Not getting HDR preview in Vegas Pro 17? Try this...

fr0sty wrote on 11/12/2019, 10:13 AM

I was recently having an issue with what I was seeing in my preview not being what I got in the final output render when editing HDR projects. I spent a week or so scratching my head and talking with the team about it, who was doing the same trying to figure out what it could be, when I stumbled across a solution.

If you are getting 8 bit previews in HDR mode, it could be because when you enable your external monitor in Vegas, it is kicking windows out of HDR/deep color mode for that monitor. I noticed it while resetting the mode for that monitor, as soon as I clicked the little monitor icon in Vegas to go full screen on my secondary OLED display, the "enable HDR for games and movies" button in windows would toggle off. Turning it back on would flip right back off again as soon as the external preview was enabled.

How I got around it:

Simply make sure your secondary HDR display is turned on and flagged into HDR mode in windows BEFORE opening Vegas and loading into your project. This fixed the issue for me. Hope this helps anyone else who may come across it.

For most folks, this isn't much of an issue as they would have their external monitors on and in HDR mode anyway, but with my GPU (Radeon 7), when I first turn on my OLED TV, it sends it nothing but static (it's been this way since the day I bought it, I'll never buy AMD GPUs again), so I have to make a setting change somewhere to make the TV get a new signal, then it will start working. One way I would do this would be to click the external preview monitor icon in Vegas a couple times, which would get the TV a signal, but I was unaware that this was also breaking HDR compatibility by turning it off in windows.

Comments

wwjd wrote on 11/13/2019, 9:51 AM

THANK YOU for this! Sounds very annoying.

How are you calibrating your TV as editing monitor?

fr0sty wrote on 11/13/2019, 10:02 AM

Turning your TV on before booting a program... not a very annoying fix.

It turns out it is a problem with my GPU causing the issue, a problem that has been there since I bought it (secondary monitor bugs out as soon as I turn it on and displays static, forcing me to make a setting change on the GPU to get an image), as the problem is not present when I swap it out with my old GPU.

I have not calibrated this set yet, though it is an OLED, so not as important due to the more accurate color representation. I do plan on looking into it eventually, but for now it is close enough.

Wolfgang S. wrote on 11/13/2019, 10:19 AM

I still use my Decklink 4K Extreme 12G for the preview with my Atomos Sumo - so a complete different Hardware Settings that works fine too. The idea to use an OLED in Addition was something that was suggested to me too, but I see the issue of the size of such an OLED but also the issue that it is really necessary to swith the OLED to either HLG or PQ before (what is not possible with all of the OLED-TVs if you wish to do that at the OLED directyl).

fr0sty wrote on 11/13/2019, 11:00 AM

You definitely cannot manually flag my TV into HLG mode, but I'm having to stick to HDR10 anyway for now, as my GPU isn't compatible with HLG either and I'm using it to output (Radeon 7, don't buy one. Super powerful, but riddled with bugs). I have a 4k decklink, not sure it can handle HDR, it's an older one.