Thank you for this. It’ll be very helpful.
I have a question. I want to take a UHD and edit the film. I want to keep the grading that it was released with, but do my edit, and be able to output the edited version with identical grading from the source, but with the new edit.
This used to be as easy as making an MKV of the film, converting it to ProRES, and then outputting a new ProRES after the edit. NOW when I try this, the color is washed out and completely off, and I believe I lose the HDR grading entirely.
I really appreciate the direction to process the MKV to ProRES 444, that’s good… but I still see it with the ungraded look. Is there a way to extract a LUT from the MKV?
Thanks so much for your help.
The color is “washed out” and “completely off” because it’s a Rec.2020 source, but your video editing application is assuming it’s a Rec.709 source. What software do you use to edit?
If you want to preserve the original HDR grading without making any modifications, then it should look washed out on your SDR display. That’s normal. And then in your timeline and export settings, you need to specify that it’s Rec.2020 ST2084 so that it doesn’t default to exporting in Rec.709.
This is a simple color management setting in DaVinci Resolve.
In other common editing programs, unfortunately, it’s complicated and sometimes not even possible to specify your timeline and output color space and gamma. So I recommend DaVinci Resolve for that reason.
HDR video will always look washed out on an SDR screen unless it’s being tonemapped. So when you’ve exported your film, you can try playing it in VLC or MPV to see it with the tonemapped colors. (Or just simply play it on an HDR TV).