HDR Encoding Guide for Premiere Pro

    Okay that makes sense. If this works it would effectively eliminate the need to use my Lumetri preset (or like I do, record the footage incorrectly flagged as rec709) and would also eliminate the need to either use setparams, side data, or set the color space info directly in the encoder as well. It would save a lot of work for sure!

    The only remaining thing would be setting the Max/Min MDL and MaxCLL/FALL metadata. You can get away with not setting it, but content will usually look better if that metadata is set correctly.

    Of course I've already started a project using my old method lol, and premiere won't let me re-interpret the color space of my footage, so I'll have to wait until my next project to be able to make use of it for my own work, although I could probably do some quick tests.

    Zitat von Vouk

    Well, you'd need to use side data to set CLL and Master Display values (HDR10).

    Once I have some time I'll work on a new premiere connector as this requries the 2022 SDK.

    True, I meant to specify that it eliminates the need to set color space in those things.

    That being said, it's still nice to have those options if anybody needs a specific need to change the color space details without a conversion taking place. It's not always guaranteed that source footage will be correctly set up or interpreted correctly.

    Hi all,

    I hope you are doing well?

    Apologies for my lack of knowledge regarding some of these processes but had hoped that someone may be able to advise me on what I may be doing wrong. I have been trying to get some insight into the below for a few days now. Stumbling onto this thread it appears that there are some extremely knowledgeable people when it comes to HDR and hope that you don't mind if I may ask for your guidance?

    I have been capturing 4k HDR 60FPS footage using the Avermedia Gamer Bolt from the Xbox and uploading to YouTube. Most of the time the footage looks pretty good when in HDR mode on a HDR display but appears to lack crispness and appears slightly blurry when viewing the same footage with HDR turned off. I am not sure if this is just a result of the absence of the dynamic range or if something else may be going on. When I capture the same footage without using HDR the resulting footage looks higher resolution than what YouTube is putting out in the SDR conversion.

    I have been having on and off issues with the HDR capturing for a couple of weeks now, really trying to dial things in and get a steady workflow/process but keep running into odd issues.

    I use Avermedia's own capturing software "RECentral 4" as I understand that this is one of the only ways to record/capture HDR?

    If I upload the raw clip to YouTube which is encoded using H.265 Main10@L6.1 High, generally so far YouTube has recognized it as HDR and will be enabled on compatible displays once processing has completed.

    If I use Adobe Premiere Pro to splice two files together and export using either H.265 Main10 or H.264 High10 it generally seems that YouTube will also detect those files as HDR and process accordingly.

    What I have recently noticed though is that If I have imported one of the raw captures from the Gamer Bolt into Premiere Pro and then used the razor tool to trim it, no matter what I do in terms of export settings, YouTube will not flag it as HDR even though in Media Info it appears that all of the information is correct and virtually identical to the original file.

    I haven't needed to do this for a couple of the other clips, but I was also attempting to try exporting using the YouTube 4k preset in Premiere Pro, the only issue I am finding with that is that even if I select the encoding profile as High10, the two options in "basic video settings" "Rec.2020 Color Primaries" and "High Dynamic Range" both stay greyed out no matter what settings I change.

    If anyone can possibly advise on any of the above I would be hugely grateful.

    Zitat von Jez_0

    Hi all,

    I hope you are doing well?

    Apologies for my lack of knowledge regarding some of these processes but had hoped that someone may be able to advise me on what I may be doing wrong.

    Just to be clear this guide and thread are about encoding using the Voukoder plugin. I'm not too familiar with Adobe's built-in encoders, which have also changed considerably since I wrote this guide. If I had to guess, their youtube 4K preset is not designed for HDR, but I do know some of their other codec settings work fine. I just don't like them because I don't have access to the type of codecs and options I like, which Voukoder has, so I don't use them.

    For HDR recording myself, I use the Atomos Ninja Inferno (newer version is called Ninja V), which allows me to manually flag the footage as SDR if I want, or leave it as the default HDR tags to use with the preset I uploaded in the first post. In the future, the premiere connector for Voukoder will also be able to work with the native HDR support Premiere has now, which will make much of my guide obsolete. As for other ways to record HDR, I believe ShadowPlay has some kind of HDR capture support, and the PS5's built-in game capture does capture HDR as well, although it's pretty heavily compressed. There may be other ways to record HDR as well that I'm unfamiliar with.

    As for why the image looks less crisp to you when converted to SDR, there could be two things going on. Either your HDR display modes are adding sharpening to them, which the display would then lack in SDR, or you're simply noticing the difference in dynamic range. Higher dynamic range means a larger contrast between dark and light colors, and higher contrast edges will inevitably look sharper because of this. When you compress that dynamic range down, you are lowering the contrast of the image, and those edges with it. This can be especially bad if the tonemapping being applied is not ideal for the footage you recorded, which is why it will look different than if you just captured it directly in SDR, like you said, since the game will tonemap its visuals much more ideally to the SDR range than any automatic tonemapping solution would do. This is why youtube allows for attaching a LUT to HDR footage, which you would generate by using color grading software, such as either lumetri color in premiere, or da vinci resolve for example. This would allow you to color grade and tonemap the image entirely yourself, giving you full control over the way shadows, midtones, and highlights look, the way color looks, the way the contrast of the image is handled, etc.

    Zitat

    What I have recently noticed though is that If I have imported one of the raw captures from the Gamer Bolt into Premiere Pro and then used the razor tool to trim it, no matter what I do in terms of export settings, YouTube will not flag it as HDR even though in Media Info it appears that all of the information is correct and virtually identical to the original file.

    Would you mind posting the mediainfo on such a file? If combining two videos together worked for you, trimming it shouldn't work any differently. Although note there are apps you can use to do both of these things without needing to re-encode, if you don't want to waste extra time or potentially add more compression to the image. The one I like to use for simple trims and appends is called AviDemux. Doing that will ensure the bitstream of the original is maintained 100%, without any modifications an additional encoder could do.

    Thank you very much for coming back to me so quickly and completely understand regarding the guide/thread not being for this sort of thing but was also just curious as to whether Voukoder may suit some of my needs.

    Please find link to the MediaInfo. I tried quite a few different combinations but so far still no luck with YouTube tagging them correctly.

    https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/…tvW?usp=sharing

    I will definitely look at AviDemux for trimming purposes. To be honest, ideally I didn't want to trim and re-encode the file through Premiere Pro but tried it as my original HDR capture that I uploaded to YouTube kept exhibiting frame drops at certain points in the clip that were not present when playing on any of my internal media players, but were only present once YouTube had finished converting.

    I did have it happen to one of my other HDR clips at certain points but when I re-encoded from H.265 to H.264 and re-uploaded to YouTube it fixed the stuttering/fps drops.

    Zitat von Jez_0

    Thank you very much for coming back to me so quickly and completely understand regarding the guide/thread not being for this sort of thing but was also just curious as to whether Voukoder may suit some of my needs.

    Please find link to the MediaInfo. I tried quite a few different combinations but so far still no luck with YouTube tagging them correctly.

    https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/…tvW?usp=sharing

    I will definitely look at AviDemux for trimming purposes. To be honest, ideally I didn't want to trim and re-encode the file through Premiere Pro but tried it as my original HDR capture that I uploaded to YouTube kept exhibiting frame drops at certain points in the clip that were not present when playing on any of my internal media players, but were only present once YouTube had finished converting.

    I did have it happen to one of my other HDR clips at certain points but when I re-encoded from H.265 to H.264 and re-uploaded to YouTube it fixed the stuttering/fps drops.

    You're right. Youtube definitely should be recognizing those files as HDR. As far as I can tell, everything you've done here is right. If it's not working, that's a problem on their end and I would recommend contacting youtube support to get it fixed. I have had some issues getting files to be recognized in the past, and it seems youtube can sometimes be inconsistent on when this works and when it doesn't, but letting them know whenever it doesn't work correctly can help solve the problem. Make sure you wait a couple days after uploading though in case processing is just taking extra time.