HDR Encoding Guide for Premiere Pro

I just don't understand why they would. They mentioned pixel formats clearly specific to HDR workflows, based on what I quoted from post 78 above. Why would they mention that but then shut down any questions about that? If they just wanted their own exporters to use those formats, I wouldn't think they would be mentioned at all.

Zitat von amissat

It took longer than I thought (I managed to almost kick the bucket and get two major surgeries in the meantime) but I'm finally back to trying to make HDR work. I completely removed all Adobe and Voukoder Pro from the system, reinstalled both using the latest 2026 versions, and created a new project just to test this. No matter what settings I change, I ether get no HDR at all (washed out colors) or the same slightly brightened result as earlier:

Is it possible to ask somebody to run their own test on this exact video sample? https://filebin.net/mq9kwzze56ohy22t

If the HDR looks good from the first glance, please make sure to open the original and compare them either side by side or by quickly switching between the two windows, because the difference is easily to miss from memory. If you output looks identical, could you please share your exact settings for the process?

Premiere has color settings in:
• Modify → Color
• Sequence Settings → Color Management (plus the Advanced collapsible section)
• Project Settings → Color

Voukoder Pro has color settings in:
• Video Input → Colors
• Video Encoder → HDR
• Video Encoder → encoder settings (for LIBX265, I tried "colorprim=bt2020:transfer=arib-std-b67:colormatrix=bt2020nc" as X265 params and • yuv420p10le as the format)

Sorry to ask, but I've already spent hours on this myself, even blindly trying different variations off all the settings above at some point, and have nowhere else to turn. If somebody could take a look and point me in the right direction, I'd greatly appreciate it.

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Unless something has changed with the newest Voukoder versions that I haven't tried, what you need to do is:

In premiere, in modify color, you need to set the clip and sequence both as rec709. The Lumetri Color -> Settings panel is the best place to find this.

Voukoder doesn't make use of Premiere's built in HDR support, so you need to fool it by sending a sequence that has taken an HDR source and is sending the same RGB values but falsely telling the encoder they're actually rec709

Then inside voukoder, your settings for x265 should be enough

Alternatively, you can use a SETPARAMS video filter like this:

which would work with x265 but could also work with NVENC

Note, I currently have an old version of VoukoderPro installed because I only installed it to see what the UI was like at the time and don't have a subscription. I still mainly use classic voukoder myself. So it's possible some things may have changed.

I also see video encoder -> HDR on mine but I don't know what that is. Setting up the project in premiere correctly and either using the x265 settings alone or with the setparams filter should be enough to get a correct HDR output

this is an example of how I would set up HDR encoding for NVENC using the above SETPARAMS filter. With the X265 settings you listed, you could skip the SETPARAMS node as well.

Thanks to Vouk I was able to test the newest version. It appears that the SETPARAMS filter I was talking about above is NOT working as I expected it to. For reference, this is the sort of thing that was working in classic Voukoder:

However, when I use SETPARAMS like the above screenshot and also put these in the HDR tab in the video encoder:

My exported test is NOT triggering HDR like the classic voukoder version of the same presets is.

Perhaps we need help from Vouk to help us understand how to recreate what classic voukoder was doing with the color_primaries=bt2020,color_trc=smpte2084,colorspace=bt2020nc

I was under the impression that setting SETPARAMS like this and feeding that into the encoder like this would do it:

but something appears to be different because here's the output file, showing rec709 in mediainfo:

It does show the HDR metadata, but the "color primaries, transfer characteristics, and matrix coefficients" are still saying rec709

Zitat von Vouk

Can you try changing this setting in the INPUT node?

Ah, I wasn't aware there was an option there. That means one less node, but unfortunately, there is no difference when I do it that way. Still get rec709 in those 3 fields in mediainfo and the video doesn't play in HDR on my display either.

I looked in the log and I see this line which may be the issue:

2026-07-26 06:57:16 (debug) [InputNode.cpp:118] Filter config: buffer@a19ca589c5e040dd9bb7b130ab4f6836=width=1215:height=2160:pix_fmt=p010:time_base=1/24:pixel_aspect=1/1:range=1:colorspace=1,scale=in_color_matrix=bt709:out_color_matrix=bt709:in_range=tv:out_range=tv,format=pix_fmts=p010le,buffersink@31a149c3d21144df84b529ba436e12a8

in_color_matrix and out_color_matrix is showing bt709 despite what I set. colorspace=1 also appears to be ignoring what I set, and I don't see transfer function being represented there at all

Zitat von Vouk

It is designed like this:

The INPUT node selects how the format from the NLE should be interpreted as.

• Either it is set to AUTO then it will be taken as it is delivered by the NLE, you can overwrite to other values though. If i understand you correctly we want to have bt709 here.

Next is the filter chain:

• We feed the frames in the filter chain.
• In:
  • in_color_matrix=bt709
  • out_color_matrix=bt709
  • in_range=tv
• Out:
  • out_color_matrix=bt709 (We want to see an HDR format here, right?)
• Next we feed this frame with the HDR format to the encoder

Is that correct?

No, we have to set things as rec709 in Premiere just so that premiere doesn't do an automatic color space downconversion of the source HDR values to SDR, since you've said you can't access the native HDR formats from Premiere. Premiere is telling voukoder that we're working with rec709/SDR, but we need to tell voukoder that's wrong and the data is actually HDR

We want to interpeet the input values to match the values I had in the old voukoder screenshot:

https://www.voukoder.org/file-download/1109/

I tried it with the input node, and I also tried it with SETPARAMS and SCALE filters and neither option worked to modify the input colorspace, primaries and transfer function.

The line from the log I posted above is what happened when I tried to set the HDR values in the input node. It seems to have ignored them.