Rendering… Black levels always raised

So I have searched and searched, and still cannot find an answer I'm looking for. It seems like multiple people have had this issue as well. When I go to render my project from resolve, whether it be the full range data, or video levels, The image always appears brighter than how it is set to look in resolve. Even exporting stills has the same effect, I can not get the blacks to line up like they are supposed to. Is there some function built into resolve to work around this? My input footage is prores 422 from the bmcc, I've tried h264, prores 422, prores 422 HQ, When I bring the clip that has been exported back into resolve, it looks as it should. This leads me to believe that resolve has some sort of preset black level if that makes any sense. Anyways, I'm extremely confused and would love some insight if anyone has dealt with this in the past.

Below is an image of what the levels look like in resolve compared to rendered, even though the shift is slight, it is still there and looks a bit milky compared to the original.

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2816/1128 ... 5a52_o.jpg

On my Windows machine I have a similar problem until I go into my video driver settings and force it to 16-235 levels for video playback. Maybe you can do something similar.

Thank you Scott for your reply. I will go ahead and see if I can do something similar on my machine! Your help is greatly appreciated.

Can you re ingest the tiff you rendered out into resolve and compare it on the scopes against what you are expecting?

You may be encountering an issue between the way resolve is rendering the file out to the monitor and how the Quicktime image viewer is rendering the file. The Mac typically uses a lot of built in color management that resolve bypasses. It may result in similar looking but not identical images, as you are experiencing.

If the re-ingested tiff matches the resolve output on the scopes, it is likely the render is correct and the
viewer is wrong.

Joseph, thank you for our reply. When I brought the image back into resolve, everything on the scopes was identical to the original image that was output. I noticed when using QuickTime player to watch my output clips, the blacks were raised a fair share. But when I viewed the same clips in VLC, the black levels were closer to that of the original image, but still raised.

Any thoughts?

[CaptainHook]

Scott said something that seems to be similar to my thoughts on your thread at BMCUser..

Rohit has said the Resolve GUI Viewer is full range, but you're rendering out video. If you can't calibrate your monitor to video levels, trying the monitor (or colour page) 1DLUT that goes from data to video levels would be the first thing i would try...

How much are the blacks raised? Does it appear to be as much as a ranging issue?

I really think that it is the difference between display programs. The mac is a very difficult platform to get correct output from.

My suggestion is to never involve any Quicktime-related software into your viewing process. However, there's no problem using the ProRes codec as long as your viewer is correctly configured.

Quicktime player was once plagued with the infamous gamma issue where any viewed material was gamma shifted slightly, sort of how you experience your rendered material from Resolve. Not sure how much of that stuff is in there today.

But any software that relies upon Quicktime for decoding will risk sharing eventual gamma quirks, such as Adobe After Effects.

If I ought to examine rendered material I use VLC, which I find much more accurate and flexible when it comes to advanced "under the hood"-settings. But just as an example, there is a chain of possible things you need to check to get accurate decoding. If VLC uses hardware (GPU) YUV to RGB conversion in Windows you manually need to set the luminance range to full under your GPU video settings, or turn off the hardware conversion in VLC. I do find Windows to be an easier platform to customize these kinds of things, but that might be because I'm more of a Windows user.

https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:Video:Color_nVidia

To me it looks like you are examining the rendered footage in the 16-235 luminance range rather than the full 0-255 range. Be sure you solve this issue in whatever software you use to review rendered material.

About a year ago there was a thread on the Avid forum re an issue with Pro-Rez.
Would'nt be too over confident re this codec.
Radman.