Hi all,
I hope you are doing well?
Apologies for my lack of knowledge regarding some of these processes but had hoped that someone may be able to advise me on what I may be doing wrong.
Just to be clear this guide and thread are about encoding using the Voukoder plugin. I'm not too familiar with Adobe's built-in encoders, which have also changed considerably since I wrote this guide. If I had to guess, their youtube 4K preset is not designed for HDR, but I do know some of their other codec settings work fine. I just don't like them because I don't have access to the type of codecs and options I like, which Voukoder has, so I don't use them.
For HDR recording myself, I use the Atomos Ninja Inferno (newer version is called Ninja V), which allows me to manually flag the footage as SDR if I want, or leave it as the default HDR tags to use with the preset I uploaded in the first post. In the future, the premiere connector for Voukoder will also be able to work with the native HDR support Premiere has now, which will make much of my guide obsolete. As for other ways to record HDR, I believe ShadowPlay has some kind of HDR capture support, and the PS5's built-in game capture does capture HDR as well, although it's pretty heavily compressed. There may be other ways to record HDR as well that I'm unfamiliar with.
As for why the image looks less crisp to you when converted to SDR, there could be two things going on. Either your HDR display modes are adding sharpening to them, which the display would then lack in SDR, or you're simply noticing the difference in dynamic range. Higher dynamic range means a larger contrast between dark and light colors, and higher contrast edges will inevitably look sharper because of this. When you compress that dynamic range down, you are lowering the contrast of the image, and those edges with it. This can be especially bad if the tonemapping being applied is not ideal for the footage you recorded, which is why it will look different than if you just captured it directly in SDR, like you said, since the game will tonemap its visuals much more ideally to the SDR range than any automatic tonemapping solution would do. This is why youtube allows for attaching a LUT to HDR footage, which you would generate by using color grading software, such as either lumetri color in premiere, or da vinci resolve for example. This would allow you to color grade and tonemap the image entirely yourself, giving you full control over the way shadows, midtones, and highlights look, the way color looks, the way the contrast of the image is handled, etc.
Zitat
What I have recently noticed though is that If I have imported one of the raw captures from the Gamer Bolt into Premiere Pro and then used the razor tool to trim it, no matter what I do in terms of export settings, YouTube will not flag it as HDR even though in Media Info it appears that all of the information is correct and virtually identical to the original file.
Would you mind posting the mediainfo on such a file? If combining two videos together worked for you, trimming it shouldn't work any differently. Although note there are apps you can use to do both of these things without needing to re-encode, if you don't want to waste extra time or potentially add more compression to the image. The one I like to use for simple trims and appends is called AviDemux. Doing that will ensure the bitstream of the original is maintained 100%, without any modifications an additional encoder could do.
