this expected behaviour? Thank you for your assistance


  • Pat Inhofer
    Guest

    Have you rendered out the video and then re-imported and looked at the vectorscope?

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