Why do you have overexposed iPhone video in Premiere Pro when you filmed it just fine? Learn why HDR footage can appear blown out and how to fix it.
Newer iPhones can record video in Dolby Vision HDR, which captures a much wider range of brightness and colour than standard SDR video. When Premiere Pro doesn’t interpret or convert that HDR footage correctly for the colour space you’re editing in, the highlights can suddenly look ridiculously bright.
Luckily, you don’t necessarily need to start fixing every clip manually with Lumetri Color. There is a much quicker way to deal with it.
Why Does iPhone Footage Look Overexposed in Premiere Pro?
Many newer iPhones record video using HDR (High Dynamic Range), including Dolby Vision HDR. HDR footage can contain much brighter highlight information and a wider range of colours than traditional SDR footage. Most standard video projects, however, are still edited and delivered in Rec.709 SDR.
So you can end up with:
iPhone HDR footage → Premiere Pro → SDR Rec.709 project
Premiere Pro needs to correctly interpret and tone-map that HDR information so it displays properly inside the smaller SDR range. If that colour management isn’t happening correctly, the footage can look blown out, extremely bright or strangely saturated. This is why lowering Exposure in Lumetri Color isn’t necessarily the best first solution.
The original footage may be perfectly exposed. Premiere Pro is just interpreting the colour information differently.
For more tips on filming with a smartphone, check out my online course.
How to Fix Overexposed iPhone Footage in Premiere Pro
This is the method that fixed the problem with my iPhone footage. Go to your Project panel and select all of the affected iPhone clips. You can select multiple clips at once, which means you don’t need to fix every video individually.
Then:
- Highlight all of the affected clips.
- Right-click the selected footage.
- Go to Modify.
- Select Color.
- Find the option to override the existing colour profile.
- Select Rec. 2020.
- Click OK.
Premiere Pro should reinterpret the footage and the ridiculously overexposed appearance should disappear. And because you selected all of the clips first, you can apply the change across the footage at once instead of fixing every shot individually.
Edit Faster in Premiere Pro
If you want more quick fixes and hidden Premiere Pro tricks like this, check out my Premiere Pro PDF guide.
Why Changing the Colour Profile Works
You’re not really reducing the exposure of the video. You’re changing the information Premiere Pro is using to interpret the colour space of the footage. That distinction is important. If you simply drag the Exposure slider down in Lumetri Color, you are colour correcting an image that Premiere Pro may already be displaying incorrectly.
Changing the colour interpretation addresses the problem earlier in the workflow. Once the footage looks normal, you can use Lumetri Color afterwards for the actual creative colour correction and grading.
Premiere Pro and HDR Tone Mapping
Newer versions of Premiere Pro have much better colour management than older versions. Premiere can automatically tone-map HDR footage, including iPhone HDR footage, into an SDR Rec.709 sequence. Tone mapping essentially takes the much larger brightness range available in HDR and compresses it into the smaller range that an SDR video can display without simply clipping all of the highlights.
If Premiere Pro correctly recognises your iPhone footage and your sequence colour management is configured correctly, this may happen automatically.
But if your iPhone footage still looks blown out after importing it, checking how Premiere is interpreting the source colour space is one of the first things I would look at.
Can You Fix Multiple overexposed iPhone Videos at Once?
Yes, and this is one of the reasons I prefer this method.
Instead of going through each clip and repeating that process across an entire project, select the affected footage together before modifying the colour settings.
Premiere Pro can then apply the change to all of those clips. If you filmed an entire project on your iPhone, that can save a ridiculous amount of time.
Do You Need Lumetri Color?
Not necessarily. If the footage looks overexposed because of an HDR or colour-space mismatch, I would fix that first. Lumetri Color is still what you can use afterwards to actually grade your footage, adjust contrast, change white balance, recover highlights or create a particular look.
But there is little point spending ten minutes manually correcting something that can potentially be fixed in a few clicks.
How to Stop Your iPhone Recording overexposed iPhone Video in HDR
If you don’t actually need HDR footage and would rather avoid dealing with it in your editing workflow, you can also disable HDR recording on your iPhone.
Go to:
Settings → Camera → Record Video → HDR Video and turn HDR Video off.
The exact options available depend on your iPhone model.
This can make your workflow simpler if most of the content you create is ultimately going to be delivered as standard SDR video anyway.
Speed Up Your Premiere Pro Workflow
This is exactly the kind of tiny Premiere Pro setting that can save you an annoying amount of editing time once you know it exists. I’ve put together a simple Premiere Pro PDF guide with my favourite hidden features, shortcuts and workflow tricks for editing faster.
It’s made for people who already use Premiere Pro but constantly find themselves thinking: “There has to be a quicker way to do this.”
You can find my Premiere Pro guide here.
Fix Overexposed iPhone Video Without Regrading Everything
If your iPhone footage suddenly looks massively overexposed when you import it into Premiere Pro, remember that the original video might not actually be badly exposed.
It may be HDR footage being interpreted incorrectly inside your editing workflow.
Before trying to repair every clip with Lumetri Color, check the colour interpretation of your footage.
For the footage I was working with, selecting the clips and going to:
Modify → Color → Override Color Profile → Rec. 2020 immediately normalised the image.
Then I could carry on editing and colour grading normally.
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