HDR Encoding Guide for Premiere Pro

Hey Katana, nice to see you here ?

Okay, a lot to work with here haha

First of all, I'm not sure how Vegas works with HDR content as I haven't used the program in years. Based on your output, I'm guessing it likely is outputting in the correct format, the raw PQ/2020 output, which indeed looks "washed out" on an SDR monitor. If you had the ability to output to a monitor that could display that information properly in HDR mode, most likely it would look fine. HDR uses a different "gamma" and color gamut than SDR, so if a program interprets it as if it were SDR data, it looks wrong. That's fine in this case because that's exactly what we need for Voukoder to work properly with the footage. The problem with Premiere is that Premiere would "correct" the display to match the SDR gamma and colors, which meant all that additional HDR information was lost on output to Voukoder. Thankfully, based on your results, I would guess that's not happening with Vegas.

As for Limited/Full, since you're capturing internally on the PS5, I don't think this will matter, because the video files will be encoded with whichever one the PS5 was set to, and Vegas will almost certainly interpret these correctly. So when you output in Voukoder (yes, the output should be set to Limited) then the editor/voukoder correctly converts the input color range to the output. So if the input is Full, then Voukoder will be converting that full range to limited. If the input is limited, then most likely what's happening is the editor will still be interpreting this as Full range floating point RGB, and Voukoder will then correctly map that to Limited range. While you can use Full range, it's not how HDR was designed to be used so I wouldn't recommend it (there's also no reason to use it). As for what to set your PS5 to, it would depend on your TV and how your TV is calibrated. Some TVs work fine with automatic settings, whether on the tv, console or both, but some need to manually adjust this (even if they claim automatic works) and in those cases I recommend using Limited range because other devices will be using limited range and it will just make the TV settings match up correctly. That being said, forcing Limited Range on the PS5 will likely result in less rounding errors or banding in the final output, as values will line up perfectly with the 10bit Limited output, so it might be a good idea to use that.

EDIT: noticed you also have some kind of external capture as well. Assuming this capture device isn't HDMI 2.1, then most likely the PS5 is outputting in YUV422 for HDR, and the output of the PS5 will always be Limited in this mode, even if you have it set to full, and this is good because most external capture devices will expect a "legal range" (limited) signal from YUV outputs, not full range.

As for why your video looks darker on youtube, this is most likely youtube's automatic tonemapping. If you aren't using my HDR metadata tool to analyze frames selected from the full video for the MaxCLL and MaxFALL values, and I don't see that metadata in your MediaInfo outputs so I'd guess you're not, then youtube has to make assumptions about the HDR content of the video, and try to map that content into SDR without severe clipping or crushing of highlight information. I personally use a process to create my own LUT which totally controls the color grading and tonemapping process for the full video, but that's a pretty complicated process as well and if you're not familiar with color grading and LUT creation, it's better to determine the correct MaxCLL and MaxFALL values and let youtube handle those. It may still end up looking dimmer than what you'd expect because HDR in general tends to be brighter than SDR in many cases, and youtube will need to darken that to avoid looking overexposed, but as long as it's presentable I wouldn't worry too much about that.

Zitat von dreamyskyjin

really appreciate for your help and finally I get asolution for HDR encoding!

I wonder can I make a video about your solution?

I will indicate the source

Sure!

CRF is far better than bitrate, if you care more about quality than file size. There are not 2 kinds of CRF. The strategy option is about what kind of encoding mode you want, and CRF is default. You can change it to ABR if you want to choose a bitrate instead.

Constant Quantizer, another option, is pretty much an outdated mode for x264/x265 and while it produces similar results to CRF, it creates wasted bits to do so. I believe CQP is what NVENC uses as its constant quality, but the number values are different and the bitrates created are typicall yhigher for the same quality with that.

Zitat von dreamyskyjin

so I should just set up a level and CRF min&max?

And shall I set the VBV? I don't quite understand the function of VBV

Really don't bother with those other settings. Set a CRF level, and leave the other settings at default. 13 or 14 seems good for HDR to me.

I've sometimes seen VBV and other settings used in combination with Blu-ray specs, but there's another option that automatically applies anything necessary for UHD Blu-ray encodes, so just use that instead.

Did you use the preset I uploaded? Third picture looks like what you would get if you followed the guide but forgot to apply the preset. The encoder assumes the color space is ready for HDR, meaning it should look more like image #2 in the preview monitor in premiere after you apply my preset.

What you will see on the preview monitor is the entire 10,000 nit range compressed into the rec709 preview monitor, with color space and transfer function converted to correspond to the BT2020 and ST2084 spaces, which will make the image look dark, washed out, and lower contrast on the preview monitor before you export with voukoder.

Here's the preset again:

https://www.voukoder.org/attachment/744…020-pp2020-zip/

Using the HDR editing mode in Premiere 2021 doesn't work with this process btw. Keep the project as rec709.

Zitat von Vouk

Okay, premiere now supports this formats:

Code

PrPixelFormat_RGB_444_12u_PQ_709    = MAKE_PIXEL_FORMAT_FOURCC('@', 'P', 'Q', '7'),    // 12 bit integer (in 16 bit words) per component RGB with PQ curve, Rec.709 primaries
PrPixelFormat_RGB_444_12u_PQ_P3        = MAKE_PIXEL_FORMAT_FOURCC('@', 'P', 'Q', 'P'),    // 12 bit integer (in 16 bit words) per component RGB with PQ curve, P3 primaries
PrPixelFormat_RGB_444_12u_PQ_2020    = MAKE_PIXEL_FORMAT_FOURCC('@', 'P', 'Q', '2'), // 12 bit integer (in 16 bit words) per component RGB with PQ curve, Rec.2020 primaries
PrPixelFormat_RGB_444_10u_HLG        = MAKE_PIXEL_FORMAT_FOURCC('@', 'H', 'L', '1'), // 10 bit integer per component RGB with HLG curve, Rec.2020 primaries
PrPixelFormat_RGB_444_12u_HLG        = MAKE_PIXEL_FORMAT_FOURCC('@', 'H', 'L', '2'), // 12 bit integer (in 16 bit words) per component RGB with HLG curve, Rec.2020 primaries

I'm just wondering they're all RGB. When dealing with bt2020/HDR it's not YUV anymore?

For some reason I totally missed this post months ago ?

Will you be incorporating these formats into the Premiere connector?

Once encoded, HDR is usually stored as YCbCr yes, typically in 4:2:0, but it appears Premiere handles their processing in RGB.

The main format people would probably use for HDR is the

PrPixelFormat_RGB_444_12u_PQ_2020

the first format would probably be pretty unlikely to be used, but all of the others could certainly be common enough in usage. So I'd probably provide options like:

PQ BT2020

PQ DCI-P3

HLG 10bit

HLG 12bit

in addition to the rec 709/601 options you currently have

If there's no performance difference between the 10bit and 12bit HLG modes, I'd just go with the higher of the two.

Zitat von Vouk

From what I've read these formats only work with effects, not with output plugins.

Oh, that's disappointing if true

That's a little hard to decipher. Normally I would associate fields with interlace, but I'm pretty sure UHD doesn't have any interlace formats so I'm not sure why those are there unless they refer to something else, and I don't know what biplanar means either. If you don't have any other information about these formats, I'd probably assume the ones that say FRAME and don't say FullRange are probably the best choices.

So what I'd probably do is, in the color space drop down in the connector, add:

ITU-R BT2020 (HDR PQ) - PrPixelFormat_YUV_420_MPEG4_FRAME_PICTURE_BIPLANAR_10u_as16u_2020_HDR

ITU-R BT2020 (HDR HLG) - PrPixelFormat_YUV_420_MPEG4_FRAME_PICTURE_BIPLANAR_10u_as16u_2020_HDR_HLG