Washed out colours editing iphone videos

melliott1963 wrote on 5/30/2022, 9:19 AM

I'm currently running Vegas 19.0, build 550. My iPhone 12pro videos (and my wife's iPhone 13 pro videos) are recorded in 1920x1080 at 60fps, with HDR Video (which includes Dolby Vision) enabled on the iPhones.

Viewing unedited videos on my phone and PC gives brilliantly crisp and colourful pictures. However, when I try and edit them in Vegas Pro and then render them to MP4 files, both the display in Vegas and the finished MP4 file, display with the colours washed out. If I add the "saturation adjust" video effect fx this helps a lot, but I'd rather not have to do this with every clip. I've also tried turning on the HDR setting within the project properties but this doesn't really make much difference. The screenshot shows the rendered picture at the top, and the original picture underneath (not the best reproduction, but it shows the difference).

Is there a setting I need to adjust, or maybe I'm using the wrong render template?

Anyone else had this issue and know how can I correct this?

Thank you.

Comments

j-v wrote on 5/30/2022, 9:25 AM

maybe I'm using the wrong render template?

Which Projectproperties do you use and which (customized?) rendertemplate?
Screenshots please!

 

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misohoza wrote on 5/30/2022, 10:01 AM

It's the Dolby Vision.

I had the same problem with iPhone videos. Vegas doesn't read the metadata.

Jack S wrote on 5/30/2022, 10:16 AM

@misohoza Try the Levels FX with the Studio RGB to Computer RGB preset.

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RogerS wrote on 5/30/2022, 10:32 AM

If you want to render as HDR it might be useful. Change to 32 bit full and select the right color space.

Otherwise, you'll get something usable with 8 bit full but may want to add a curves Fx to restore contrast (curves in color grading panel is also good and there is saturation adjust too I believe) to get the contrast right.

If you don't need HDR I would pick a different setting on the phone.

Musicvid wrote on 5/30/2022, 10:48 AM

Sorry, but because of licensing restrictions, Vegas does not support Dolby Vision decoding.

Please see this comment: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/vegas-pro-18-update-4-build-482-general-discussion--127860/?page=6#ca798836

melliott1963 wrote on 5/30/2022, 1:06 PM

Thanks everyone for your replies. Will look at the various suggestions including turning off the HDR on our phones (although I guess that will result in not so good looking videos?).

But what a pain that in this day and age, companies can't come to agreements!

As I'm looking at potentially going over just to iPhone video, forsaking the large zoom of my camcorder for getting a better looking picture, I might have to ditch Vegas after goodness knows how many years and move over to a program that does support Dolby Vision (I do have a Macbook Pro as well as a Windows PC so maybe Final Cut Pro?).

melliott1963 wrote on 5/30/2022, 1:47 PM

@misohoza Try the Levels FX with the Studio RGB to Computer RGB preset.

Thanks for this. On a quick test, it seems to give a good result, definitely better than without it!

RogerS wrote on 5/30/2022, 2:43 PM

Non HDR mode on the phone should look good, actually.

Delivering HDR isn't trivial even with software that supports it. It's still early days for standards.

melliott1963 wrote on 5/30/2022, 3:07 PM

Non HDR mode on the phone should look good, actually.

Delivering HDR isn't trivial even with software that supports it. It's still early days for standards.

Thanks. Will do a few tests tomorrow for comparison.

Musicvid wrote on 5/30/2022, 3:12 PM

For editing in Vegas, don't use Dolby Vision. If your phone can shoot it, HDR10 PQ (ST 2084) should work just fine in VP19.

Yelandkeil wrote on 5/30/2022, 3:13 PM

@melliott1963, could you upload an original/primary sample any where that I can take a try?

I'm plying me with every kind HDR clips but no DolbyVision.

I suspect yours is not really that one due to the license distribution. Perhaps it just contains the Dolby audio but I could be wrong.

(I have some iPhone13 samples, they are HLG format.)

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fr0sty wrote on 5/30/2022, 3:25 PM

Final cut does not support Dolby vision. Your best bet is to shoot in HLG mode, not Dolby vision. That phone camera doesn't have anywhere near the dynamic range and needed to take advantage of Dolby vision anyway. HLG still gives you HDR quality.

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fr0sty wrote on 5/30/2022, 3:26 PM

Final cut does not support Dolby vision. Your best bet is to shoot in HLG mode, not Dolby vision. That phone camera doesn't have anywhere near the dynamic range and needed to take advantage of Dolby vision (or HDR) anyway. HLG still gives you HDR quality. Then you want to go into the properties of each clip in the Vegas media pool and specify the color space to be HLG. Then make sure your project is in 32-bit full range mode, with HDR on if you want HDR video output, or HDR off and the project color space set to SRGB.

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melliott1963 wrote on 5/30/2022, 3:47 PM

Final cut does not support Dolby vision. Your best bet is to shoot in HLG mode, not Dolby vision. That phone camera doesn't have anywhere near the dynamic range and needed to take advantage of Dolby vision (or HDR) anyway. HLG still gives you HDR quality. Then you want to go into the properties of each clip in the Vegas media pool and specify the color space to be HLG. Then make sure your project is in 32-bit full range mode, with HDR on if you want HDR video output, or HDR off and the project color space set to SRGB.

The Final Cut Pro details on Apple’s website disagree with you there:-

melliott1963 wrote on 5/30/2022, 3:51 PM

For editing in Vegas, don't use Dolby Vision. If your phone can shoot it, HDR10 PQ (ST 2084) should work just fine in VP19.


This is the only option available.
Have looked a bit further and turning this off is advised unless you really want HDR Dolby Vision which, for the home videos that I want to edit, is probably overkill.

Musicvid wrote on 5/30/2022, 3:55 PM

HLG should work in Vegas too, and I a gree with you that plain HD is the easiest to use and edit.

fr0sty wrote on 5/31/2022, 3:09 PM

Final cut does not support Dolby vision. Your best bet is to shoot in HLG mode, not Dolby vision. That phone camera doesn't have anywhere near the dynamic range and needed to take advantage of Dolby vision (or HDR) anyway. HLG still gives you HDR quality. Then you want to go into the properties of each clip in the Vegas media pool and specify the color space to be HLG. Then make sure your project is in 32-bit full range mode, with HDR on if you want HDR video output, or HDR off and the project color space set to SRGB.

The Final Cut Pro details on Apple’s website disagree with you there:-

I should be more specific, Dolby Vision allows users to provide separate metadata per-scene, among other features, and that Final Cut does not support... it can take in video shot in DV, but it can't do anything with it that utilizes DV's advantages over other HDR formats. Basically, it's just a name... you aren't getting the benefits. DV also supports 12 bit color, and an iphone camera isn't going to capture anywhere near the dynamic range to even max out 10 bit, so DV for a phone is complete overkill even if HDR is your target format.

Also, in FCP, you'll have the exact same problem you are having in VEGAS... either the Dolby Vision videos will look good and all the non DV videos will appear way too dark, or the other way around, the same problem you are having in VEGAS, the DV will appear washed out and the regular videos will look OK. There isn't a way to blend them both together and all look OK. So, technically, FCP's DV support isn't much better than VEGAS'. It only works if you are trying to exclusively shoot in Dolby Vision.

The only way (in either app) to fix this is to color correct the HDR footage so that it matches your SDR footage, using the color grading panel in VEGAS. It'll require some trial and error.

Last changed by fr0sty on 5/31/2022, 3:15 PM, changed a total of 2 times.

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melliott1963 wrote on 5/31/2022, 4:21 PM

OK, I’ve been doing some testing today.

Turning off HDR mode on my phone results in slightly dull looking videos, so I decided to look at the best way of fixing the washed out colours on the HDR footage.

After various attempts using different methods, and to cut a long story short, it’s incredibly simple!

I used iMovie on my iPad, created a new movie and inserted just the HDR video clip. Without doing anything else, I then saved the “movie”, turning off the HDR option before doing so:


I then used this newly created file in my Vegas Pro project, and the colours came out great! So no fiddling around with any settings, or adding any video event fx. The only way it could be simpler would be if Vegas Pro handled the HDR file straight off.

Using a trial version of Final Cut Pro, I was able to achieve the same result, but as this costs £250 and iMovie is free, it’s a no brainer as to which I’ll be using!

Hope this is of help to anyone else experiencing this issue.

Former user wrote on 5/31/2022, 9:51 PM

@melliott1963 to use your HDR footage on SDR in Resolve you use a simple color transform. It is preferred over LUTS because it's non destructive. The reason to record in HDR for SDR output is for the extra dynamic range and color resolution, For color grading HLG is easier to work with compared to SLog3 as an example

I tried using the Vegas project properties Aces color transform, but it's default results were not so good, especially with color, which should be the HLG advantage

 

fr0sty wrote on 5/31/2022, 11:51 PM

VEGAS supports IDT view transforms as well, and I think that is the solution to this issue. Even though VEGAS doesn't have a Dolby Vision specific view transform, it does have one that works just fine, as Dolby Vision uses the Rec2020 color space. Try this... Put VEGAS into 32 bit (full range) mode in project settings.

Now go to your dolby vision video in VEGAS, right click on it in the project media pool, and select "properties".

In the properties menu, navigate to the color space drop-down, and set it to "rec2020". Set the color range to full. Doing this on a test dolby vision clip I downloaded made the video go from washed out to beautiful color. See if that helps.

You may notice that other clips you drop in that are not dolby vision appear too dark (when I tested it, it wasn't too dark, but it was oversaturated really bad), you need to select the proper color space for those as well... try Rec709 and see if that works on the non DV stuff. On my test clip, it worked great.

You'll also notice that when in 32 bit mode, performance is a lot slower when editing... that is normal, you're processing a lot more data... the good thing is, you can do all your editing in 8 bit mode, and then when you are ready to color and render it out, you can switch it to 32 bit mode at the end, which gets around the performance issues.

8 bit Dolby Vision shot by iphone 12

32 bit (full range) with the "rec2020" color space enabled in the clip properties

Last changed by fr0sty on 6/1/2022, 12:04 AM, changed a total of 5 times.

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melliott1963 wrote on 6/1/2022, 1:05 AM

@fr0sty I tried exactly that, and whilst I got better results than I originally got, they weren’t anywhere near as good as my final “solution” of saving the HDR footage as SDR in iMovie and using that.

alifftudm95 wrote on 6/1/2022, 1:30 AM

VEGAS supports IDT view transforms as well, and I think that is the solution to this issue. Even though VEGAS doesn't have a Dolby Vision specific view transform, it does have one that works just fine, as Dolby Vision uses the Rec2020 color space. Try this... Put VEGAS into 32 bit (full range) mode in project settings.

Now go to your dolby vision video in VEGAS, right click on it in the project media pool, and select "properties".

In the properties menu, navigate to the color space drop-down, and set it to "rec2020". Set the color range to full. Doing this on a test dolby vision clip I downloaded made the video go from washed out to beautiful color. See if that helps.

You may notice that other clips you drop in that are not dolby vision appear too dark (when I tested it, it wasn't too dark, but it was oversaturated really bad), you need to select the proper color space for those as well... try Rec709 and see if that works on the non DV stuff. On my test clip, it worked great.

You'll also notice that when in 32 bit mode, performance is a lot slower when editing... that is normal, you're processing a lot more data... the good thing is, you can do all your editing in 8 bit mode, and then when you are ready to color and render it out, you can switch it to 32 bit mode at the end, which gets around the performance issues.

8 bit Dolby Vision shot by iphone 12

32 bit (full range) with the "rec2020" color space enabled in the clip properties

VEGAS IDT for iPhone HDR clips still look washout and way diff than how it supposed to look like.

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fr0sty wrote on 6/1/2022, 1:34 AM

It looks close enough to when I play it outside of VEGAS that a slight adjustment to the contrast and saturation should be more than enough to make it look just fine (and when you get it how you like it, you can save that adjustment as a preset that can be applied later with a single click)... it definitely beats waiting for an entire render process in a different app to complete, wasting tons of time and hdd space.

Last changed by fr0sty on 6/1/2022, 1:36 AM, changed a total of 1 times.

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Desktop

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Windows 10

Laptop:

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melliott1963 wrote on 6/1/2022, 2:47 AM

@fr0sty Adding a clip to iMovie and then saving it as an SDR file took mere seconds. I’m a lot happier doing it this way as the results are excellent and virtually indistinguishable from viewing the original HDR file. I know that in the future, I just need to do this to all my HDR clips first of all, with the knowledge that the rest of my editing will be straightforward and give good results without any tweaking of settings. It’s a lot quicker than changing settings in Vegas, then having, as you say, to do slight adjustments to contrast and saturation. OK, so it means using more disk space, but I’ve got 6Tb to play with on my home server (plus 2TB on my laptop), so that’s not really an issue.