Adobe Premiere Pro CC: HDR Compression Guide

Posted on by Larry

Adobe Premiere Pro CC supports four codecs for HDR output:

However, there’s nothing online about HOW to export these and retain the high dynamic range images.

Recently, in talking with Adobe, I discovered they have an unpublished guide to exporting and compressing HDR media. I was given permission to share it with you.

Here’s the link to the HDR Compression Guide for Premiere Pro CC

Recently, I also created a webinar that goes into detail on how to create HDR sequences in Premiere. (Here’s the link.) Once your HDR sequence is built and you are ready to export:


(To make this easier to read, I masked other interface elements.)

In Export Settings:

Next, go to the Video section.

For the smallest files, choose either H.264 or HEVC. For the highest quality, choose JPEG 2000 for Rec. 2020/PQ format files, or XAVC-Intra for Rec. 2020/HLG files. Only XAVC-Intra supports REc. 2020/HLG.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Exporting HDR material will be very slow. I have not tested all four settings, but exporting H.264 took nine minutes to export one minute of material. HEVC will be slower. This is because neither is hardware-accelerated, yet.

Output speed is CPU-based. The faster the CPU and the more cores it contains, the faster the export.

So, give yourself LOTS of time to export any HDR project!


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