Screen color management in Premiere Pro CC 2020 causes severe banding

dawnsears.com - This is a bug that I noticed in the first 2020 version of Premiere Pro, which still persists in version 14.3.0.

I replicated it on a separate machine (with a different GPU), and I can also replicate that it does NOT exist in 2019 (version 13.1.5 or earlier), all on Windows 10.

Simply put, the display's color management seems flawed. If enabled, it causes severe banding in the image. I have attached sample pictures as a test, showing the following

- unmanaged images from 2019 and 2020, both identical

- managed image from 2019, showing how it "should" look (reduced saturation and gamma shift)

- 2020 managed image, which reproduces the problem (for example, the deep blue tint in the grayscale midtones and general color corruption in the other 3 channels. Obviously, the effect is more noticeable with a captured image , but the ramps represent more informative).

This means that the DCM option is more or less unusable in 2020, right now.

The profile was created in DisplayCal with a gamma of 2.4 and a target white point chromaticity of D65. Works great in Photoshop 2020 and Premiere 2019 (as above).

I have seen others have noticed similar behavior but without a proper solution - does anyone have any thoughts or ideas?

Thank you very much for the help!

What is your monitor and what are the connections (like Decklink) between the monitor and the computer? What color management is defined in the operating system for the monitor profiles and controls that can be applied to the image on this monitor?

My setup is Win10 too, with an ultra-wide LG for my main UI monitor and a BenQ PD2720U as the streaming monitor. I run my i1 Display Pro disk / software for Rec. 709 / 2.4 / 100 nits, then I check the results with Lightspace software running Resolve as a patch generator measured with my i1 disk. The results, after learning how to change both the monitor and i1 settings, are pretty tight, DeltaE has a red peak from 0.5 to about 2.8, everything else is less than 1.8, mostly less than 1.0. Gamma are three closed curves.

 

With DCM enabled, I get slightly exaggerated contrast / saturation on both the program monitor and the stream output to the BenQ. In Bars / Tone and other tech clips, I lose the fine (and subtle) distinction between the bottom two black control bars and the colors get a bit more eye-catching. So I don't use it.

But I don't have any bands going ... I wonder what the market is.

I got a reply from Jarle Leirpoll ... (premierepro.net, author of several books on Premiere) and it may be helpful.

“I have seen this happen when the monitor is 'calibrated' using Spyder, X-rite, etc.

They call it benchmarking, but it's really just profiling. And if the correction in the profile is large enough, it will cause banding. Add in the additional internal gamma correction that occurs with DCM, and it may be more noticeable. "

Essentially, if the profiling step of the X-rite or Spyder process needs to make major changes to the pixel remapping to match the chroma / gamma curves needed, when Premiere applies what it does to the image that goes to the program monitoring, the results are ignored. values.

From what you've listed for your process, I don't see DCM being of use to you anyway. Feel free to put it aside. Actually, it works best with uncalibrated monitors.

I assume you used DisplayCAL to create a profile in the form of XYZ + Matirx. If this is true, use Curve + Matirx or other shapes instead.

After my testing, I found that Premiere Pro doesn't support LUT, not only in the dark, but almost the entire image will experience some degradation.

I wrote a discussion article on this topic, written in Chinese, if you are interested, you can refer to it.