There have been posts in the forum from time to time by people having trouble with HDR clips, and since I sometimes use HDR footage in my projects, I thought I’d put together a video about how I do it in case it could help others.
Here’s my video on the process I use - and it also talks about why I do this. Hopefully others may find it useful.
Have you tried using one of the NBCU HLG2SDR LUTs? (I am not sure if you are using HLG.) I agree Handbrake offers better conversion than Shotcut’s Properties > Convert, which actually uses a ffmpeg command line and could be improved especially in the forthcoming version of FFmpeg.
My camera (Canon EOS R6 Mark II) supports both log and PQ. I’m using PQ - since I’m making SDR videos and just using HDR to give me more wiggle room in tricky situations, PQ is good enough, and simpler to deal with.
Most people in your situation will use the log format and a LUT (first try one from Canon). Then, you do not need a conversion step. Applying a LUT can be considered simpler. Proxies now retain the same color as the original if you work with proxy.
Also, if you are doing 10-bit end-to-end and stick to only using 10-bit filters and no track compositing, you can adjust the ten_bit export preset to specify a 10-bit Y’CbCr working pixel format instead of the 8-bit RGB it currently requests: in the Other tab, change
mlt_image_format from rgb to yuv420p10
Just some ideas if you are interested to explore.