F3: Premiere too??

L

LeavingTheCandy

Well-known member
OK, so I finally made the jump from FCP 7 to Premiere CS6.x to try to get away from color shift/gamma issues. My workflow is shooting SLOG to Pix240 ProRes422, grading in Resolve using Data Levels, then outputting VIDEO levels back to Premiere. When getting back to Premiere, everything is shifted: colors shift, darker gamut, etc.

Certainly this must be a very popular workflow, but seems to continuously haunt me.

Grading with scopes and FSI monitor.

Any words of wisdom before I ditch-out to start a butcher-shop instead of video??

Thx
 
Congrats on Premiere. I am quite happy with my CS6, I'm also using FCP X for certain projects.

Only certain formats/codecs support full data levels so my advice is to either not use the full data levels setting in Davinci, or use a format/codec will support full data levels when exporting video from Davinci. (ie. DPX, EXR, there are others)

Like you, I found out that certain ProRes codecs would automatically shift my data levels back to video levels and you can not do anything about that. ProRes 4444 is a solution, but the files will be massive and not worth it in my opinion.
 
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Also before you start a butcher shop, consider Speedgrade. It's similar in tools to Resolve but takes a little getting used to. But in CC version you can toss back and forth to/from premiere effortlessly and also the "match color" feature makes it all worth it. You just select two clips, one graded and the other not, and SG matches the grade. It's always spot on and you don't have to eyeball matching clips anymore.
 
Your problem is most likely stemming from grading in data levels, but then exporting with video levels - if you haven't wrangled your 0-1023 data levels down into the 60-960 range specified by video levels, then every time you export those images, anything that falls outside of the video levels range will be either cut off or shifted darker or lighter in order to fit. Which is a recipe for giving yourself grading nightmares!

You have to pull your data levels down into 'legal' tolerances before you export out with 'video levels'.
 
Thanks for the tips. I have tried exporting with DATA LEVELS also, then bringing the XML back into Premiere and it's changed. Anyone know if Premiere handles Data levels? If exporting to H264 at the end of the pipeline, does it get changed there? In other words, how far in the process can I carry the data-levels and is it worth it if eventually it gets truncated to video levels anyway?
Thx
 
starcentral said:
Only certain formats/codecs support full data levels so my advice is to either not use the full data levels setting in Davinci, or use a format/codec will support full data levels when exporting video from Davinci. (ie. DPX, EXR, there are others)

Like you, I found out that certain ProRes codecs would automatically shift my data levels back to video levels and you can not do anything about that. ProRes 4444 is a solution, but the files will be massive and not worth it in my opinion.
Click to expand...

As already stated it is not a matter of selecting data levels upon export. Simply put most codecs do not support full data levels so you can not expect Premiere to show them if it isn't even stored in the file that way.

H264, ProRes 422 do not support full data levels, so its getting changed right there in the pipeline. You can use ProRes 444 which will preseve your full data levels but you can expect 1.7GB per minute of footage.
 
Hmmm…I thought ProRes 422 retained more data than Rec709. The result seems to be better when I change the footage to data-levels in Resolve. Maybe this is a result of moving my entire data in a direction that looks better to me.

I'll shoot 444 next time and play with that.

Have been generally shooting SLOG, but have gone back to some Abel Cine profiles (Range) for a faster/easier post-path.
 
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