How to Export Color Correction in Premiere Pro

When exporting your video from Premiere Pro, ensuring your applied color correction, such as a LUT (Lookup Table), appears correctly in the final file is crucial. Based on the provided reference, a key step to achieve this is the rendering process before export.

Exporting Your Color-Corrected Video

To successfully export your color correction within your video file so it looks the way you intended in Premiere Pro, follow the standard export process while ensuring your sequence is properly processed.

One essential insight highlighted in the reference is that after applying color correction, such as a LUT, the final step involves rendering.

"And so the last step hit render. And when it finishes you'll see that it appears the way you edited it in premiere. And of course it looks much better than that first export without the lut."

This suggests that rendering your timeline before exporting can be vital. Rendering processes the effects applied to your sequence, making them ready for a smooth and accurate export. While modern export settings often handle effects during the export process itself, ensuring your sequence is rendered can help confirm that Premiere Pro is processing your color adjustments correctly.

Steps for Exporting (General Process)

1. Finish Editing and Color Grading: Ensure all your color correction and other edits are complete on your timeline.
2. Render Your Sequence (Optional but Recommended by Reference): Although not always strictly necessary with modern export settings, rendering your sequence by selecting the sequence and going to Sequence > Render In to Out can pre-process your effects, including color correction.
3. Go to Export: Navigate to File > Export > Media (or use the shortcut Ctrl+M on Windows or Cmd+M on macOS).
4. Choose Your Settings:
   • Select your desired Format (e.g., H.264 for web video, ProRes for higher quality).
   • Choose an appropriate Preset or customize settings like resolution, frame rate, and bitrate.
   • Ensure video and audio are checked for export.
5. Export: Click the Export button. Premiere Pro will then encode your video with all applied effects, including your color correction.

By ensuring your timeline is processed correctly, whether through rendering beforehand or relying on the export encoder to handle the effects, your final video should display the color correction exactly as it appeared in your Premiere Pro timeline.