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This was screwing up iPhone-user YouTubers, including myself. There were tons of not-too-useful videos on how to work around this, including selling you plugins and LUTs. In February 2023, Adobe fixed this by adding tone mapping so most of these “fixes” are mostly no longer helpful. Newer iPhones now support Higher Dynamic Range (HDR) video, which has a “larger color space” and allows whites to be whiter and a broader range of colors making videos more vibrant than standard monitors and videos in Standard Dynamic Range (SDR). The problem is that not all cameras, editors and displays support HDR, and the tools are just starting to support HDR. Color spaces are standardized to be consistent across devices. The common color space standard for video is Rec. 709, which is what Adobe Premiere uses as a default. There is a different color space called Rec. 2100, which is a larger color space that supports HDR, unlike Rec. 709. If you record with the HDR setting on the iPhone, it will record in Rec.
The problem was that if your timeline on Premiere Pro was set to Rec. 709 and you added a clip recorded in Rec. 2100, the images looked blown out and saturated because the colorspace was too big and didn’t “fit” inside Rec. 709. You needed to either “map” Rec. 2100 to Rec. 709 and shrink the color space to fit in Rec. 709 or edit the entire video in Rec. 2100 by setting the color space to Rec. Some people got thrown off because if you tried to edit a Rec. 2100 sequence with a normal display setting (your computer is default sRGB which is the computer equivalent of Rec. 709), the Rec. 2100 images would look blown out and weird on your display (even though they are actually fine on the sequence.) To properly edit Rec. 2100 videos, you must set your display settings in Premiere to map or recognize the Rec.
2100 settings in preview mode. Lastly, even if you set the sequence to Rec. 2100 and the preview in the edit to Rec. 2100, if the export is set to Rec. 709, you would end up with the same blown-out image in the exported file. So the key to doing a proper HDR video is to shoot with HDR on, make sure your sequence is set to Rec. 2100 and your export is set to Rec. 2100. If you want to edit and export in Rec. 709 (normal video color space), just make sure you set tone mapping on and set your sequence and export to Rec. Luckily, if you set tone mapping on, any videos you put into your sequence will automatically map to whatever color space you edit. Also, if you choose New Sequence From Clip, the sequence will properly default to the color space that your clip is in. General on Premiere Pro and ensure that Display Color Management and Extended dynamic range monitoring are on.
This is required to view Rec. 2100 HDR videos in Premiere Properly. If you don’t set these, they may look blown out when you try to edit them. If you record a video with HDR on and examine it in QuickTime, for example, you should see the color space as Rec. 2100. (In this image: Transfer Function: ITU-R BT.2100 (HLG)) Import this into Premiere Pro 23.2 or later. Right-click this clip and select New Sequence From Clip. Right-click the sequence in the project pane and select Sequence Settings. Observe that Working Color Space is Rec. 2100 HLG. (HLG stands for hybrid log-gamma.) The Video Previews Codec should be Apple ProRes 422 HQ. This is the compression standard (codec) that supports HDR. This shows that the sequence is the same setting as the HDR media. Go to export, select QuickTime as the format, and ensure your color space is set to Rec. 2100 HLG. Although the Apple Default is Rec. 2100 HLG for iPhone HDR videos, for posting on the Internet, Rec. 2100 PQ is probably better. If you export this and upload to YouTube or Vimeo, they should both recognize that they are HDR and display with high dynamic range for users able to view them. You will see “HDR” on the settings gear. It can take a few minutes for Vimeo and YouTube to process the HDR part. See my sample video on YouTube and Vimeo. See, for example, how much brighter the whites in the video are than the white of the web page if you are viewing on an HDR compatible display.
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