Jonny Elwyn has an excellent article on using Cinematch to match 2 different Cameras. And you can use his Promo Code at Cinematch for the $125 Plug in (for either Premiere, DaVinci or FCP or $174 as a Bundle).
This is another extensive article and well worth a read.
I would love this tech, since the company I have been working for seems to use 2 different cameras always, and different settings every time, but getting info is like pulling teeth, and the EXIF route seems more difficult than just throwing it in Resolve and fixing it by eye, maybe not as well matched, but visually matched.
I do really like the idea of this match, but also they don’t have my DJI Pocket 2 in here, which would be my second camera most of the time.
I know I know, I am a bit behind here, NAB 2022 is long past, but this article by Phil Rhodes at Red Shark is very interesting on some of the new tech shown at NAB. I guess 6P Color was showing monitors with 6 primary colors instead of 3 and they look amazing, though are expensive and probably won’t catch on. I am sure it would be an improvement, as it would be with a camera photo-site, though would have to be larger.
So Adobe new update of Premiere Pro says it includes Color Management for H.264 and HEVC as a new features. The feature describes itself as the following:
With new color management for H.264 and HEVC formats, Premiere Pro interprets the correct color space when importing these formats, including 10-bit and HDR files. For exports, Premiere Pro includes the correct color space metadata with your output files, ensuring that your colors will display correctly on the destination platform. When creating new sequences, you can choose to Match Source or apply the color space you want to use, depending on your working media.
I was hoping this would add the ability to add tags to exported H.254 videos so that they would display correctly anyplace, but especially on Macs. Macs of course have the weird gamma shift issue because of how they handle color, so Apple’s apps work correctly, but everything else has the wrong tags, so you have to watch your video in an un-color managed app to see what the clips will actually look like.
Now DaVinci Resolve has the ability to change the gamma tag in an exported H.264 clip.
Here is I change the Gamma tag to Gamma 2.4, which is what I am working in to get correct Rec.709 video
If I set the Gamma tag to Gamma 2.4, the exported H.264 video plays back correctly both in Quicktime as well as in VLC. I was hoping this is what Premiere was doing.
Unfortunately I immediately opened my current Premiere Pro 2021 project in Premiere Pro 2022 and did an H.264 export matching the export i did yesterday, and as far as I can tell it is exactly the same as the clip I exported yesterday with the gamma shift and all in Premiere Pro.
I checked out the video info in Quicktime on the clips, and the clip from 2021 and 2022 match exactly like this:
Interestingly a video exported from DaVinci with the Gamma 2.4 tag does show up with different info in Quicktime. It looks like this.
Unless I am completely missing something in Premiere Pro, I am not sure what they actually changed here.
3 days ago Apple announced a new Apple TV 4k with a new remote and A12 Bionic Chip. It supports higher frame rate HDr, Dolby Vision and 60 fps.
The coolest feature which should at least hit some previous models is part of tvOS 14.5 according to 9 to 5 Mac, is color balancing using your iphone.
This will not color balance your tv, but instead the output of your Apple TV to correct for your TV’s color balance! Wow! Apple needs to make an SDK for this feature, as I would love to have it in Adobe Premiere and DaVinci resolve on my Mac!
It still doesn’t account for Apple’s weird color shifts on the Mac. Be interesting to see how this balances for your own clips played back on an Apple TV from Premiere or Resolve, but for streaming and purchased movies this should be a godsend.
As an editor, colorist and motion graphics artist, I of course use dual monitors. And they are 2 very different displays, but even if they were the exact same type of display you need to try and balance them as mush as you can, and that is why I own and us a datacolor Spyder X (and yes the printing is smudged and coming off on mine).
This is the menu bar launcher.
And where you calibrate the displayers, you will then put the device on the spot on the display and turn up the brightness and it will measure your displays.
It measures both displays, has you set matching brightness, and then lets you adjust based on perception. It can be difficult if you have very different displays but is certainly worth it so your 2 displays are as close to each other as can be.
My only complaint is that having bought the device, the software is linked to my computer. And I would love to be able to take it with my to match monitors at work, especially with rental computers, but obviously they want them to buy there own, unfortunately most companies won’t bother.
An image from a short film I have been grading, on the left is the image as shown by quicktime, and the right is in VLC matching what you see in DaVinci, you can see that they are quite different. It is the damn Apple Quicktime Gamma shift!
So I have been having issues with the gamma problem with my producers viewing my movies, since I am working from home, and we are running Premiere. I knew about the issue in the past, but have been looking into any solutions, and found some amazing articles on the subject that you should certainly read to know more about this frustrating issue.
For those who don’t know is that basically Apple and Quicktime have a Gamma shift issue with Video Footage that has to do with Apple Colorsync and how it tags video. So if you play your videos on a Mac in Quicktime or in any Colorsync application (life Safari) a video from Adobe Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve they will be brighter and less contrasty than they actually are. It can be a huge issue when sending to clients.
The issue does not occur with Final Cut Pro X because it uses ColorSync (not having to be cross platform).
The solution is to use a non-colorsync application to play the video back and it will look correct (or at least more as it was intended). This can be done with Mozilla Firefox or VLC.
You could add a LUT to try and fix it (and Adobe actually has one) but for people on windows or using a non-color sync app the image will be too dark, and the the fix is never going to be perfect.
So the problem become getting people to use VLC as Apple is never going to fix it’s messed up Gamma settings.
Personally I have been spending a lot of time with Davinci Resolve of late. With a proper video card it is really an awesome program, and is certainly my current choice for color correction. It is fast and easy to use and does a very good job.
The other interest is SpeedGrade which I am learning, mainly because of it’s ability to roundtrip a grade to Premiere Pro and put it on clips as a single filter on each clip. A very cool feature, but the program needs some work before it can really compete with Resolve. First off it needs support for Black Magic cards instead of just AJA cards. If Premiere Pro can do it, Resolve needs to do it. And second it really does need curves. Curves are such a powerful color correction method that many have come to rely on, and not having them seems a huge failing. Other issues I have are it’s abilities with multitrack video are limited, and I have just gotten so used to nodal vs layer based correcting, though that is certainly not going to change. SpeedGrade is powerful and does work well with Premiere, but needs to get some updates to be able to really rival Davinci even with it’s ability export it’s grades as color correction filters into Premiere.
