Graded footage exporting with skewed colours - help!

I have experienced a strange distorting of colours from Resolve graded footage and would grateful for any advice other users may be able to offer as I have a film festival deadline looming and I am a struggling to know how best to proceed.

My grading set up is using Resolve on a PC with a plasma TV connected as an external monitor via a Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4k card. While I appreciate that a Panasonic plasma TV is not a calibrated colour monitor I have gone some way to ensure that it gives reasonable results by using THX and other freely available calibration tools and images.

I edit on Premiere Pro and After Effects CC2018. Both Adobe products and Resolve give the same output to the plasma TV in terms of colour, contrast and image quality. The footage I am working with is 4K UHD DNxHR 10 bit files transcoded from 4k UHD Sony A7S2 camera footage.

I have just finished grading a short film and everything was looking great via all three above programs.

I then rendered out an HD H264 copy for uploading to the film festival website and the colours are off when viewed via that site. There is an overall skew to green but it doesn’t appear as simple as a consistent tone, the colours just look strange. I have rendered out copies via Resolve and Premiere and both playback similarly wrong when viewed on the PC.

I have reloaded the output file to both Premiere and Resolve and it looks fine. I have viewed it on my PC with a couple of different media players and the colours look off. I have viewed the file online via my mobile phone and the colours look off.

One thing I have noticed is that while the camera footage looks the same via both Resolve and Premiere the credits of the film (a DNxHR file with video legal dark red text on a black background) look different on Resolve when imported initially for grading. The background is black the same but the red text is quite a bit paler.

I am sure you are all thinking what my first thought was – my plasma TV has a colour cast and so my grade is borked. However the video display on my main PC monitor when using Premiere and Resolve is broadly consistent with the external plasma TV monitor. Certainly there are no colour variances.

Surely if it was just the external monitor that was the issue the image within Premiere and Resolve on the PC monitor would have strange colours like the exported file?

Can anyone think what has gone wrong other than my external monitor is just off?

If my monitor is off can anyone suggest how I can come up with a grade which I can apply to the timeline to approximate a correction as a stop gap measure?

Having invested a number of weeks and sleepless nights on the project I am more than a little desperate so any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks for your help.

the colours are off when viewed via that site

That's likely something you can't control. How it looks on a calibrated display from a hardware player is your only practical reference.

my first step would be to take some selected worst shots with color bars at the head to a facility that has callibrated monitoring, and pay them for 15min or whatever the lowest cost time is and look at selected shots in a correct enviroment with external scopes

anything else is like nailing jello to the wall, everything will keep slideing around....

then you will really know where you stand now, and where you go next to get to where you want to be

good luck, hopefully the master is alright and something else is messed up

oh, and some panaplasma's are capabile of being callibrated accuratly

I then rendered out an HD H264 copy for uploading to the film festival website and the colours are off when viewed via that site. There is an overall skew to green but it doesn’t appear as simple as a consistent tone, the colours just look strange. I have rendered out copies via Resolve and Premiere and both playback similarly wrong when viewed on the PC.

I have reloaded the output file to both Premiere and Resolve and it looks fine. I have viewed it on my PC with a couple of different media players and the colours look off. I have viewed the file online via my mobile phone and the colours look off.

Hey Pete

Its hard to solve these kind of problems without actually testing/checking the file and outputs..

However, from what I can understand, you're only experiencing shifts on websites/browsers and in several players (which ones?) on your system.

A lot of players and most browsers/web players are color managed in some way or another and therefore biased. not sure how dramatic is the shift you're experiencing, but shifts are to be expected.

Furthermore, expecting calibrated and accurate results is only relevant when the whole pipeline is such, from grading station to final output device/software.
For example, when grading/correcting for broadcast TV,
or for digital screenings in theaters (and festivals)
(you can also add in controlled, private screenings with properly calibrated equipment)

The web isn't such an output, nor are many computer file-players
(I believe VLC isn't color managed and should show same results as the viewer in Resolve).

Again, i'm not really sure what exactly causes your problem, so this is all very general.

I then rendered out an HD H264 copy for uploading to the film festival website and the colours are off when viewed via that site. There is an overall skew to green but it doesn’t appear as simple as a consistent tone, the colours just look strange. I have rendered out copies via Resolve and Premiere and both playback similarly wrong when viewed on the PC.

There's some great advice above.

You could always download that file from the website, then load it back into the Resolve timeline and do an A/B comparison with your original corrections. If they match, they match. Scopes are a big help to check small differences.

Bear in mind that Mac OS looks different from Windows, and Chrome can look different from Safari, Safari looks different than Firefox, and Firefox looks different from Edge. YouTube can look different from Vimeo, and both can look different from other services. If the site is re-encoding the image (which many do), things can go wrong.

How are you watching the material off the website? If it's on a computer, how is the computer display calibrated? If nothing is calibrated, the potential for errors skyrockets. Read Steve Shaw's excellent essay "Why calibrate?"

https://www.lightillusion.com/why_calibrate.html

I'm having the same problem and I haven't solved it yet. The cut looks fine on my display, and streamed through Kodi on a regular tv, and on Chrome. But we watched it with a Mac hooked up to a Viseo tv through HDMI using the Safari browser and the colors were terrible. The most notable thing was the blues were aquamarine. Horrifying.

The next thing I'll try is to do a grade in 8-bit. That way, I'm the decider when it comes to converting from 10-bit instead of trusting something random in the pipeline.

The next thing I'll try is to do a grade in 8-bit. That way, I'm the decider when it comes to converting from 10-bit instead of trusting something random in the pipeline.

It has nothing to do with 8 or 10 bits...
Safari in mac is color managed by the OS through a display profile in display preferences.

Try watching through VLC which isn't affected by display profiles on mac

I'm having the same problem and I haven't solved it yet. The cut looks fine on my display, and streamed through Kodi on a regular tv, and on Chrome. But we watched it with a Mac hooked up to a Viseo tv through HDMI using the Safari browser and the colors were terrible.

What happens if you use Opera? What happens if you use Firefox? What happens if you watch from a different player? The very fact that it looks good on one but not on another should tell you that the browser itself is changing the picture.

Read pp. 667-668 of the Resolve 14.3 manual: "Limitations When Grading With the Viewer on a Computer Display." This goes into some detail why you cannot accurately monitor directly from the computer and operating system. And that especially goes for a non-calibrated display, Vizio or not.

Can you post screenshots or samples?
Check your Timeline color space settings in Resolve. If Timeline set to Rec2020, Resolve always adds metadata to exported file. And that Rec2020 metadata exists even if you add final color space transform node "timeline to rec709". Some players and OS can read that metadata, some not. So the colors may be different.
This problem exists only with Rec2020. No metadata added if use different wide gamut timeline color space.

I'm having the same problem and I haven't solved it yet.

That's because you can't solve this. You can't control the image pipeline once it's on the 'Net. You do your job well in the studio, and let it go. How it looks anywhere else is not something you can control.

That's because you can't solve this. You can't control the image pipeline once it's on the 'Net. You do your job well in the studio, and let it go. How it looks anywhere else is not something you can control.

I've often said: even if you just want to confine your viewing chain to current Macs and Safari, those don't all look alike, either. I have frequently walked into the biggest Apple store in LA and seen the same demo playing on five iMacs in a row, and it looks radically different on each one... some too bright, some too dark, some too blue, some too red. And it's very likely that none of them are right. You can't control an image pipeline that's constantly changing and is not calibrated.