awful clip thumbnails when working in RCM

if you switch to DaVinci Resolve YRGB Color Managed color science, all the clip thumbnails in the Media Storage tab become super contrasty and non-usable. you can't pick the clips based on that. they remain that bad on the Source Monitor and become good only once you add them into a project.

When you work in RCM, you need to specify the input color space of every clip. If you don't, Resolve assumes they are all Rec709 (which is fine if they are, but most likely they aren't).

This isn't as onerous as it sounds. Select all your video clips in the media pool's master bin, being very careful to not accidentally select any timelines along with them, right-click, and in the contextual menu you'll see an option to set the input color space. If you don't, it's because you selected a timeline along with the clips.

Also, be sure you haven't applied any LUTs.

The OP wants to evaluate clips *before* adding them to the media pool. There's apparently no way at present to view these clips either normalized to rec. 709 or as bmd film log.

The OP wants to evaluate clips *before* adding them to the media pool. There's apparently no way at present to view these clips either normalized to rec. 709 or as bmd film log.

Ah, I misunderstood. But my clips (which are all log footage from BMD cameras) look fine in the media storage tab and the source viewer, even before I've loaded them into the media pool, and I'm using RCM.

Depends on the format. Prores is fine, braw is as described.

they fixed it in Resolve 17. thank you if someone from staff reading this!

I'm ressurrecting this thread (instead of starting a new one), because I have been experiencing inaccurate thumbnails in Resolve for quite some time. Haven't had time to make a post, but now I'm in between projects.

This is something that happens when using Resolve Color Management.

Media Storage panel thumbnails are fine; but once in Resolve, any thumbnail representing the clip on any page is rendered useless because it seems to have some kind of LUT applied internally to it. Making it super contrasty and even more saturated.

And yes, I have double-checked to make sure no LUTs are applied. Before people misunderstand this problem, let me clarify:

The image is fine. All my adjustments are fine. Everything is working as expected... EXCEPT the thumbnail does not match the actual clip that is loaded in the viewer. This bug renders using things like the Lightbox very confusing, to downright useless, for doing a final visual check on a grade pass; or using live preview in the media pool to scan over a large thumbnail.

The ONLY workaround I found to get the clip thumbnail to match exactly to what the graded image is...

is to right-click in the Color Page thumbnail and select, "Bypass Color Management." That fixes the issue, but only in that particular timeline; but then it causes the other problem of—now I don't benefit fully from RCM (which I want to use; I don't want to bypass it). This fixes the thumbnail image on the Color Page timeline, but if I head to the Media Page, the Media Pool clip thumbnails are still inaccurate (i.e. appear to have a LUT on them).

Let me know if anyone has been experiencing this. I can post screen shots if needed to show my point, but I'm trying to explain it as clearly as possible.

A little more detail on what happens to the thumbnail. It seems like a Rec.709 LUT is applied to it, even if Rec.709 is already set as the output transform. So for those clips, it is doubly applied, and for Log images, they appear converted when they should remain appearing as log in the thumbnail.

And to repeat, rendering out the images are fine, this bug just causes me to not be able to use the clip thumbnails as an accurate reference for color, making using things like the Lightbox, or even the Media Pool, very difficult.

Below are screenshots of my system specs. I am running Resolve Version 17.4.3 Build 10.

Screenshot 2022-02-01 110155.jpg (20.83 KiB) Viewed 660 times

Screenshot 2022-02-01 110213.jpg (77.58 KiB) Viewed 660 times

Screenshot 2022-02-01 110233.jpg (39.02 KiB) Viewed 660 times