finally have what we always wanted: HEVC support in Adobe Premiere!

Happy Daze wrote:

MikeDPR wrote:

OK, I finally had a chance to run some H.265 files through the latest Premiere Pro.

Yes, I do see crushed blacks IF I play within PP or export to H.264 format and play it with another player (I use the MPC-HC).

If I export to H.265 format, it retains the tone curves perfectly and looks the same as the original source file. And boy does it look fantastic.

If you were to import an H.265 directly to the time line and then convert the same clip to H.264 before import, have you compared the two files on the same time-line using the lumetri scopes? I find that the scopes for the H.265 file really bottom out, which of course makes it impossible to export to anything else without some basic PP to contrast and brightness (brightness -3, contrast -15 to make the two clips about the same).

Yeah, Lumetri scopes clearly show clipped blacks and whites for H.265 files while they are fine for the same clips converted to H.264 prior to import.

Amount of clipping and amount of changes in mid tone levels suggest to me the Premiere is interpreting my H.265 NX1 files as having 16-239 input range even though they were recorded with the 0-255 setting in camera. This is either a blatant bug in the Premiere they should fix immediately or perhaps NX1's files are not properly tagged with the level range when it's set to 0-255. One may ask, if it's NX1's fault in tagging, how come the H.264 converter and MPC-HC handle them fine? Well, I think there's some possibility that other programs look at actual levels being used instead of just looking at the metadata. But I'd say it's more likely Adobe's bug at this point. I haven't tried yet, but if my theory is correct, problem will likely go away if we use the 16-239 range setting in camera (unless there's a separate bug).

EDIT: Well, since H.265 exported files from the Premiere retains the original blacks and whites, it must be a Premiere's bug, a really bad one. Basically, they use 0-255 range for one code path and 16-239 range for another code path.